STATEN ISLAND — A surge in drug overdoses on Staten Island has prompted the NYPD to transfer 15 detectives to the borough.
During a City Council budget meeting Monday, NYPD Chief of Department James O'Neill said the detectives were being reassigned from other boroughs within the next two months.
The move comes after at least 48 drug-related deaths were reported in Staten Island this year, the Staten Island Advance reported.
"If there's an OD, a detective's going to investigate that to see where it came from and see if we can get some prosecutions out of that," O'Neill told the council.
The surge of overdoses from opioids — including eight in eight days this month — led District Attorney Michael McMahon to call the drugs a "plague" on the borough and call on the city to provide more resources.
Staten Island has been in the throes of a prescription pill and heroin epidemic for years, with the borough having the highest rate of accidental overdoses in the city, according to the city's Department of Health.
Numbers for 2015 are not available yet, but McMahon previously said if the trend continues, it will have a higher rate than 2014. He also said that there could be as many as 30 percent of overdoses that were improperly reported.
In February, McMahon started a program which would investigate every suspected overdose death in an attempt to trace the source of the drugs.
