FBI Director Kash Patel and Senator Dave McCormick were in Allentown today for a roundtable on the fentanyl crisis. While their visit highlights the severity of the issue, there is a huge ongoing crisis that the local health department and police department rarely speak about publicly. I wonder why.
How many calls do Allentown EMS, fire, and police respond to where fentanyl is involved? The police department has data analysts on staff—I don’t know exactly what all they do, but tracking and publicly reporting these numbers should be a core task for them.
How many fentanyl arrests are made each year? How many overdoses involving fentanyl occur annually in Allentown and Lehigh County? Homicides may be down—and that’s the metric the mayor and police chief often highlight as a major success. But what about all the overdose deaths? Someone is selling this poison, and in a very real sense, they are killing people. It’s a different type of homicide, if you ask me.
Yes, people have a choice to use drugs, just like they have a choice to shoot someone. But that doesn’t absolve the dealers who flood our streets with a substance so potent it kills users—often unknowingly—by the hundreds.
The Mayor only ever highlights its accomplishments and never its downfalls. The mayor only says how great Chief Roca is, yet continues to hide all the things he isn’t accomplishing. Between the illegal dirt bikes, the huge juvenile gatherings, recent shootings, and the fentanyl problems, what is really being done? It’s all just smoke and mirrors.
What is the health department doing about this? Ms. Kistler, where are you? Haven’t seen you at a council meeting in a while.
(She makes me cringe. Eeeewww)
The public deserves transparent data on fentanyl-related emergency responses, arrests, and fatal overdoses. Shining a light on the full scope of this crisis—not just the declining homicide numbers—is essential to holding leaders accountable and driving real solutions.
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