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A Times Editorial
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 29, 2001
Forget "To protect and to serve." New Port Richey police can adopt a motto of their own: Solve it yourself.
John A. Casteel faces a jury this week in Pasco Circuit Court. He is accused of raping a New Port Richey woman in 1998. And again nearly a month later.
His arrest is hardly the result of gumshoe police work. Casteel, who served 14 years in prison for a previous rape conviction, is in court because the victim spotted him in a service station four months later and notified authorities.
Until then, New Port Richey police detectives treated the victim, a 41-year-old woman, as though she was the problem. Detective Jackie Pehote, lauded as the department's Officer of the Year in 2000, believed the woman had been battered by a lover after consensual sex.
Never mind that the woman had been beaten so badlyshe needed four surgeries to replace broken teeth.
When the woman was raped a second time, Pehote put the blame on the victim. "How could you be so stupid to move back into your house?" the woman said Pehote had asked her.
The insensitivity is alarming, indicative of a detective unable to recognize the trauma and emotional damage suffered by sexual assault victims. At the least, Pehote needs retraining. Reassignment shouldn't be ruled out.
But, the insulting behavior wasn't the exclusive example of poor police work.
Detectives failed to send fluids, collected from the woman during a rape exam, to a lab for DNA testing. They pushed the first case to their inactive list 16 days later, even though Detective William Barrus characterized the sexual assault as "a very big case for a small police department like us. So I worked hard on it."
Twenty-nine days after the first attack, patrol officers failed to inspect the interior of the woman's home, even though a middle-of-the-night alarm signaled her rear door was open. An intruder was hiding inside. After police left, he raped the woman.
Three days later, someone hand-delivered to the woman's house a milk crate filled with items stolen during the attack and a note asking the victim for a date: strong evidence that a serial rapist still was in the vicinity. Detectives, however, put the case "pretty much on the back burner," said Pehote, after asking neighbors if they had seen the crate delivered.
Detectives failed to tape-record some conversations with the victim, Pehote said, because "we didn't know the recorder wasn't working. The batteries apparently had died out."
Five months after the second attack, interviews with Casteel, who police saidacknowledged having sex with the woman, also weren't recorded because, Pehote said in a deposition, "That's when our recorders were all -- now we have no recorders."
The lame excuse is tiresome. Either New Port Richey had a run on batteries rivaling Christmas morning, its equipment is antiquated, or detectives don't want recorded versions of their interviews available as evidence.
A recorded interview between Pehote and a murder witness came back to haunt the detective in a previous case. In December, Pehote made misstatements under oath concerning the investigation of the death of a 3-year-old child. The detective said she never threatened the wife of the defendant with arrest. A video recording of the interview contradicted her.
Pehote isn't the only New Port Richey detective to find recordings problematic. In June, trial testimony showed Detective Howard Snyder lost the only copy of a videotaped interview with a suspected rapist.
As in the case against Casteel, the victim also did her own police work. Twelve days after a Sept. 10, 1998, attack in which a knife-wielding intruder raped a woman while her twoyounger daughters slept nearby, the woman called police. She had found the knife used in the attack -- wedged between the bed and the wall. Police efforts, including dusting for fingerprints, taking pictures and collecting sheets and pillow cases, had failed to turn up the weapon.
A year later, she gave police a towel the suspect had used to disguise his face. Nobody had ever asked her for it.
New Port Richey police Capt. Darryl Garman justifies the officers' shoddy performance by noting the earlier cases ended in convictions, "so we must be doing something right." It's a generous assessment. The man accused of first-degree murder in the death of the 3-year-old instead received a plea bargain to a lesser charge of manslaughter after Pehote's testimony was attacked by defense attorneys.
Garman said no major changes in department procedures are planned. It's unfortunate. Circling the wagons won't hide the pattern of miscues. Garman and Chief Aage Madsen, whose silence on these matters is incomprehensible, should raise the detectives' performance bar beyond "doing something right."
If Madsen isn't talking, then Mayor Wendy Brenner and the City Council should. They should direct City Manager Gerald Seeber to make sure the city's public safety efforts are a concern beyond once-a-year budget talks about the size of the department.
Quantity, after all, does not ensure quality.