The Wilmington City Council approved several measures Tuesday, Jan. 5, to help boost the city’s police department, which could eventually see officers equipped with body cameras and an emergency drug to help treat individuals in the throes of a heroin overdose. The council also funded a series of meetings between police officials and the community.
The council voted to authorize the city to apply for a $60,000 grant from the North Carolina Governor’s Crime Commission for approximately 70 body cameras, which would record police interaction with citizens and suspects. Wilmington Police Chief Ralph Evangelous said that officers have said they want the cameras.
“Assuming it gets funded, we’ll have pretty close to everyone with body cams,” Evangelous said. “It’s important for our officers. They want to be able to protect themselves. It gives them the opportunity to show their side of what’s happening.”
The council also voted to accept a donation from the Kaleo pharmaceutical company for $143,750 in emergency heroin treatment measures. Evangelous said that the officers will carry the EVZIO auto-injectors, which will give them a tool that can resuscitate people in cardiac arrest from a heroin overdose.
Wilmington paramedics already carry the heroin overdose drug, Evangelous told the council, but often police will arrive at the scene of an overdose before emergency medical providers. In these cases, police will now have the ability to potentially halt an overdose.
“It’s an opportunity to save a life,” Evangelous said. “If someone has a needle stuck in their arm and in cardiac arrest, officers can hit them with the auto-injector and God willing, bring them back.”
Evangelous said that heroin has become a big problem, not just in Wilmington, but across the country. Much of the problem stems from pharmaceuticals like oxycontin, which have become harder to obtain, leading addicts to turn toward heroin, now cheaper and easier to find.
Evangelous said officers are responding to two or three heroin overdoses a week. He said that officers will be equipped with the auto-injectors over the course of the next two or three weeks.
The council also used about $9,500 of federal money from drug asset forfeitures to provide the resources for a series of planned community meetings to open the dialogue between the community and police.
The Wilmington Police Department, together with the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, plan 20 community meetings between residents and police, which will be organized through the University of North Carolina Wilmington. The meetings will be at different locations throughout the city and county, he said.
“It’s important for us to have a dialogue with our community,” said Evangelous, who said the meetings were just as important for police to help understand what’s happening in the community as they are for the public to understand the perspectives of law enforcement.
“It’s a two-way street. You can’t get respect unless you give respect. If you don’t respect us, you’re not going to call us,” he added.
While there have been a handful of high-profile violent crimes in Wilmington, including a drive-by shooting in late December that killed one 16-year-old and wounded four others, Evangelous said that there was actually a 20 percent decrease in homicides in December, down from 15 last year to 12 this year.
Wilmington has already experienced its first 2016 homicide in the shooting death in Turnkey, a neighborhood adjacent to Creekwood, of 14-year-old Aljhean Thomas Williams, a ninth-grader at Mosley Performance Learning Center.
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