Keith Newman, who has been at the helm of the Southwest Georgia Drug Task Force, will resign his position effective July 11, Newman said Thursday.
The task force, which covers Mitchell, Baker and Grady counties, is jointly funded through federal grants and fees from the three counties.
In April 2007, Newman was at the center of a sometimes bitter fight to prolong the life of his unit when a Mitchell County grand jury handed down a recommendation that county leaders withdraw their support for the task force in favor of building their own narcotics interdiction unit run by Mitchell County Sheriff W.E. Bozeman.
Newman and the task force would inevitably survive that battle, but it would leave lasting scars on the man who says he’s had to fight county commissioners about as often as he has drug dealers.
“It’s really a totality of the circumstances,” Newman said after being asked why he was resigning his position. “It’s not just one thing, but the Mitchell County incident has been a factor in the decision.”
Under Newman’s leadership the unit has averaged about 300 drug arrests a year and has become a vital part of a drug eradication initiative currently under way in the communities served by the task force.
When news of the grand jury recommendation reached Camilla Police Chief Ray Folsom, the former Albany detective balked at the idea of operating a police force without the unit.
“Without the help of the drug squad, I don’t have the personell to handle the drug problem here,” Folsom said.
Ironically, it was another grand jury visit Wednesday that Newman says sparked interest in his decision to leave.
“The grand jury asked about the drug unit, and I think they were very interested in what’s going to happen,” he said.
District Attorney Joe Mulholland, who sits on the board that governs the unit, said Wednesday that he had received Newman’s letter of resignation but didn’t feel comfortable talking about it publicly.
What he did speak to, though, was the future of the unit itself, saying that funding formerly earmarked to fight drug dealers is now being used overseas to fight terrorism.
“The folks in Washington are shifting the funds from the war on drugs to the war on terror,” Mulholland said. “So the money that we’ve relied on to ease the financial burden coming from the counties is dwindling.”
Mulholland said that the federal government’s contribution has declined rapidly in the last several years, going from 80 percent of what it originally was before the war on terror down to just 40 percent.
Newman said that a meeting with board members had been scheduled, presumably to discuss his resignation and the future of the unit. He said he would know more after that meeting.