Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office using new device to detect synthetic drug Spice

By Jason Marks

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    SACRAMENTO, California (KCRA) — The work inside the Sacramento County jail never ends. Some of that work is constantly doing random pod shake downs.

“Today we are going to be searching for all forms of contraband, but we are especially looking for weapons and narcotics,” said Deputy Sopwith. “All teams go to the assigned cell, handcuff the inmates at the door, and then will bring them to indoor rec where we will do a pat search of them.”

Random searches are nothing new for deputies. Neither is finding drugs hidden in cells.

“This is just a snorting straw, and inside of it there is some white powder,” said Intel Analyst Rodgers. “It could be Tylenol or fentanyl. It could be anything.”

It is a constant cat-and-mouse game between inmates and duties.

“The desperation that these guys have to get some sort of fix while they are in here is pretty high,” Rodgers added.

Rodgers and Sopwith are part of the Investigative Services Unit inside the jail.

“The only way we can stop it is to pick it off before it enters the facility,” Rodgers said.

The ISU routinely analyzes conversations between inmates and the world outside the concrete walls, including monitoring the inmates’ phone calls.

“I haven’t heard any plans yet, but it sounds like they will try to get into the facility somehow,” Deputy Brandon Imbriale said after listening to one call.

But these days, most of what the ISU is focused on is Spice.

“We all know that Spice is here,” Rodgers said. “Aside from catching somebody in the act of using it, it’s very hard to detect it. It’s odorless and colorless.”

Spice is known as a synthetic marijuana, but can cause psychotic episodes, and inmates found a clever way to sneak Spice into the jail.

“What they are doing is they are spoofing the law offices and having the return address be the law office. But it is really coming from somewhere else,” Imbriale said. “That’s why we have sort of a meticulous process to make sure the legal mail is coming from the return address. It looks like something that they just printed off, but in reality, it is soaked with Spice.”

That paper would then be smoked.

“Other narcotics do get in here a much smaller amounts, but if you were to get one piece of paper soaked in Spice into this building, that is a lot of drug use for a lot of people,” Rodgers said.

On the jail market, that one piece of paper could net nearly $4,000.

“Every agency that I’ve spoken to in the region has had this issue, and everyone’s tackling it in a different way,” Rodgers said.

For the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, its way comes from a university 5,000 miles away.

“Actually, what we find with a drug like Spice is that it is incredibly potent,” said Professor Chris Pudney.

Pudney is a professor at the University of Bath in eastern England. He developed a Spice-detecting device.

“We have found that this is incredibly accurate,” Pudney explained.

The small, handheld device scans the paper. If it detects Spice, the lights will turn red.

Pudney says there are now three of his devices in jails and prisons in the United States. Sacramento was the first.

“Prior to having that, I don’t believe to my knowledge we hadn’t charged any cases,” Rodgers said. “Within the last 10 months, we’ve had 16 cases that were able to be charged criminally at a felony level.”

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