Boulder County is using opioid settlement money to fund advanced technology that will help investigators combat the local drug crisis, Boulder County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Nick Goldberger said Wednesday.
The sheriff’s office is using roughly $80,000 of the county’s first year of funding on the new investigative tools Cellebrite Premium, Graykey, TruNarc, Magnet AXIOM and Nighthawk — all of which will help speed up investigations, Goldberger explained.
“When we talk about the Cellebrite and the Graykey — those are products that help us get past an electronic device’s security,” he said. “And our purpose for law enforcement is not — and I’ll repeat that — is not to go after the user or somebody with an opioid use disorder. Our mission is to get the drug traffickers, the drug dealers — who are selling hundreds, thousands of pills.”
Law enforcement has to obtain search warrants from courts to gain access to smartphones, and once those warrants are in hand, investigators then need to unlock, decrypt and gain access to evidence — that’s where the new technology comes in.
TruNarc is a handheld device that identifies unknown substances such as drugs or explosives. The technology also helps to keep officers safe, Goldberger explained.
“If I can find out that this substance is dangerous to human beings — whether it’s a drug or an explosive, that’s good to know — so we can take the safest precautions,” he said.
Nighthawk analyzes all case information and instantly provides pattern matches in the data that can help speed up investigations. Magnet AXIOM can also speed up cases by recovering deleted data from a range of devices and analyzing evidence.
Boulder County received $1.8 million in opioid settlement money, which is being used to fund abatement programs, initiatives, campaigns, supplies and training.
Goldberger, who’s on the Boulder County Drug Task Force, was a member of Boulder County’s Opioid Operations Group, which advised the regional opioid council on how the money should be spent.
“Every project in there, you’ll see — and rightly so — is helping the community members with opioid use disorders,” Goldberger explained. “The program that I submitted for law enforcement was the only program that is trying to slow down the influx of drugs coming into our community.”
An 18-year distribution timeline has been established for the county’s settlement funds, and the $1.8 million is for year one.
The ongoing annual funding will ensure the new investigative technology will remain in operation, Goldberger said.
“That equipment that I asked for has that recurring cost — it’s like getting a computer certificate, you have to pay for it every year,” he explained.
Every law enforcement agency in the county will have access to the new technology through the Boulder County Digital Forensics Lab, he said.
Forty-five pounds of fentanyl was seized in Longmont in early December — a case that shows the magnitude of what the county is dealing with, Goldberger said.
“The good thing is, that was seized — that could’ve killed thousands of people,” he said.
When it comes to saving lives, the commander said the new technology is “priceless.”
“When you take off 100,000 pills, you know you saved lives — even if you take off 20 pills, you know you saved a life, because those pills are going to kill people — it’s not, you know, ‘possibly’ — some of those pills will kill people,” he said.
