Sheriff Bob White says soaring call volume justifies the largest budget hike in 16 years. But since he took over in 2001, the total number of serious crimes has stayed nearly the same.
By THOMAS LAKE
Published September 10, 2006
Your sheriff has his hand out. He says he has needs. More deputies to keep the peace. More cars to propel them. More vests to protect them.
Most of all, more money to pay them.
Bob White is asking county commissioners for the largest sheriff's budget increase in 16 years. His reasoning comes down to this. You and your fellow Pasco County residents called for service nearly 40 percent more last year than you did five years earlier, and he needs more troops to meet your demands.
You might think this means the crime rate soared from 2000 to 2005. It fell. A Times analysis of all 1.1- million calls since 2000 shows that those of the highest priority - such as stabbings, shootings and kidnappings - plunged by nearly one-third.
Think of it this way. Since White took over in 2001, as newcomers flooded the county, the total number of serious crimes stayed nearly the same.
If White gets his way, law-enforcement spending during his administration will have leapt by nearly 69 percent.
He says this is the cost of putting you first.
"If the people elect me to be their sheriff," he pledged in 2000, "then I will serve them with a capital S."
The numbers suggest he was telling the truth. And the money he seeks has nothing to do with a crime wave.
It is a wave of constituent service.
CITIZEN-ASSIST CALLS
White is right when he says you called him more than ever last year. But nearly all the increase came in the least urgent of the major priority categories. That category includes obscene phone calls, curfew violations and illegal watering.
It also comprises the second most common call type, the citizen assist, which has more than doubled in frequency since 2000.
What is a citizen assist? Here's an example.
Last June 2 on Stardale Drive in Holiday, Michael Bender was cleaning out his 82-year-old mother's house when he came across an old rifle. He didn't want it. His mother didn't want it. So he called a deputy to take it away.
The Sheriff's Office took 398 citizen-assist calls that week. It appears the rifle-removal request was one of the four most urgent, because it was one of only four such calls that generated incident reports.
"A lot of times," sheriff's spokesman Kevin Doll said, "they're so minor they don't rate a report."
It is true that on occasion a citizen-assist call can lead to something more serious, like a child-abuse investigation. But listen to Bradley Kokoris, 52, a longtime Pasco patrol deputy who recently left the agency after he was hurt on the job:
"I've seen where deputies got up to use the bathroom and called it a citizen assist."
Meanwhile, such calls as robberies, death investigations and sex offenses stayed flat. Maj. Maurice Radford said there's a reason for the steep drop in top-priority calls: Under White, a smarter dispatch system reassigns priority based on new information and makes it less likely a deputy will go screaming after a false alarm.
But Col. Al Nienhuis acknowledged that top-priority calls might have fallen slightly even without the new system.
No one disputes that the lesser calls drove the jump in call volume. Shoplifting nearly doubled. Unwanted guests proliferated. Deputies clamored to curb illegal parking.
This cascade of banality is hardly unusual. Experts say real-life law enforcement rarely involves firefights or explosions.
"The majority of police calls are not for crime," said William Walsh, director of the Southern Police Institute at the University of Louisville. "It's the barking dog. It's the neighbor that gives me a hard time. It's the car that's parked in my driveway that shouldn't be there."
Responding to every minor call can be counterproductive if it diverts deputies from more urgent matters. But it has at least two advantages. First, it often leads deputies to catch criminals who are wanted on unrelated warrants. Second, says James Conser, criminal justice faculty emeritus at Youngstown State University in Ohio and the author of Law Enforcement in the United States, it keeps voters happy.
"Why would they vote for the sheriff," he said in an e-mail, "if nothing ever happens to their complaint?"
All that aside, you might be convinced that more residents and more calls mean the sheriff needs more deputies. Know this: An independent consultant issued a report five years ago that concluded manpower was not a problem.
But there is more than one way for a sheriff to calculate need.
NUMBERS
If a sheriff can be blamed when crime rises and praised when it falls, White deserves congratulation. His numbers shine compared to those of his predecessor.
From 1993 to 2000, when Lee Cannon ruled, the county's serious crime rate rose slightly. This might not be noteworthy except that crime fell statewide by almost one-third in those years. In other words, while Florida became a much safer place to live, Pasco became more dangerous.
By contrast, Pasco's serious crime rate dipped nearly 14 percent from 2001, White's first year in office, to 2005, his fifth. The decrease matched a continuing statewide trend.
And the crime-solving rate has climbed steadily during White's two terms. Last year it was 26.6 percent, four points above the state average.
Last month, less than two years after he crushed his opponent to win re-election, White submitted a $61- million capital improvement plan to the County Commission. The report, prepared by the Tampa consulting firm WadeTrim and approved by White and Col. Nienhuis, said White's agency had an unusually low ratio of officers to population and proposed raising it by degrees to a more acceptable level.
But there's a problem. White's third-in-command sees no reason to base staffing needs on this formula.
"It is absolutely meaningless," Col. Richard Worch said on Thursday. "It's nothing more than PFA - plucked from air."
Worch and Radford say they have a better formula, one with widespread recognition. It is laid out in their new five-year strategic plan. It says the agency should staff itself so that deputies spend a third of their time answering calls for service, a third being proactive (traffic stops and building checks, for example) and a third doing administrative tasks such as writing reports.
This is the formula behind White's latest request.
He wants to add more new positions over the next year than in five previous budget cycles combined.
A FAMILIAR REFRAIN
If you have lived here for more than a few years, you have seen this before. In years past, the sheriff's annual budget battle could have challenged football and snake-handling for a place on Pasco's list of sporting traditions.
John Short, a sheriff known in the '80s as much for being indicted as he was for fighting crime, went to the governor to get the cash county commissioners denied him. So did his successor, Jim Gillum, who once grew so vexed during a budget hearing that he snapped a pencil and hurled it across the room.
Then came Lee Cannon, a Democrat who served two terms in the '90s. Former County Commissioner Ed Collins swore that Cannon once threatened to squash him like a bug.
Cannon said the county's stinginess left his agency perilously understaffed. In 1998, he proposed a law-enforcement tax that would raise nearly $80-million in a decade and increase his deputy total by 70 percent. He supported the proposal with piles of statistics that turned out to be false. Voters trounced the tax. Cannon lost the 2000 election.
Months after White took over, an outside consulting firm called DMG-Maximus released an exhaustive study on the agency's staffing. Cannon had ordered it after the Times revealed his mathematical errors.
The study found that the agency could solve many of its problems by shifting existing resources rather than adding more. More to the point at hand, the consultant studied population trends and foretold no need for major growth within the agency over the following decade.
White stayed conservative at first. He asked for five new positions in his first budget , nine in his second, two in his third. All along, his commanders say, he worked to make the agency as efficient as possible.
Then he decided efficiency was no longer enough to match population growth that was larger than expected. He needed to plan for the future.
"Law enforcement's not a Chia Pet," White said last week. "You don't add water tonight and it blooms by the next morning."
In 2004, he asked for 26 new positions.
In 2005, he asked for 49, along with a 14 percent budget hike, and the commission gave him every dime. Now he wants 98 more positions.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Your property taxes keep the Sheriff's Office running. No other department takes nearly as much from the county's general fund.
And this year, as gasoline and homeowners' insurance drain taxpayer bank accounts across the county, three of the five commissioners say they're looking for cuts.
Other elected officials have agreed to trim their budgets to help accommodate a property-tax rollback. But Commissioner Ted Schrader said White has made no such offer.
The county's budget must be approved by the end of the month. Want to say something about it? The first public hearing is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Monday at the county courthouse in Dade City.
Flying pencils are not on the agenda.
GOOD THINGS HAPPEN?
Make no mistake. That crime did not rise between 2000 and 2005 does not mean it disappeared. More people fell victim to homicide in the first seven months of this year than in all of last year, and there are indications that deputies are hustling to quell a mysterious spate of thefts and burglaries.
Before White was elected in 2000, he laid out several key goals. One was for deputies to spend more time solving crime. Another was for good things to happen when residents dial 911.
Both have been achieved, if the letters of praise in the deputies' personnel files are any indicator. But when Ted Jeczalik called for help a week ago Saturday, he says, the agency went 0-for-2.
Jeczalik, 40, says he was driving home to Wood Trail Village in New Port Richey that afternoon when a child chased a ball into the street near his minivan. He braked and honked.
We don't have the other side of the story, but he says two men - one apparently the child's father - invaded his minivan, yelling threats. One held him, he says, while the other yanked his keys from the ignition and threw them into the distance. He suffered scratches and a broken window.
"I was afraid for my life," he said.
Jeczalik ran away and called 911. He says one of White's deputies interviewed him, interviewed the men, reprimanded Jeczalik for calling 911, told him to avoid the neighborhood even though he lives there, and left without filing a report.
The agency decided to investigate after Jeczalik filed a complaint. "At this point," spokesman Doll said Thursday, "I do not know why a report was not generated."
Jeczalik's view of this case seems to underline a point White himself made on Thursday.
More money or not, there is always room for improvement.
Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report, which used information from Times files. Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.
