On Sept. 9, the Issaquah Police Department began a 10-week Citizens Academy to teach willing community members about the ins and outs of police work. Reporter writer Daniel Nash is attending — this series chronicles his experience and the lessons learned about policing in Issaquah.

Detective Work

Another Wednesday, another night of Citizens Academy. Last week, Officer Jesse Petersen had introduced us to uniformed patrol, the foundation of police work.

But this week we would need to get a clue as we welcomed two members of the department’s investigation division: Detective Cpl. Laura Asbell and Detective Dustin Huberdeau.

Both joined the Issaquah Police Department in 2007, when Huberdeau was 21 and Asbell was 22. Both rotated into detective positions from patrol and both will one day rotate back to the uniformed beat.

Huberdeau has been a member of Special Operations and Tactics (Issaquah’s SWAT equivalent), is a firearms instructor for the department and the instructor for active shooter situations. Asbell is a Taser instructor and was one of four Issaquah officers awarded the Washington state Law Enforcement Medal of Honor for meritorious conduct in 2012.

“Coming out of college, you never really know the [qualities of the] departments or the cities they’re in,” Asbell said. “So I feel really lucky to have landed in a city as cool as this one.”

Whereas patrol officers are sent out as the first responders to crimes and other incidents in the city, detectives are the follow-up team. They investigate cases of reported child or elder abuse, property crimes and follow up on domestic violence incidents.

“Anything that requires more than that initial patrol response comes to us,” Asbell said.

They are also responsible for monitoring sex offenders who move into the city. Issaquah’s municipal code bears more stringent regulations for registered offenders than King County, Asbell said. Whereas the county requires convicted sex offenders to register their home address, Issaquah requires police to contact the offender at their home. Persons more likely to reoffend — level two and level three offenders — are additionally restricted to homes in an approved zone within the city, away from schools and day care centers at risk of otherwise incurring $250-per-day fines.

The Issaquah Police Department is one of 12 partners in the Coalition of Small Police Agencies, an organization formed in 2003 to pool resources on major crimes such as rapes, robberies and burglaries.

Huberdeau also assists in producing ballistics samples from found ammunition, so that the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab can analyze them for connections to unsolved crimes.

Detectives have access to a number of specialized law enforcement databases, like the King County Regional Automated Fingerprint Identification System, to analyze evidence in open cases for connections to other known information. But social media and crowdsourced websites also have become important to the process. Huberdeau said he and other officers frequently used the website CanYouID.me to post surveillance images of suspects for potential leads.

“I wish everything worked like ‘CSI,’ where I can run things through facial recognition software and solve everything in an hour with commercial breaks,” Huberdeau said. “But until then, I’ll keep using this website.”

It’s important for detectives to work with the city or county prosecutor to make sure all investigations will pass muster with a judge, Asbell said.

“What are some of the common frustrations with your job?” a classmate who declined to be identified asked.

“Frustrations, frustrations…” Asbell said, mulling the question over. Then she turned to me. “What can be frustrating is when I know Daniel did this. You know Daniel committed a crime and you know he’s involved, but the evidence just isn’t quite there. So you can’t prosecute and he gets away with it.”

I pump my fist and hiss out a quick “yessss.” You’ll never catch me, coppers!

It’s a common obstacle to effectively responding to Issaquah’s drug problem, Huberdeau said.

“There is a drug issue in Issaquah, it’s just a matter of proving it,” he said. “For citizens, I would say if you call in and say ‘I see Daniel smoking something outside the library’…”

At this point I start to think I might have a reputation problem.

“…and I go out to talk to him and ask him if he was smoking anything, he can say, ‘Yeah, I was smoking a cigarette.’ That’s not illegal, and I don’t have cause to believe he was smoking anything else, so I have nothing to go on. But if you make that same call and go into detail about the paraphernalia he’s using — if you say ‘I see Daniel smoking something out of a glass pipe’ — now I have something to work with.”

As an example of the odd factors that can contribute to solving a crime, Asbell recounted an old theft case involving a CenturyLink truck that had been stolen from the Issaquah Transit Center off of State Route 900.

The truck was new enough that its license plate didn’t register through the state database. But it was soon found by police in the Timber Ridge at Talus senior community, completely stripped of its telecommunications equipment. The serial numbers for the equipment had been lost, the supervisor on duty told police.

The investigation had hit a dead end.

Then Asbell caught a break. A man browsing eBay called and told her he had found a piece of equipment for sale matching what was reported stolen from the truck. In the photo, Asbell could see the name of the CenturyLink area manager written on the item.

“In detective work, we call that a clue,” Asbell joked.

Police contacted the seller, who had bought the item from a pawn shop for online resale. That was another break: Pawn shops are required by state law to maintain a record of everything they buy and take as collateral, including the identity of the seller. The pawn shop’s record tracked back to a CenturyLink employee — and the supervisor who had lost the serial numbers.

In all, the case was solved in about nine months.

And, according to Huberdeau, it was an example of one of the best tools detectives can have in solving property crimes.

“Write down the serial numbers on all your major items,” Huberdeau said. “Keep them in a safe somewhere. If you have that, it’s huge and we might be able to get [your stolen property] back right away.”

The Wide, Wide World of Drugs

Asbell and Huberdeau stayed on for the night’s second seminar, on narcotics. We immediately learn the lobby of the Issaquah Police Department contains a drop box for disposing of expired prescription medications.

“The main thing we’re seeing a lot more of is heroin — black tar heroin,” Huberdeau said.

Heroin has seen a resurgence among abusers in the wake of the prescription painkiller epidemic. During the height of the prescription epidemic, no product was more visible than OxyContin, the brand name for a form of oxycodone manufactured by Purdue Pharma. From its approval in 1995 and through the ‘00s, abusers could bypass OxyContin’s inner time release barriers by simply crushing the pills, allowing the resulting powder to be snorted or smoked.

In 2010, Purdue rolled out a tamper-resistant time release system. Their drug of choice gone, many addicts transitioned over to nearly chemically identical heroin.

“I’ve seen abusers as young as 15,” Huberdeau said.

“I’ve seen younger,” Officer Nathan Lane said. “Youngest I’ve seen was 13.”

Thefts are often connected to drug abuse.

“We see drugs as the cause and root of a lot of crime,” Asbell said.

Some drugs have stepped out of the shadows of illicit use, notably marijuana, which has been legal to possess for recreational use in Washington state since late 2012. But the coexistence of recreational marijuana with medical marijuana has created some complications for law enforcement.

“So let’s say Rachel and Madeline are sitting in cars side-by-side, both smoking some pot,” Huberdeau said, stepping up to one of the classroom tables. “Rachel has her medical green card and Madeline’s just a recreational user. Now let’s say I see them doing this and I contact them both. Madeline walks away with a ticket, but Rachel goes to jail.

“It’s a strange loophole in the law that hasn’t been closed yet.”

The rise of “vaping” has also made public consumption more difficult to detect, as the electronic devices used to vape dry buds or hash oil look similar to those used to vape tobacco or nicotine e-liquid. Vaporizers also leave less of a lingering odor after use.

The paraphernalia used to snort powdered cocaine can present a similar problem because, as Huberdeau noted, there’s nothing suspicious about a dollar bill in someone’s pocket.

On the other end of the spectrum, abuse of crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine can become highly conspicuous after the fact. Huberdeau noted that both can be smoked by applying heat to the surface of glass pipes. With continued use, a pipe will often burn its users’ fingers, lips and teeth.

John, a classmate who works in store loss prevention, said he can spot a potential thief by those burns.

“If their fingernails are black and swollen, you know to keep an eye on them,” he said.

As the seminar went on, Asbell and Huberdeau passed around clear plastic boxes containing weed, crack and heroin.

“If we were to open this box, which we won’t do, you would notice it smells like cat urine,” Huberdeau said, passing off the container of heroin.

Powerpoint slides on the wall showed scenes of greater and greater horror: rotten teeth, track marks and the bathroom of a heroin user’s home, the sink counter covered in blood and littered with needles and discarded food containers.

A sense of panic for a crumbling society rose, palpably, in the room. One classmate asked if there was any hope for curbing the rise of drug use among the community’s teenagers. Not whether teen drug use had risen at all — that much was assumed.

Asbell assured him things hadn’t become so bleak.

“If you go out to a football game at Issaquah High School, you can see most of these kids having normal, teenage fun,” she said. “You see it and it’s really refreshing to realize they’re not all on heroin. They’re just goofy kids, like you and I were.”

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