The Daily Citizen, Dalton, GA

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March 18, 2010

The time spent is worth it

Dalton Daily Citizen

DALTON — Sixty-eight arrests, and possibly more, 10 law enforcement agencies and 14 months of hard work.

Those are just a few of the numbers from last weekend’s raid on an alleged cockfighting ring in southern Murray County.

In making its preparations for the raid, the Murray County Sheriff’s Office was assisted by the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office, the Dalton Police Department, the state Department of Natural Resources, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, and K-9 units from the Tunnel Hill and Calhoun police departments. Also taking part in the investigation were the Conasauga Safe Streets Task Force, FBI, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That is a lot of manpower and man hours spent to take down an alleged cockfighting operation, and it has some wondering if it was worth it.

The simple answer is it was.

Cockfighting is a cruel activity — we won’t dignify it by calling it a sport — whose very premise is built upon watching birds destroy each other and betting on which one you think will survive. There is nothing noble or uplifting about cockfighting and much like dogfighting it is rightly deemed to be illegal here.

But beyond the cruelty of it, the raid also exposed how rife with other criminal activities cockfights usually are.

Murray County Sheriff Howard Ensley said that in addition to the charges of gambling and cruelty to animals, people arrested at the site were charged with a variety of drug offenses and more than $40,000 in cash was seized.

He also said the investigation turned up five people who were identified as drug traffickers, although they were not in the raid, and that some gang members were also identified who were coming to the fights.

The bottom line on activities like cockfighting is that law enforcement should take an aggressive approach to it.

You can’t look the other way on any activity where drugs and illegal gambling are involved.

Fighting crime is expensive but you have to draw a hard line on activity that you know has no place in society.

 

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