Is St. Pete: Soft on Crime?

[Gladiator]

Oh Oh...the neighborhood associations, and just about every other group, are getting pretty pi$$ed off at the City.

From The Weekly Planet

Soft on crime?
Audacious criminals have St. Pete neighborhoods questioning the city's commitment — again
BY WAYNE GARCIA and ALEX PICKETT
Published 08.16.06
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Alex Pickett
FIRED UP: Palmetto Park Crime Watch member Matthew Culp points to the spot where drug dealers tried to firebomb his home.It was an impressive, and impassioned, group of eight homeowner association and crime watch leaders who met with St. Petersburg's deputy mayor and neighborhood partnership director on June 16.

Attending were Karl Nurse, the president of the civic umbrella group Council of Neighborhood Associations, St. Pete Court Watch's Carol Griffin, and Alma Frazier, the president of the Federation of Inner-City Community Organizations. It also included two leaders from Palmetto Park, where drug dealers ordered the firebombing of crime watch members.

It wasn't the kind of meeting that gets newspaper coverage. But it probably should have.

The eight civic leaders told Deputy Mayor Mike Dove and neighborhood director Susan Ajoc that they are fed up with crime and underwhelmed by the city's response to it.

One group that participated, the newly formed United Neighborhood Alliance, told the two city officials that it wanted real public safety and not "window dressing." Everything from the city's police department staffing levels to what they believed was a visible increase in drug dealing and prostitution was criticized.

St. Petersburg's neighborhood leaders have bemoaned crime for many years. But the meeting in June represents a whole new level in their ongoing discontent with the city's response to crime, especially its ingrained drug problems.

"We have been trying for approximately a year" to get the police more involved in Palmetto Park, said civic association president Lurlis Simmons, who attended the June meeting. "I always get the same answer: We're working on that."

If you believe stereotypes (or at least campaign rhetoric) about Republicans being tough on criminals, it is ironic that the most visible Republican mayor in the region, Rick Baker, is also the one who gets the most heat for being -- in essence -- soft on crime. And while the crime rate in most categories is actually down (except for a soaring murder rate), a series of high-profile crimes has angered neighborhood groups.

Earlier this month, police arrested a drug dealer who was using children as crack couriers, burning one 10-year-old boy with cigarettes when he didn't produce enough revenue. The city is going through a weird series of stabbing murders, with four such crimes in June and July. Also in July, an 8-year-old girl was raped in broad daylight in a park in the Central Oak Park neighborhood.

The most audacious crime occurred on May 21 when drug dealers tried to firebomb two Palmetto Park crime watch members. Three men are accused of being involved in the plot, in which two drug dealers paid five pieces of crack cocaine to a third man to throw Molotov ****tails at the two houses. The bombs didn't explode and only minimal damage was done. The drug dealers, according to arrest affidavits, thought the crime watch members had become too "nosey."

Culp and others reacted by forming the United Neighborhood Alliance. The reaction from the mayor and Police Chief Chuck Harmon has been quite a bit more muted. Neither has been quoted publicly about the crimes.

One of the firebombed crime watch members, Matthew Culp, says of the city's reaction, "We feel like we're expendable. We feel like we don't have any support in this environment."

The response to recent cries from the Times' editorial board, which has consistently supported Baker, has also been low-key. After a Times news story echoed neighborhood and rank-and-file officers' contentions that the police department is understaffed, the editorial page countered by giving Baker and Harmon a guest column on the op-ed page in which they defended staffing levels and argued that no more officers are needed on the street. The last time the newspaper editorialized about police staffing was in 2003, when it dismissed neighborhood concerns and supported Chief Harmon's efforts to recruit more officers. Since then, according to police records, St. Petersburg has hired 148 new police officers, but has lost 150. [Read more about St. Pete police staffing in next week's Planet.]

One theory regarding St. Petersburg's inability to crack down on crime enough to please neighborhood leaders goes back to the mayor's political past -- and future.

"[Baker has] got political aspirations further beyond where he is right now, and he's got to have a city at peace," said former city council member Virginia Littrell, who frequently clashed with the mayor and was voted out of office earlier this year after the Times endorsed her opponent. "We all appreciate his efforts in Midtown, but the crime elements exist, and it's not getting better. The residents are screaming 'help us,' and it's not happening."

Baker was the first mayor in recent years to bridge the gap between mostly white, mostly western St. Petersburg neighborhoods that wanted a full-bore crackdown on crime and African-American leaders in Midtown that demanded more even-handed criminal justice efforts. He carried precincts both north and south of Central Avenue, something his predecessor David Fischer never quite managed.

The perception that politics guides the St. Petersburg Police Department has some neighborhood leaders turning to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office for help. Sheriff Jim Coats confirmed that he has received several telephone calls from St. Petersburg neighborhood leaders.

"I have personally talked with Chuck Harmon about some of them," Coats said. "I have offered the St. Petersburg Police Department some of our resources to assist. I don't know what else to say."

His offer was turned down.

City officials disagree with the notion that they aren't doing everything they can to battle crime. They point to the police department's latest statistics, which show crack seizures, drug arrests and prostitution sweeps all up significantly. Overall, reported crime is off 5 percent from the previous year, with the notable exception of murder, which is up 60 percent.

The city's top neighborhood official, Ajoc, declined to talk specifically about the meeting with the neighborhood leaders in June but said she understands that crime tops their concerns.

"If you look at the CONA agenda for the last couple of years, public safety has been at the top," Ajoc said. But Ajoc dismissed talk about race and politics in fighting crime.

"It's not to say that I'm discounting anything that they are saying," she said. "People are going to say what they are going to say. I'm not going to say if it is right or wrong." But she added the city's approach is not to deal with rumors or speculation but to "define what the issue is, and let's deal with what the issue is. We try to get at the heart of the issue, and we try to attack it."

Just move over, chief, and let the PCSO star attack the problem. Pacifying the people causing the problems doesn't work. The Sheriff's Office can get the job done and for less co$t to taxpayers. The patrol ofcs will be happier, too, being able to do their job ... police work!