09-27-2008, 04:02 AM
1 Officer Fired, 2 Sgts, 1 Lt, 1 Capt Suspended 2 Weeks, Deputy Chief, Chief Receive Reprimands
Updated 6:10 p.m.
Tallahassee Police Chief Dennis Jones admits the department was wrong to have initially said Rachel Hoffman got herself killed when the confidential informant was shot in a disastrous May 7 drug bust.
“We were placing most of the blame on Rachel Hoffman. I regret that now,” Jones said Friday. “It made us look like we weren’t taking responsibility for what happened.”
Speaking a day after the release of a harsh internal-affairs report, Jones said he’d suspected early on that there was more to the story than simply Hoffman’s refusal to obey instructions by following two suspected drug dealers to an unauthorized location. But that’s what officers initially told him, he said, and that’s what he told the public.
“I think we were too quick to relate what we knew at the time,” he said.
Within a few days, however, he began to look into the incident and read the officers’ first reports. He realized the department had made mistakes, too.
“That’s when I said, 'Whoa, wait a minute, guys. This isn’t the way we were supposed to be doing it,’” he said.
Hoffman’s family lawyer, Lance Block, said the chief’s comments are a step in the right direction.
“It’s been obvious for five months now that Rachel Hoffman was the victim of negligence by the Tallahassee Police Department, which directly led to her death,” Block said. “So, Chief Jones’ comments are clearly appropriate.”
Jones ordered an internal-affairs investigation three days after Hoffman’s body was found May 9. That investigation found 21 individual violations of nine separate policies.
“I didn’t think it would be so many policies not being followed,” Jones said. ”We have to share in the responsibility.”
Ultimately, however, Jones and other city officials say, it’s the job of the criminal and civil courts to determine exactly who shoulders the most responsibility.
“If there hadn’t been these procedural errors, can you say with any certainty that Rachel wouldn’t have been killed? I don’t think we can,” said Michelle Bono,
assistant to the city manager. “Even in the best of operations, you never know exactly what the outcome will be.”
But Hoffman’s parents and others have contended that she should never have been used as a confidential informant in the first place. Certainly, they say, police should never have let such an untrained novice go alone to meet suspected drug dealers who officers knew had a gun.
Hoffman was also in a court diversion program stemming from an earlier marijuana-possession conviction. Because of that, the State Attorney’s Office should have been notified before Hoffman was recruited as an informant, but that never happened.
“(City officials) say that they want to be held accountable,” said Block. “I think they should admit they are negligent and say they are sorry and ... compensate this family fairly.”
Jones said that Hoffman should have been dropped as an informant early on. From the beginning, she did numerous things that should have made it clear to her main contact, Investigator Ryan Pender, that she wasn’t cut out to be an informant.
“He should have cut her loose then,” Jones said.
As chief, he trusted his staff and didn’t think it necessary to micromanage how confidential informants were used.
“There were assumptions made that people were doing their jobs,” Jones said. “My disappointment is a loss of confidence in those folks.”
Updated 12:27 p.m.
The grand jury that examined the Rachel Hoffman case was instructed in negligence law and could've pursued criminal charges against Tallahassee Police Department officers, but no indictment was returned.
“That issue was before the grand jury and there was no indictment,” said State Attorney Willie Meggs.
Meggs said he had no comment about whether the punishment doled out to the TPD officers was appropriate.
Earlier update
A Tallahassee police investigator has been fired, the chief of police reprimanded and four officers suspended without pay for the botched drug sting that led to informant Rachel Hoffman's death.
The disciplinary actions were announced Thursday afternoon at City Hall before the release of a nearly 200-page Tallahassee Police Department internal-affairs report and a 34-page report from the Attorney General's Office. Police Chief Dennis Jones and City Manager Anita Favors Thompson detailed changes they've made as a result of the findings.
The only person fired was Investigator Ryan Pender, Hoffman's main contact with TPD and the officer who recruited her as an informant after police found drugs in her apartment.
"When we make mistakes, we not only believe we should be accountable for those mistakes, but we are also charged with putting into place whatever it takes to prevent such mistakes from happening in the future," Thompson said.
Lance Block, the attorney for Hoffman's parents, said how the chief disciplines his employees is a department issue.
"What we know is Rachel Hoffman's case was terribly mishandled and we want to see justice, and justice constitutes a public apology and just compensation for the family," Block said.
The attorney general's report found 32 potential violations of TPD's policies and procedures.
The chief of police has been reprimanded by the city manager and told to have stricter supervision from the top down. The deputy chief was also reprimanded.
Four of the 15 officers involved in the sting — Capt. Chris Connell, Lt. Taltha White, Sgt. David Odom and Sgt. Rod Looney — were suspended without pay for two weeks. Connell, White and Odom are being reassigned within the department.
Complacency blamed
Police spokesman David McCranie said the officers' punishments were decided by the chief based on "the totality of the circumstances, the number of violations and the severity."
Internal-affairs investigators cited Pender for nine substantiated violations of policies and procedures, the most of any officer involved.
Pender knew Hoffman had met with a potential suspect outside his control and against direction, according to the internal-affairs report. He was also aware that she'd set up a deal with a suspect without consulting him and that she'd disclosed her confidential-informant status to a suspect.
He'd also allowed Hoffman to go alone in her car to meet two men for the drug deal that resulted in her death, the report said. He let her decide where to put the wire, the recording device and $13,000 in recorded bills. He also allowed the suspects to determine the location of the drug deal.
McCranie said complacency was a major cause of the breakdown.
"All of the officers were trying to do the right thing," he said. "The policies and procedures are in place to protect all of us. You've got to adhere to them to make sure things like this don't happen."
By Thursday afternoon, the officers hadn't been notified in writing of the disciplinary actions against them, according to the Big Bend chapter of the Florida Police Benevolent Association. Once notified, they'll have 15 days to file a grievance. Police-union officials are reviewing the punishments and helping to determine appropriate actions.
Details from May 7
The two reports, both of which have portions blacked out because of a pending murder trial, reveal more of what happened May 7, when the 23-year-old Hoffman was to buy drugs and a gun from two men.
Police lost sight of her, and she was found shot to death in Taylor County 36 hours later. Deneilo Bradshaw, 23, and Andrea Green, 25, are now charged with her murder.
Officers admitted in interviews they didn't know the identity of one of the suspects Hoffman was to bust until she disappeared.
The original location for the planned drug buy was at the Summerbrooke home of one of the suspects' parents. The suspects later told Hoffman to meet them at Forestmeadows Park.
One potential location for the drug sting was the Wal-Mart on Thomasville Road. Both it and the Forestmeadows Park location were crowded with cars and people in the early evening. Using such a site would violate department policy, the report said.
According to the internal-affairs report, the officers should have considered several factors before allowing the deal to happen at Forestmeadows: Traffic was bad northbound on two-lane North Meridian Road after 5 p.m.; the road is lined with tall, shady trees that made aircraft surveillance "useless"; Hoffman was not familiar with the area; and Forestmeadows is a public park with citizens present.
Pender lost track of Hoffman when he turned in at the Meridian Sports Complex instead of following her to Forestmeadows, a half mile away, the report stated. He didn't arrange for someone else to tail her, but he let officers know over the radio she was on her way. Some of the officers later said they thought one of their colleagues was following her.
At 6:45 p.m., the officers at Forestmeadows told Pender they didn't see her. A minute later, Pender lost the signal to Hoffman's wire. At 6:48 p.m., Pender got Hoffman on her cell phone and found out she was headed to Gardner Road. He said he told her to stop following the men and turn around. Pender radioed the other officers to move in immediately. Four minutes later, officers were on Gardner. But Hoffman and the suspects were already gone.
Officer Greg Tucker told internal-affairs investigators none of the officers in his car knew where Gardner Road was until someone gave directions over the radio. He didn't turn on his car's police lights and sirens on his way there.
"I was torn between getting there as fast as I could and not alerting the bad guys until we got there," Tucker said. "At that point we didn't care about the takedown as far as the arrest. We didn't care about the dope. We were going to get our CI back."
'This tragedy'
In his interview with investigators, Pender said nothing Hoffman said or did would've led him to believe she was incapable of conducting a sting.
"Just the opposite," he told investigators. "She was very competent. And her street slang of drug terms used in doing deals — she was very, very good at discussing those over the phone."
At the Thursday news conference, City Manager Thompson expressed her "personal and heartfelt" sympathy to the Hoffman family and friends.
"This incident has not been taken lightly in Tallahassee," she said, "not in our community, not in our government and not by our TPD law-enforcement personnel who share the grief of this tragedy."
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Updated 6:10 p.m.
Tallahassee Police Chief Dennis Jones admits the department was wrong to have initially said Rachel Hoffman got herself killed when the confidential informant was shot in a disastrous May 7 drug bust.
“We were placing most of the blame on Rachel Hoffman. I regret that now,” Jones said Friday. “It made us look like we weren’t taking responsibility for what happened.”
Speaking a day after the release of a harsh internal-affairs report, Jones said he’d suspected early on that there was more to the story than simply Hoffman’s refusal to obey instructions by following two suspected drug dealers to an unauthorized location. But that’s what officers initially told him, he said, and that’s what he told the public.
“I think we were too quick to relate what we knew at the time,” he said.
Within a few days, however, he began to look into the incident and read the officers’ first reports. He realized the department had made mistakes, too.
“That’s when I said, 'Whoa, wait a minute, guys. This isn’t the way we were supposed to be doing it,’” he said.
Hoffman’s family lawyer, Lance Block, said the chief’s comments are a step in the right direction.
“It’s been obvious for five months now that Rachel Hoffman was the victim of negligence by the Tallahassee Police Department, which directly led to her death,” Block said. “So, Chief Jones’ comments are clearly appropriate.”
Jones ordered an internal-affairs investigation three days after Hoffman’s body was found May 9. That investigation found 21 individual violations of nine separate policies.
“I didn’t think it would be so many policies not being followed,” Jones said. ”We have to share in the responsibility.”
Ultimately, however, Jones and other city officials say, it’s the job of the criminal and civil courts to determine exactly who shoulders the most responsibility.
“If there hadn’t been these procedural errors, can you say with any certainty that Rachel wouldn’t have been killed? I don’t think we can,” said Michelle Bono,
assistant to the city manager. “Even in the best of operations, you never know exactly what the outcome will be.”
But Hoffman’s parents and others have contended that she should never have been used as a confidential informant in the first place. Certainly, they say, police should never have let such an untrained novice go alone to meet suspected drug dealers who officers knew had a gun.
Hoffman was also in a court diversion program stemming from an earlier marijuana-possession conviction. Because of that, the State Attorney’s Office should have been notified before Hoffman was recruited as an informant, but that never happened.
“(City officials) say that they want to be held accountable,” said Block. “I think they should admit they are negligent and say they are sorry and ... compensate this family fairly.”
Jones said that Hoffman should have been dropped as an informant early on. From the beginning, she did numerous things that should have made it clear to her main contact, Investigator Ryan Pender, that she wasn’t cut out to be an informant.
“He should have cut her loose then,” Jones said.
As chief, he trusted his staff and didn’t think it necessary to micromanage how confidential informants were used.
“There were assumptions made that people were doing their jobs,” Jones said. “My disappointment is a loss of confidence in those folks.”
Updated 12:27 p.m.
The grand jury that examined the Rachel Hoffman case was instructed in negligence law and could've pursued criminal charges against Tallahassee Police Department officers, but no indictment was returned.
“That issue was before the grand jury and there was no indictment,” said State Attorney Willie Meggs.
Meggs said he had no comment about whether the punishment doled out to the TPD officers was appropriate.
Earlier update
A Tallahassee police investigator has been fired, the chief of police reprimanded and four officers suspended without pay for the botched drug sting that led to informant Rachel Hoffman's death.
The disciplinary actions were announced Thursday afternoon at City Hall before the release of a nearly 200-page Tallahassee Police Department internal-affairs report and a 34-page report from the Attorney General's Office. Police Chief Dennis Jones and City Manager Anita Favors Thompson detailed changes they've made as a result of the findings.
The only person fired was Investigator Ryan Pender, Hoffman's main contact with TPD and the officer who recruited her as an informant after police found drugs in her apartment.
"When we make mistakes, we not only believe we should be accountable for those mistakes, but we are also charged with putting into place whatever it takes to prevent such mistakes from happening in the future," Thompson said.
Lance Block, the attorney for Hoffman's parents, said how the chief disciplines his employees is a department issue.
"What we know is Rachel Hoffman's case was terribly mishandled and we want to see justice, and justice constitutes a public apology and just compensation for the family," Block said.
The attorney general's report found 32 potential violations of TPD's policies and procedures.
The chief of police has been reprimanded by the city manager and told to have stricter supervision from the top down. The deputy chief was also reprimanded.
Four of the 15 officers involved in the sting — Capt. Chris Connell, Lt. Taltha White, Sgt. David Odom and Sgt. Rod Looney — were suspended without pay for two weeks. Connell, White and Odom are being reassigned within the department.
Complacency blamed
Police spokesman David McCranie said the officers' punishments were decided by the chief based on "the totality of the circumstances, the number of violations and the severity."
Internal-affairs investigators cited Pender for nine substantiated violations of policies and procedures, the most of any officer involved.
Pender knew Hoffman had met with a potential suspect outside his control and against direction, according to the internal-affairs report. He was also aware that she'd set up a deal with a suspect without consulting him and that she'd disclosed her confidential-informant status to a suspect.
He'd also allowed Hoffman to go alone in her car to meet two men for the drug deal that resulted in her death, the report said. He let her decide where to put the wire, the recording device and $13,000 in recorded bills. He also allowed the suspects to determine the location of the drug deal.
McCranie said complacency was a major cause of the breakdown.
"All of the officers were trying to do the right thing," he said. "The policies and procedures are in place to protect all of us. You've got to adhere to them to make sure things like this don't happen."
By Thursday afternoon, the officers hadn't been notified in writing of the disciplinary actions against them, according to the Big Bend chapter of the Florida Police Benevolent Association. Once notified, they'll have 15 days to file a grievance. Police-union officials are reviewing the punishments and helping to determine appropriate actions.
Details from May 7
The two reports, both of which have portions blacked out because of a pending murder trial, reveal more of what happened May 7, when the 23-year-old Hoffman was to buy drugs and a gun from two men.
Police lost sight of her, and she was found shot to death in Taylor County 36 hours later. Deneilo Bradshaw, 23, and Andrea Green, 25, are now charged with her murder.
Officers admitted in interviews they didn't know the identity of one of the suspects Hoffman was to bust until she disappeared.
The original location for the planned drug buy was at the Summerbrooke home of one of the suspects' parents. The suspects later told Hoffman to meet them at Forestmeadows Park.
One potential location for the drug sting was the Wal-Mart on Thomasville Road. Both it and the Forestmeadows Park location were crowded with cars and people in the early evening. Using such a site would violate department policy, the report said.
According to the internal-affairs report, the officers should have considered several factors before allowing the deal to happen at Forestmeadows: Traffic was bad northbound on two-lane North Meridian Road after 5 p.m.; the road is lined with tall, shady trees that made aircraft surveillance "useless"; Hoffman was not familiar with the area; and Forestmeadows is a public park with citizens present.
Pender lost track of Hoffman when he turned in at the Meridian Sports Complex instead of following her to Forestmeadows, a half mile away, the report stated. He didn't arrange for someone else to tail her, but he let officers know over the radio she was on her way. Some of the officers later said they thought one of their colleagues was following her.
At 6:45 p.m., the officers at Forestmeadows told Pender they didn't see her. A minute later, Pender lost the signal to Hoffman's wire. At 6:48 p.m., Pender got Hoffman on her cell phone and found out she was headed to Gardner Road. He said he told her to stop following the men and turn around. Pender radioed the other officers to move in immediately. Four minutes later, officers were on Gardner. But Hoffman and the suspects were already gone.
Officer Greg Tucker told internal-affairs investigators none of the officers in his car knew where Gardner Road was until someone gave directions over the radio. He didn't turn on his car's police lights and sirens on his way there.
"I was torn between getting there as fast as I could and not alerting the bad guys until we got there," Tucker said. "At that point we didn't care about the takedown as far as the arrest. We didn't care about the dope. We were going to get our CI back."
'This tragedy'
In his interview with investigators, Pender said nothing Hoffman said or did would've led him to believe she was incapable of conducting a sting.
"Just the opposite," he told investigators. "She was very competent. And her street slang of drug terms used in doing deals — she was very, very good at discussing those over the phone."
At the Thursday news conference, City Manager Thompson expressed her "personal and heartfelt" sympathy to the Hoffman family and friends.
"This incident has not been taken lightly in Tallahassee," she said, "not in our community, not in our government and not by our TPD law-enforcement personnel who share the grief of this tragedy."
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http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080926/NEWS01/809260339&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL