Ever hear of a traced phone call, Officer?

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© St. Petersburg Times
published June 28, 2002

It's hard to figure out what it is about cops and phones.

Last week's resignation of a corrections deputy in Pasco County for making 168 telephone calls to gay sex lines wasn't the first time that the department has had to remind its employees that it isn't always a good idea to "reach out and touch someone."

Usually, when the department has a phone problem, it is because someone is playing a joke. Once it was because a lovelorn sheriff apparently needed to call his girlfriend on the public's dime (so to speak, you haven't been able to call anyone for a dime for a long time).

What is sort of amazing is that the guys who get caught playing around with telephones are the ones who should know better than most of us how easy it is to get caught doing that.

I'm not a cop, and even I have been too scared to make anonymous phone calls (from my own phone, anyhow) for years.

Pranks in cop shops are nothing new. In the days when I was a police reporter they were predominantly, almost exclusively, male preserves with hot and cold (mostly hot) running testosterone on tap and the predictable locker-room, Bengay-in-the-jockstrap brand of humor.

Believe it or not, the first telephone prank I ever ran into was from a Pasco deputy who sneaked up to me in the courthouse and slipped me a number that he said would yield valuable information. It was Dial-A-Prayer, but that was in the days before phone sex lines, and options were more limited.

When the first phone sex lines came in, there was a flurry of those little telephone call-back pink slips with 800 numbers and the word "urgent" appearing on desks. They were treated basically as a nuisance until the lines that actually cost money came along. Then phone sex calls started showing up on the department's telephone bills.

Incidentally, that was back during the days when my colleague, Lucy Morgan, was working on an investigation of the Sheriff's Office for which she and Jack Reed eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

During that period the meanest thing one deputy could do to another was put Lucy's name in the call-back space and leave the form on someone's desk in plain view. Before it was over, the Sheriff's Office was giving employees polygraph tests asking only one pertinent question: "Did you talk to Lucy?"

Later on, another sheriff went to court to try to keep our reporters from seeing the records of his cell phone calls to a woman who later became his employee and girlfriend. Then-Sheriff Jim Gillum said he made more than 200 calls to Christine Puto because "I needed somebody to talk to."

That and other cases should make it clear -- especially to people in law enforcement -- that calls can be traced and that someone armed with a warrant and the right equipment can get access to all incoming and outgoing calls. The technology involved is usually used in drug investigations, but it's still there.

The deputy involved in the latest incident was making calls to a toll-free gay phone-sex line and then transferring the calls to other unsuspecting employees.

Other than the cost of the time lost in making and answering some calls, there was no real financial loss, and he probably would have gotten away with it if he had stopped after a call or two rather than 168.

If I worked in corrections, I wouldn't be thrilled to have one of my co-workers making it look to a budget-conscious boss and general public that we all had that much time on our hands.

Still, given the flaps that erupt in some other agencies on a regular basis, it's a pretty small ripple on the law enforcement pond.

I am a little bothered that the caller in this case apparently thought it was funnier, perhaps more embarrassing, to make the call to a gay phone-sex line than to a straight one.

It concerns me to think that he thought his colleagues would be extra-piqued by that.

It would concern me more if I found out that they were.

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