A drug-sniffing dog with the U.S. Postal Inspectors helped tip the police to a 24-year-old Concord man they arrested earlier this week after seizing $100,000 worth of marijuana and hashish and an AK-47 rifle.

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Jack Cayes was arraigned in Concord’s district court yesterday on two counts of possession of controlled drugs. Cayes, who lives on Jackson Street, had more than five pounds of marijuana and more than two pounds of hashish at his apartment, according to the complaints filed in court.

Concord police Sgt. Roger Baker, head of the department’s drug enforcement unit, said the police had previously received tips about Cayes, but it was a call from the postal inspectors that spurred the investigation. “As it so happened, because of this relationship with the postal inspectors, they were aware and got a package their drug dog hit on,” Baker said.

According to a police affidavit dated Feb. 3, the police got a call in January from a postal inspector who suspected a package he was asked to deliver to Cayes’s address had illegal drugs. The inspector told the officer the package was addressed to someone at Pats Peak, but the postman who tried delivering it was told no one by that name was at that address, according to the affidavit.

The next day, the inspector told the police, he got a call from someone claiming to be the person whose name was on the package. The person asked the inspector to deliver it to Cayes’s address, according to the affidavit.

The police went with the inspector to deliver the package, and Cayes told an officer he knew the package was going to be delivered but refused to say who sent it, according to the affidavit.

The officer asked Cayes what was in the package, “and he would not say anything and started looking at the ground,” according to the affidavit. He wouldn’t let the inspector search the package, but later agreed to let the police open it after the officer said he would get a search warrant, according to the affidavit.

Six packages of marijuana and four of hashish were inside the package, according to the affidavit. The officer told Cayes he wouldn’t take him into custody that day but would seek a warrant for his arrest, according to the affidavit. The police said they arrested him Tuesday.

Baker said Cayes likely paid $65,000 for the drugs seized by the police and would have made more than $100,000 reselling it. He said that the amount of marijuana Cayes had wasn’t unusual for a dealer, but that the quantity of hashish, which Baker said is valued at $10,000 a pound, isn’t often seen in New England.

“That was probably the biggest surprise,” Baker said. By weight, the police seized more marijuana, but the hashish had a greater value, he said.

Baker said it’s often difficult to catch drug packages, given the volume of mail the U.S. Postal Service processes and the way drugs are mailed. “This was not, ‘I’m a buddy sending a buddy drugs through the mail,’ ” he said. “These are double heat-sealed packages.”

But while Cayes’s package was professionally sealed, the inspector’s dog still caught it, Baker said. “The dogs are hitting on the smell of marijuana, mostly because the people who are packaging it are lazy,” he said.

Cayes’s bail was set yesterday at $3,000 cash and $50,000 personal recognizance.

* Shred documents with personal information before throwing them away.

* Don’t carry your Social Security card or write your Social Security number on a check. Give it out only if absolutely necessary or ask to use another form of identification.

Miscreants driving around with drugs in La Porte may not be aware that they’re up against one of the best K-9 narcotics detection units in the State of Texas, police officials said Thursday.

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In between assisting with narcotics arrests and other issues while on patrol, one of the K-9 teams placed in the top 10 for the third year in a row at the National Narcotic Detector Dog Association’s 2012 regional skills competition.

Officer Jesse Arenivas and his canine partner, Lodka, were among more than 100 law enforcement agencies from Texas and Louisiana who competed in the event in Angleton.

La Porte’s team competed in the narcotics detection contest, a timed event in which the team located various types of narcotics in a warehouse setting.

For more information regarding the La Porte Police Department’s K-9 program, contact the Department’s Patrol Operations Division at 281-842-3184 or log onto the department’s website, located at www.laportetx.gov/police/.

Police dogs soon will be brought onto the Newark Memorial High School campus in an effort to deter drug use, and Fremont high schools may not be far behind.

http://liarcatchers.com/drugdogsweeps.html

The Newark school board voted unanimously last week to proceed with the policy, which will begin at the high school but ultimately could be used at other schools, as well.

“The goal is for people to come in and use the tools they need to use to make sure there’s no contraband on campus,” said Jan Crocker, a Newark school board member. “It’s not like the ’70s any more — that was just horrendous, the kids were in really bad shape. We don’t ever want to go to back to that. So we want to make sure no drugs are on campus.”

Newark Superintendent Dave Marken said the district is working with Newark police so that use of the dogs will begin April 16, when students return to class from spring break.

“We don’t think that there’s any more significant of a drug problem at Newark schools than anywhere else,” Marken said. “But we’re trying to take an active approach at curtailing and eliminating its use and sales so that we have a safe learning environment.”

Fremont, meanwhile, is garnering feedback from parents and other community members before proceeding. “I believe the use of the dog is a good deterrent and tool to have; I believe it’s worth looking into,” said Fremont police Sgt. Jim Koepf, supervisor of the district’s school resource officers. “I do not want to move forward

unless the community and the parents are supportive of it.”

There were 141 drug or alcohol incidents on Fremont high school campuses in 2009-2010, 188 in 2010-2011 and 72 so far this school year, Koepf told the school board and City Council at a recent joint meeting.

Fremont Superintendent Jim Morris said the policy would be a preventive measure, focusing first on education.

“Just to make sure that students know that this could happen and this is a consequence,” he said.

Newark and Fremont are the latest Bay Area school districts to consider bringing in police dogs as a method of curtailing drug use. Castro Valley, Dublin and Livermore already use campus canine units.

School officials in Pleasanton last month approved a plan in which the police department’s two drug-sniffing dogs would conduct random searches of the parking lots and PE lockers at the three high schools.

Fremont and Newark would have similar policies, Koepf and Crocker said.

“We’re not taking kids and lining them against the wall to face snarling dogs — that’s not what the use of the canine is,” Crocker said.

“It’s a search of lockers done while students are in class.”

Still, some students and civil rights groups have expressed concerns.

“In general, these types of operations are not a good idea,” said Michael Risher, staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California. “We don’t want schools to be places where administrators are assuming students to be guilty of something.”

If administrators decide to enact such policies, he said, they should be careful to address exactly what happens after a dog “alerts” at a locker.

Would police and administrators, for example, use that as a reason to question the student or conduct further searches of his or her property, even if the dog’s reaction was a “false positive,” and nothing was found in the locker?

“Certainly, if I were a parent of a student at one of these schools, I would want a very detailed explanation of what these dogs are going to be doing, what the consequences of a search would be … and that we do not have false positives creating lasting consequences for students,” he said.

He added that some students could be afraid of large, aggressive police dogs “roaming the halls of our schools.”

Crocker, though, said she isn’t worried about having the dogs on campus.

“We’re not using the animals to hurt the kids or frighten the children. We’re using them because they have a nose and ears to do things that humans can’t.”

Fremont High School campuses

141 Drug or alcohol incidents reported in 2009-2010
188 Drug or alcohol incidents reported in 2010-2011
72 Drug or alcohol incidents reported this year so far