McDonough County Sheriff Nicholas Petitgout and his team of deputies are working with neighboring counties to fight crimes related to methamphetamine distribution. Sheriff Pettigout says the problem is the SuperMeth was sold cheap at first and then the addictions occurred, and the Mexican cartels have driven up prices which is leading crimes of theft.
“From the Mexican cartels and it gets transported through the border to Chicago and then it trickles down throughout the different counties and cities. So, when I tell people you, now that we’re dealing with cartel meth, it’s very real thing. When people talk about border security that national attention that comes with it, and it doesn’t really matter what side of that you’re on, but that’s where our drugs come from. They come from the Mexican cartels via Chicago and then get filtered out, so you know that it’s not being made locally anymore. When you use the word like super meth and they’re made in super labs, you know these large labs. A lot of the chemicals come from Asia and then that’s made in Mexico, so we are dealing with that. The issue has been the price was fairly cheap for a very long time so then you have a mass sort of, how do you want to say addiction and then once the price goes up and now you have people who have to steal, so just watching out for that.”
Sheriff Petitgout says their department has had two arrests that did lead to federal indictments, and they are proud of taking those types of criminals off the streets. Meanwhile, local Sheriff’s offices are showing concern about the trends in crime in our communities. McDonough County Sheriff Petitgout explains:
“This is some of the violent crime that we’ve seen. Some of the gun crime that we have seen and to be honest with you, I think it’s a trickle-down effect. It’s this effect that we feel out of the city of Chicago and sort of the soft on crime approach. Just things that you know when you say something to your neighbor like ‘hey that doesn’t happen her,’ yeah it does and I’m not really happy about that and just that big city type of crime that has sort of knocked on our door lately.”
Pettigout says we need to change our approach to repeat violent criminals:
“We definitely need to hold people accountable for the things they do and that has been the hardest part about being a sheriff in Illinois the last four years and it’s something that we all talk about right now, is this sort of lack of accountability that we have for whatever reason. I don’t think people realize that the criminals that we deal with on a daily basis, they have had their second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth and ninth and 10th chance, that we are not just dealing with people who have one interaction with law-enforcement and are simply going to prison, that does not happen. It does not happen in Illinois. So, this approach of we need to be kinder gentler, yes, there’s times for that and I don’t disagree wholeheartedly, but we have kind of lost our way in just simply holding people accountable for the things that they do.”
