Safety crews shape up; let pay follow

OFF/BEAT GLIDEWELL E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published September 3, 2002

I try to limit the amount that I write about the town where I live, simply because I live there, and it is only one place in three large counties.

But I can't let the need for better police salaries in Dade City go by without voicing a loud "amen."

If police departments were graded like schools, the Dade City Police Department up until about 15 years ago would have been bouncing back and forth between D+

and F- for more than a decade.

It was like watching the Andy Williams Show on acid.

The police chief drove around town shooting dogs out of his car and, when challenged by members of the power structure, engineered testimony from a burglar that one of the city's most powerful people had accepted equipment stolen from a burned out Zephyrhills radio station.

The response was a whispering campaign of allegations about the chief posing nude with underage boys for pornographic pictures, which somehow never were produced as promised.

A police sergeant, told to "roll his knowns," meaning get a set of known fingerprints from a dead hit-and-run victim, took a nose print instead, saying he had been told to "roll his nose."

A grand jury investigation in 1973 found the department's handling of criminal cases, including one where a man accused of rape and murder was allowed to return home after he had confessed, "atrocious."

The chief was accused of driving a wealthy Dade City drug addict to Tampa to pick up his drugs, but the accusation was never proved. He later told me he had driven on the trips but didn't know what the man did while there.

Two officers presented what was later determined to be a false affidavit allegedly from a deputy who signed his name with an X (not that unusual back then) accusing the police chief of exposing himself to three young girls in the woods. The chief was able to prove he was in Germany on the date of the alleged assault, and the officers were fired.

Later the chief's right-hand man, a captain, went to prison for having sex with a teenage girl, but not before he allegedly tried to hire another officer to kill an officer who he thought had ratted him out.

Under two subsequent chiefs the department had racial problems, one in which a black officer was accused of mistreating a white woman after she made racially offensive statements during a traffic stop and one where a fire hose was turned on a group of angry young people at a predominantly black youth center by a chief who meant to "cool them down," and had no idea what a furor the images of fire hoses being turned on African-Americans would cause.

Since police Chief Phil Thomson took over in 1987, the department has continually upgraded its image and today would rate an A on most days and a B+

on its worst days. There have been occasional ripples on its pond, but compared to the almost monthly tsunamis of the past, they are hardly noticeable.

Likewise, the city's firefighters, always a pretty steady lot, have maintained a highly professional image and have absorbed additional responsibilities -- providing fire protection for Saint Leo without a whimper -- and haven't appeared on the city's trouble screen at all over the past several years.

One of the primary tests of public safety agencies should be whether the public they serve feels safe. I am part of that public, and I do.

At this time of the year we are painfully reminded of the lives these men and women are willing to put on the line for us at a moment's notice, and their salary figures speak for themselves.

A Dade City officer starts at $24,000 per year. That is $6,000 (probably soon to go to more than $8,000) less than an officer in Zephyrhills, nine miles away, gets when he or she signs. The city's firefighters start at $23,000 per year, while Zephyrhills firefighters start at $26,000 per year and those in Hillsborough County start at $41,000.

And don't overlook the false economy involved in the city forking over money for training and acting, in effect, as a farm team for nearby and better paying departments. My guess is that if you cut the turnover and training costs, the money for adequate pay raises would materialize and the prospect of cops risking their lives to live below the poverty level would go away.

City Commissioner Hutch Brock said it best: "Folks, it's an embarrassment."

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