Countywide : Top Dutch Policeman Studies Drug Task Force

The top police officer in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, met this week with an Orange County narcotics task force on how to coordinate a range of different law enforcement agencies to fight together against drugs.

John A. Blaauw, 59, chief police commissioner of the Rotterdam Police Department, stopped in the county as part of a five-week Dutch government-sponsored world tour to find out how other law enforcement agencies fight drug trafficking.

Blaauw said Rotterdam police annually seize about 25 kilos of cocaine and a similar amount of heroin, although in one rare case in 1986 more than 200 kilos of cocaine were seized. Rotterdam, one of Europe’s major seaports, is visited by 32,000 ships a year carrying 2 million containers of cargo, he said. “That includes a lot of opportunity for drug smuggling,” Blaauw said.

Blaauw, who also toured Indonesia, Thailand and China, said he came to Orange County because of a chance meeting in Holland with Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer, who told him about the Regional Narcotics Suppression Program, headed by Sheriff’s Capt. Tim Simon.

The program--a coalition of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies formed this year to coordinate the county’s police narcotics efforts--has seized more than 4,000 pounds of cocaine, $5.5 million in cash, and arrested 46 suspected drug traffickers, Simon said.

Blaauw said the Netherlands has 148 separate police agencies, 17 in the Rotterdam area, that he has been trying to coordinate in anti-narcotics work. He called the Orange County program “a perfect example of what I want to get off the ground in my country.”