Alamance narcotics task force earns federal drug-trafficking award

The Alamance Narcotics Enforcement Team received the 2024 National High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Award for the Atlanta-Carolinas Region, a federal honor Burlington police said recognizes ANET’s work against drug trafficking. The city described the award as honoring the team’s “outstanding contributions” to the effort.

ANET’s most visible result was Operation Roadrunner, which led to 42 arrests. A separate joint investigation in Alamance County produced 53 drug-trafficking and gang-violence arrests, giving the task force a public record of enforcement activity that goes well beyond a routine patrol case.

The award also points to the way drug cases are handled in Alamance County. A North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation post tied Operation Roadrunner to both the DEA and NCSBI, and the DEA says state and local task forces are a core part of the HIDTA model for fighting drug trafficking. In practice, that means Burlington officers, state investigators and federal partners are working from the same case files when trafficking networks cross city and county lines.

For residents, the clearest measure is the arrest count. Forty-two arrests in Operation Roadrunner and 53 more in the joint investigation suggest investigators were able to disrupt active drug networks and related violence, not just make isolated street-level arrests. The figures also show why federal authorities would single out an Alamance County team in a region-wide award: the work produced measurable enforcement results that can be counted, tracked and tied to named cases.

The recognition places ANET among the agencies that HIDTA uses to coordinate anti-trafficking work across local, state and federal levels. In Alamance County, that cooperation has now been backed by two large enforcement totals and a federal award that reflects the scale of the task force’s reach.