It was an interesting week in the saga of the St. Petersburg Police Department — one that saw neighborhood activists moving to embrace a sheriff's takeover, the mayor giving them a flat no and police officers overwhelmingly critical of their own department.
The discussion of the department's future comes at a time when St. Pete officials must consider the possibility of $22.6 million in budget cuts, depending on the level of property tax reform adopted in Tallahassee in June.
Some neighborhood leaders, faced with cuts to programs aimed at fighting crime and improving the cultural life of the city, have been quietly working for weeks to raise the notion of contracting out police work to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
They secretly talked with City Council members and gathered financial data to see how much money could be saved. (Tens of millions, they suspect.)
But asking Sheriff Jim Coats to step in? That part was apparently too hot to handle — until last Wednesday, when the Council Of Neighborhood Associations took the plunge anyway. Its members voted 13-3 to urge the City Council to send a Request for Proposed Services letter to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office for a cost estimate on outsourcing police duties. CONA's police review committee will also start researching the matter.
"The rumblings have always been that the Sheriff's Office could do the policing job for much less than the police department can do it," says former CONA president Karl Nurse, who presented the issue to the membership. "It looks like the alternative [budget cuts due to property tax reform] could … wipe out everything but police, fire, sewer and garbage services. In that kind of environment, I don't know how you could not at least ask the question."
Mayor Rick Baker, however, said he would not even entertain the idea: "It's a non-starter."
Getting rid of the police department — as troubled as it is with staffing levels and neighborhood complaints about the elimination of Community Police Officers — is the third rail of St. Pete politics. The Sheriff's Office is viewed with suspicion by many in the black community, a voting bloc to whom Baker owes no small part of his two election victories. Sheriff's deputies have shot and killed two black St. Pete men in the past few years in incidents that raised great ire in the community.
"Every police department has their pros and cons, but it's ours," Councilman James Bennett said in defense of keeping the department under the control of City Hall.
SPPD spokesman Bill Proffitt weighed in with the view that "everybody in St. Pete likes having their own police department."
That doesn't mean that everyone likes the department itself, as a study released a few days later showed. A draft report done by Matrix Consulting Group gives credence to what police officers, union officials and some residents have been saying for months: The majority of police officers feel they are inadequately staffed and are dissatisfied with their work environment.
That dissatisfaction shows up in employee turnover; the report detailed how SPPD's attrition rate from 2002-2005 was almost triple that of nine other Florida police agencies surveyed.
In surveys with 503 out of 746 employees, Matrix Consulting found:
• 85 percent of employees "disagreed" or "strongly disagreed" that staffing levels at the department are adequate to meet the demand for police services.
• 43 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that the department provides high levels of law enforcement to St. Pete communities.
The Matrix draft and CONA's request should give City Council members and residents lots to talk about Thursday night at 6, when council members host their first public forum about the city's 2007-2008 spending plan.
This article appears in May 23-29, 2007.