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By MARY JO MELONE
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 28, 2000
Vigorously.
That's the way St. Petersburg police Chief Go Davis said this week in federal court he wanted an investigation of one of his officers carried out.
This is Davis' definition of "vigorously": six pages, more or less.
That's how long the report on Donnie Williams was.
Six pages will give you an idea of just how hard St. Petersburg detectives looked at claims by an informer that he had seen Williams three times in early 1998 enter a 16th Street S bar, the Spotlight, and engage in what looked like dope deals.
Six pages is only an estimate, from St. Petersburg Times attorney Thomas H. McGowan. He was standing before the bench as the document was passed from the government's lawyers to the judge.
The Times wanted to see the file. So did the Police Benevolent Association.
Nothing doing, said U.S. District Court Judge Richard Lazzara on Wednesday. He ruled the report was part of an ongoing federal drug investigation.
We lost after we were shoved, and I mean shoved, into federal court.
The newspaper and the union sued for the records last fall, seeking to find out what the investigation into Williams had determined. Davis had said the investigation was closed before Williams was promoted, and closed investigative files usually are made available to the public. We sued in state court under Florida's Public Records Act.
Williams was suspected of dealing with a target of a federal drug investigation, but his own alleged role was as a street dealer, not the kind of person federal agents are interested in. Nevertheless, federal attorneys showed up at every court hearing, and finally they demanded that the case be moved to federal court.
You have a better chance of getting to the moon on foot than you do of winning a public records case in federal court. The outcome was guaranteed. But the glass is not empty now. At least half full, I'd say.
The federal hearing established just how little was done to investigate Williams.
According to the case detective, those still-secret six pages include forms filled out from two days in August and September 1998 when undercover officers were on the trail after Williams.
Six pages. Two days.
Cops do more on some car accidents.
Evidence at the hearing showed that Davis and his assistant chief couldn't square their stories. Davis said the case was active. His assistant chief, William Proffitt -- who was in charge of the detectives who investigated Williams -- said nobody is looking at him now.
The evidence also indicated that when Davis promoted Williams, he didn't trouble himself to read the investigation narrative -- the explanation of the steps taken that the case detective dictated into a tape recorder. The work was put into a computer, from which it could have been printed, two days after Williams got his promotion.
This happened in a police department where Davis fired a cop for lying because he disagreed with what the chief believed was the correct version of events when a suspect got roughed up.
This happened in a police department where detectives who suspected a cop of having sex with a prostitute tried to catch him in a sting. When that failed, they took him to internal affairs and he was fired.
Donnie Williams, a lucky guy if ever there was one, never even got an internal affairs investigation.
There is a question of balance here in this department.
Correct that. There is no balance.
Six pages. Two days.
The newspaper and the union are not the only losers. The people of St. Petersburg are, too. Every day that goes by is one more without an explanation for why their police chief went so far to protect Lt. Williams.