2nd drug raid at Salt Lake home

For the second time in less than a month, Salt Lake City police officers conducted a drug raid at a home that allegedly supplied narcotics to areas around the city's homeless shelters and Pioneer Park.

Narcotics officers and SWAT team members served a search warrant at a home near 500 North and 800 West early Friday morning, arresting four people. Salt Lake City police detective Kevin Joiner said officers found drug paraphernalia and personal quantities of crack cocaine.

"It's obviously frustrating to go back in less than a month's time and make an arrest there," Joiner said Friday. "We'll go back as many times as it takes to make it go away."

Last month, police served a warrant and arrested seven people — including a Hurricane Katrina evacuee — and placed a 12-year-old girl in state protective custody. In that raid, officers seized crack cocaine, methamphetamine, Lortab, marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

"We believe that this house has been a big supplier to the shelter area around Pioneer Park," Detective Robin Snyder told the Deseret Morning News at the time. "It's an ongoing problem that we've been dealing with for years."

Employees at the Road Home shelter on Rio Grande Street have said the drug trade around the shelters is "ongoing trouble."

Joiner said their efforts to stop drug trafficking around Pioneer Park and the shelters will continue.

"We're hoping that as our narcotics officers continue to develop leads and information about where drug dealing is going on, we'll always be out there," he said.

---

E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com