Drugs
A very high percentage of crime in Newport News is drug related; and, the majority of Part I crimes can be linked to some form of substance abuse. In 2005, there were 2,759 drug arrests. Drug usage contributes to crimes that do not necessarily involve drug transactions, such as robbery assault, prostitution, larceny and burglary.
Because drugs are readily available in the community, an aggressive criminal justice system response combined with a comprehensive community program involving drug prevention, rehabilitation and education are needed to reduce the demand for drugs.
To deter youth from drug use, middle school and high school students are offered Virginia Class Action, which teaches the basic State laws that affect youth, and the consequences of violating these laws, including drug violations. Officers are assigned to rotate among the City’s middle schools where they teach Virginia Class Action and Gang Law and also serve in the capacity of middle school resource officers. The high school resource officers teach Virginia Class Action at the high school level. The health and physical education teachers in the middle schools currently teach the “Life Skills” curriculum to students, covering basic anger management, tobacco avoidance, and other youth issues.
In response to the drug problems, the Department developed the Drug Offender Mapping Project (DOMP). This project is a joint effort between the Police Department, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, the Pre-trial Services Unit, the Magistrate’s Office, and the Probation/Parole Department that focuses on identifying neighborhoods with concentrated drug and violence activity and limiting the ability of drug offenders to frequent those areas. There are currently nine areas that have been identified and labeled as DOMP areas, as shown on Map 8-3.
The Circuit Court may apply a “Mapped” identifier to any drug offender as a condition of probation, sentence suspension, or pretrial release. Those individuals labeled as “Mapped” by the Court are subject to re-incarceration should they be observed inside one of the DOMP Areas. Parole officers ride with police officers on a regular basis in the DOMP Areas. The parole officers will have the authority to require any “Mapped” individual they observe in the DOMP Areas to submit to a field drug test. Should the test result in a positive reading, the parole officer will complete a parole violation report and arrest the individual. In addition, the parole officer has the authority to take other administrative actions against “Mapped” individuals they might observe within the DOMP Areas, regardless of the field drug test result.