From left, state police Troop F commander Maj. Wayne Olson; Ulster County Sheriff Paul Van Blarcum; Mayor Shayne Gallo, holding a symbolic broom; Chief Egidio Tinti; Undersheriff Frank Faluotico; and District Attorney Holley Carnright at the March 31 post-arrests press conference. (Photo by Dan Barton)
According to Carnright, gang affiliation and prior drug convictions played a major role in sentencing recommendations. “In this case you had a very large number of individuals with prior felony convictions for drugs and that was a compelling factor to ask for more [prison] time,” said Carnright. “We had people on parole who were back selling drugs a month after they got out of prison, in those cases we asked for the maximum.”
Unfair sentencing?
But Kossover, whose office defended about 60 percent of the Clean Sweep cases, argues that the weight attributed to alleged gang affiliation in sentencing was unfair. According to Kossover, evidence of gang affiliation often consisted of little more than a police officer’s word, a photograph of a defendant conversing with a known gang member or video showing them wearing the color red. Kossover noted that, despite making over 100 arrests during the course of the operation, cops recovered just three firearms. Kossover said using supposed gang membership as a rationale for longer sentences without actual proof of criminal activity beyond small-scale drug dealing was unfair.
“They lock people up for small sales based on the suspicion that they may be involved in other criminal conduct,” said Kossover. “From our perspective, fear of gangs drove this entire process. But if these are big bad gang members, why did they only get three guns?”
But Carnright said that proof of the operations effectiveness was clear in this year’s crime statistics, which show declines in violent offenses in the months since the drug sweep. Police, meanwhile, say while drugs are still sold in the city, the sweep has made it much easier to disrupt the trade. KPD Detective Sgt. Brian Robertson, who worked on Operation Clean Sweep, said the crackdown had broken up deeply entrenched networks which had for years facilitated street-level drug sales in the city. Robertson described the networks as ranging from the lowest level of dealers to people willing to provide temporary shelter to fellow gang members as “force multipliers,” allowing dealers to show up in Kingston from out of town and plug into a reliable local distribution system. With the old networks broken up, Robertson said, the dealers who have been showing up from Poughkeepsie and Newburgh in the months since the sweep are forced to recruit their own local talent running the risk of bringing an informant into their operation.
“Drug dealing is still going on but since the sweep it has gotten much harder to come into town and do business,” said Robertson. “The people showing up now are strangers and we’re the natives. Anybody new, we’ve got a handle on.”
