Raids done, Brockport PD chief willing to discuss 420 Emporium in his community
Previously we published a story looking at the communities that had head shops alleged to be selling synthetic drugs and those villages that had no such establishment.
As part of the process, we requested an interview Brockport Chief of Police Daniel Varrenti -- several times. At one point, we got the message back that he was out of the office until Thursday.
Yesterday morning as I stood outside The 420 Emporium on Ellicott Street, Batavia, and knew the same sort of raid was taking place in Brockport I thought, "ah, this is why the chief didn't want to talk to me until Thursday."
This morning, Varrenti apologized for not getting back to me. He was in fact concerned about discussing The 420 Emporium prior to the raids.
This morning while awaiting my own appearance on "Kimberly and Beck" radio show on "The Buzz," I heard a Brockport resident talk about how many people in the community there were concerned about the 420 allegedly selling bath salts and that just like in Batavia, dozens of people drove down Market Street yesterday cheering on law enforcement during the raid.
Varrenti confirmed this morning that there were people in the community concerned that the 420 might be selling synthetic drugs and were requesting police action. He said, however, as a law enforcement issue, his officers did not handle many calls similar to what we've seen in Batavia involving bizarre and violent behavior.
There were calls, he said, involving bizarre behavior, but it was never established that they were related to bath salts.
His officers, he said, weren't necessarily looking for a connection to bath salts.
"I know I've read reports where people might have denoted some psychological problems, but we do not know if it was the result of synthetic drugs," Varrenti said.
"How do we know we haven’t come across 20 of these things, but because there was no law broken all we’re going to do is bring in the person to be evaluated for (his or her) mental health and we’re never going to know what the problem was," Varrenti added.
Varrenti said as a 33-year veteran in law enforcement including more than a dozen years as a narcotics detective, many people in the community know him as an expert in narcotics.
"If I'm a quasi-expert in anything," Varrenti said. "It's narcotics."
With that background, people were looking to his department especially to do something about the perceived problem at the 420.
"Why can't you take care of this problem we have here?" Varrenti said people would ask him.
"It's very difficult because these investigations take a long time," Varrenti said. "We don't want to lock up the clerk behind the counter. We want to get to the distributor or the importer. I'm not a patient person by nature and I can only imagine what it's like for a member of the community who has a family member (who is using bath salts), and we've gotten those complaints."
In one of the affidavits used to secure search warrants for yesterday's raids,* community complaints in Brockport are used as a justification for the search. Varrenti provided DEA agents with an email from a community member who said "it is killing our children" and implored Brockport PD to do something about it.
*NOTE: There were two affidavits used for search warrants yesterday, one for the Northern District of the U.S. Attorney's Office and one for the Western District. Yesterday, we only had the Northern District affidavit. Today we obtained the Western District affidavit, which is full of information specific to Batavia that was not in the Northern District affidavit. In a separate post later today we'll share information from that affidavit.
