The Casa Grande Police Department has received a $132,000 grant allowing officers to work with the U.S. Border Patrol to combat smuggling of narcotics and illegal immigrants.
The department has received this type of grant for the past few years to participate in Operation Stonegarden, a part of the federal Department of Homeland Security.
It covers overtime, police officer-related expenses and vehicle mileage reimbursement.
“What we do is we work with the Border Patrol in a certain area of town the Border Patrol picks for us, where we try to do some interdiction and some crime suppression as they come up,” Police Chief Mark McCrory told the City Council, which unanimously approved accepting the grant. “We use this money for an overtime grant that costs the city nothing. It’s fully reimbursed back to the city, all the costs associated with it.”
He added, “It allows us to put extra bodies out onto patrol areas that are deemed high volume areas for narcotics and illegal immigration coming into our community. It increases our patrol capabilities and the time and the effort that we put out into those areas that really have kind of a high impact on some of the crime problems in our community. We’ve had some success and some seizures of narcotics. We issue citations, we do our traffic enforcement and things out there. We don’t cover things that are unrelated to the idea of what Stonegarden was set up to do.”
