At a Monday afternoon press conference in which he shared the the latest on the Sunday morning's horrific crash that killed three teenaged boys, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri was pretty clear about who and what he thought was to blame.
“The juvenile justice system isn't working," he said. "There's not enough consequences.”
The six kids involved in the string of burglaries, car thefts and the high-speed joyride that led to demise for three of them had 126 arrests among them, he said; 19 of those arrests were for grand theft.
“They just totally, totally could have cared less,” he said. “They don't care because it doesn't matter to them. It's a revolving door.”
Two who survived are currently in police custody awaiting trial while the youngest survivor — one of two 14-year-olds — remains hospitalized.
Gualtieri said he is considering bring felony murder charges against the surviving teens. Authorities are able to do this because, while the deaths were probably not intentional, they happened due to the commission of a felony (i.e. grand theft auto).
Being tougher on kids early on would cause them to change their behavior before it did them in, he seemed to suggest.
Gualtieri, a prominent Republican with a tough-on-crime approach to running the department, said that agencies like the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice are underfunded and understaffed, which means that they don't have the ability to effectively deter as many young people as they should. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office (PCSO) has case workers to help at-risk youth, but there's only so much they can do.
“They're not our kids,” Gualtieri said. “Unless we're going to move into their house and hold their hand 24-seven, there's nothing more we can do.”
In the wake of Sunday's events, Gualtieri has gotten extensive criticism from some civil rights advocates who say he and others are playing up the boys' extensive criminal histories in a manner demonizes them and encourages callousness and scorn toward young black males whose lives were cut short as well as their families.
As is the case with many incidents involving people of color, the Tampa Bay Times comments section under stories posted on the newspaper's website relating to the case include overtly racist comments that in some cases celebrate the deaths.
On the other end of the spectrum, St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Jesse Nevel, whose campaign is affiliated with the Uhuru movement and whose message stresses the importance of reparations to right generations of institutional injustice toward African Americans, called the boys' deaths "state sanctioned lynching.” He and his City Council candidate counterpart, Eritha "Akile" Cainion said they doubted authorities' account of what happened, namely that there had been no high-speed chase (the offenses the boys were suspected of committing legally do not warrant a high-speed car chase), though police dash cam footage Guatieri showed at Monday's press conference suggested that, at the time of the accident, police were not in hot pursuit of the suspects.
Nevel and Cainion compared the incident to a police chase that preceded the drowning of three black teen girls after their car plunged into a pond in April of 2016.
Auto thefts have been a hot topic of late, particularly in light of a Tampa Bay Times investigation into a recent rash of such incidents throughout the county. Prior to Sunday's deaths. At recent candidate forums Nevel's response to questions about what Gualtieri called an auto theft "epidemic" has been that the media and mainstream politicians are the ones doing the victim-blaming. Instead, he has said in the past, the focus needs to be on abolishing institutionalized racism and social, economic and political barriers that come with it.
This article appears in Aug 3-10, 2017.