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Small county takes big stand: Stay away drug dealers

"I am sick and tired of looking at news every single day to learn that some mother and some father was robbed of the things that they went out and worked hard for."

CONYERS, Ga. -- A new team of crimefighters is making waves in Rockdale County.

It’s called the surge team and it targets areas where crime is increasing – or predicted. And while they haven’t existed very long, they’re already reaping big rewards.

The sheriff’s office assembled this team in early October. Within the first month, they had three major drug busts totaling almost $4 million.

“I am sick and tired of looking at news every single day to learn that some mother and some father was robbed of the things that they went out and worked hard for,” Sheriff Eric Levett said.

So Levett decided to do something about it. He collected about 25 officers from different departments to come together on one team -- everything from vice, narcotics and sex crimes to school resource officers and traffic units.

“We are on a mission to catch drug sellers, drug traffickers, drug manufacturers,” Levett said.

Three busts, five arrests and over 120 pounds of illegal drugs later, they’re surging forward and keeping their word.

The first bust happened Oct. 18 in a Walmart parking lot where an undercover officer collected five kilos of heroin.

The second one happened just 10 days later when they found 100 pounds of cocaine from a traffic stop on I-20.

The most recent one on Nov. 1 was where they picked up five more kilos of cocaine, tens of thousands in cash and two guns.

Altogether, it equals $3.75 million dollars in drugs coming out of Georgia’s second smallest county.

“Most people know in the business that we’re in that metro Atlanta, bigger cities are the hub of those manufacturers,” Levett said. “They tend to utilize the little cities to become that community to distribute it.”

After each bust came a Facebook post with a warning directly to the criminals that read “do not come to Rockdale.”

“Do not even come through Rockdale,” Levett said reading one of those posts. “And we mean that - I mean that.”

And they’re not just targeting drugs. Besides these three major busts, the team has made 80 to 100 other arrests for various crimes.

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