SHORTAGES OF CASH, MANPOWER PLAGUE POLICE

MCKEE - When police in Jackson County investigated two people last August
on suspicion of selling drugs, Sheriff Tim Fee said he forked over $80 of
his own money so an informant could buy two OxyContin pills.

That helps explain why there's not more drug enforcement in rural Kentucky.
Many sheriffs' offices don't have the money or manpower to do much of it.

The Kentucky State Police has only two dozen officers specifically assigned
to drug investigations for 56 Eastern and Southern Kentucky counties.

"It's really, really slim," said state police Maj. Mike Sapp. "To properly
enforce the drug problem, we would need to at least triple the amount of
people."

Instead, the agency is 64 officers short of its budgeted strength.

Meanwhile, the FBI has been consumed with combating terrorism, which shifts
attention and staff away from drugs, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration focuses on large drug organizations, not street-level dealers.

The bottom line: The size of the drug problem exceeds the troops to fight it.

Though the numbers fluctuate, Kentucky has ranked near the bottom in the
nation in the number of sworn police officers per capita, according to the
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In 1997, only two states had a lower rate of police officers in state and
local departments. Kentucky had 15.5 officers per 10,000 residents, ranking
ahead of only Vermont and West Virginia.

By 1999, the most recent year for such data, the figure was 17.6 officers
per 10,000 residents, which ranked Kentucky ahead of 10 other states.

Heavy Workload For Sheriffs

Sheriffs wear a lot of hats in Kentucky. They're responsible for collecting
taxes, transporting prisoners, providing court security and serving court
papers, such as summonses.

Combine that with meager funding and big areas to cover, and few are able
to do drug investigations that require extended surveillance or expensive
drug purchases.

"The sheriffs are very limited in what they can do," said former Letcher
County Sheriff Steve Banks, who left office this month. Banks said he had
five full-time and two part-time deputies to cover a county of more than
25,000.

Jackson County's Fee said he wants drugs off the street, but money for
investigators' drug buys often comes out of his pocket. "A man suffers from
financial pneumonia" doing that, he said.

In Lee County, which covers 210 square miles, Sheriff Harvey Pelfrey said
he and his lone deputy rely on volunteer special deputies for help. "It
keeps me busy just doing ... paperwork and transports," Pelfrey said.

The state police are "strapped like everyone else," said Col. Rodney
Brewer. While the state has authorized 1,020 officers, the agency has only
956. Brewer said 11 of those officers have been called to military duty.

The state police made a number of moves last year to beef up drug
enforcement, such as setting up a system to better share information among
officers. At each regional post, a detective was assigned to be a
street-level drug investigator. The agency also expanded education efforts
against drug abuse.

The changes came as a report by the state police and the National Drug
Intelligence Center was making clear that Kentucky's drug problem "has
exceeded the resources of law enforcement officials."

"Abuse of certain types of drugs is so pervasive that effective law
enforcement and prevention efforts prove extremely difficult," said the
report, released in July.

FBI Focuses On Terrorism

The FBI has long played a key role in Kentucky drug investigations,
especially cases involving police corruption related to drugs. The agency
investigated the largest such case in state history, charging four Eastern
Kentucky sheriffs, a deputy and a police chief in 1990 with taking payoffs
to protect drug runners.

Because it can severely damage the quality of life in communities, public
corruption remains a top priority for the FBI, said J. Stephen Tidwell,
special agent in charge of the FBI in Kentucky.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, however, the FBI has shifted resources to deal with
terrorist threats. The agency has fewer agents in Eastern Kentucky now than
before the attacks, although officials declined to say exactly how many
agents it has in the state.

Tidwell said there was a time when the agency could put other matters on
the back burner, if necessary, in order to concentrate resources on
investigating a large drug organization.

"Now we're not in the position to do that as much as we'd like to," Tidwell
said.