It’s easy to understand Wheeling Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger’s desire to use the city’s opioid settlement funds to help his department battle the war on drugs. It’s a fight his officers take on every day, and frankly it’s a fight they cannot win.

Wheeling City Council last month gave its OK for the department to utilize $40,000 to purchase and be trained on using what’s known as a Cellebrite machine, which would allow officers to extract evidence from cell phones as part of drug-related investigations.

The technology will be helpful to the department in thwarting crime and helping identify perpetrators of overdoses. Currently, when a phone confiscated as part of a drug investigation needs to be analyzed, it has to be sent away, and it can take weeks to get the results. This new technology will allow the department to now do that process immediately by unlocking cell phones and pulling an array of data from them including web history, key work searches, photos and videos and call and text history.

“Currently today, when the Wheeling Police Department is faced with a (drug) investigation, we’ll send the phones that may be seized or recovered in narcotics cases to the West Virginia Fusion Center,” Schwertfeger said.

For those concerned with potential civil rights violations, the chief noted “No phone will ever be searched without consent of an individual that owns the phone standing before us giving consent or a search warrant. Those overdose death investigations — if my loved one is lying dead there who has an addiction and has been sold narcotics that ultimately have taken their life, I want that information in the law enforcement agency’s hands as quickly as I can get it … for the justice that’s deserved.”

That’s good to know, as in the wrong hands this technology does have the potential to violate an individual’s rights.

One point of concern, though, is that the system is being purchased through the last of the city’s initial opioid settlement funds. This purchase, along with about $600,000 for the police and fire departments for various equipment including side-by-side ATVs, means that no funding at all has been appropriated to helping deal with the treatment site of drug addiction — just enforcement. City leaders, with future funding coming from the state’s opioid settlement, would be wise to help fund programs that help steer those addicted to a brighter future instead of solely focusing on how to lock them up. There’s a balance there that needs to be found.