Sheriff's race: Shoar's experience vs. Maynard's call for change
Posted: August 11, 2016 - 11:19pm
By JARED KEEVER
jared.keever@staugustine.com
When Republican voters go to the polls for the Aug. 30 primary, they will likely be choosing the next Sheriff for St. Johns County, and the two candidates they have to choose from could hardly be more different.
While two write-in candidates have qualified for the upcoming general election — thus closing the primary to Republican voters — their voices have not been heard, and they haven’t raised any money. That leaves voters with a choice between three-term incumbent David Shoar and his challenger Debra Maynard, a former deputy who hasn’t worked in law enforcement since she was fired from the Sheriff’s Office in 2012 after serving less than five years.
Shoar boasts 35 years of experience in law enforcement, which he began as a patrolman in the St. Augustine Police Department where he eventually served as chief before he was elected sheriff in 2004. Maynard, on the other hand, has a more varied background and spent a number of her earlier years working in education.
Shoar, who has raised $245,000, is running primarily on his record. Maynard, with less than $10,000, is running a grassroots campaign — conducted largely through social media and community get-togethers — that involves thinly veiled attacks on Shoar. That includes allegations of corruption and charges that the agency does a poor job of going after deputies involved in domestic violence as well as oblique references to the Michelle O’Connell death investigation that has plagued the Sheriff’s Office for years.
In interviews with The Record since she announced her candidacy, Maynard has discussed a number of those topics as well as reasons why she thinks she was fired. She has said on the campaign trail and first told The Record she was fired because Shoar asked her to say she did not remember something and that she refused the request because doing so would have been tantamount to lying. The event, she said, had to do with a complaint she lodged about the questioning of a suspect who she felt had his rights violated.
But records from the Sheriff’s Office indicate the individual was someone whom Maynard considers family, and she was terminated after an internal affairs investigation found that she involved herself in a criminal investigation concerning the young man.
Maynard told The Record last month that she didn’t feel the internal affairs investigation was “complete” — that certain witnesses and her supervisor were not interviewed — and suggested she was targeted for termination.
“I think if you want to direct an outcome, you direct it,” she said. “You don’t interview everybody to get the outcome you want.”
Asked why she may have been targeted, Maynard speculated that it could have been because of answers she provided on workplace “climate surveys” while she was a deputy. But those surveys — three of which were provided to The Record after a public records request — show few signs of any problems.
The short surveys consist of a series of questions about harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In her first survey, dated February 2008, Maynard did answer that she had seen behavior inconsistent with policies and she was the victim of discrimination or harassment.
A handwritten note at the bottom reads, “Issues can be discussed in person — However, issues were confronted at the time of occurrences.” Her two subsequent surveys — one dated February 2009 and another dated March 2011 — indicate no problems.
While candidate forums and joint interviews between the candidates have been mostly cordial, there remains in Maynard’s campaign an undercurrent of seeming resentment that continues to churn up memories of the O’Connell case and the topics swirling around it.
O’Connell died of a gunshot wound through her mouth on Sept. 2, 2010, in the home of her boyfriend, Jeremy Banks, a deputy with the Sheriff’s Office. The gun used was Banks’ service weapon.
The Sheriff’s Office led the initial investigation — which Shoar has since admitted could have been handled better — and the death was eventually ruled a suicide. Some of O’Connell’s family members have said she wouldn’t have killed herself, and some have questioned the integrity of the investigation and believe Banks is responsible, though he has denied any wrongdoing. He still works for the Sheriff’s Office.
Maynard, who was among the first deputies on the scene the night O’Connell died, has said she doesn’t believe the death was a suicide and has served as a source for a 2013 New York Times story about the case and a subsequent PBS Frontline documentary, though the Sheriff’s Office has no records that indicate she ever expressed concern about the investigation prior to her being fired.
While Maynard has said that she wouldn’t use O’Connell’s death to bolster her campaign, it seems to be a claim she has had a hard time making good on.
In her most recent campaign video, shared on social media, Maynard, tongue in cheek, lists 10 reasons why people should not vote for her.
“If you think self investigations are OK, don’t vote for me,” she says, following it up with: “If you think guns recoil forward, don’t vote for me.”
The latter is a direct reference to a theory touted in the O’Connell case as to how the young woman may have received a small cut above her eye. And in listing her reasons for running in her candidate survey for The Record’s Primarily Speaking (due out Sunday), Maynard says the Sheriff’s Office is not a place for “cronies or corruption, domestic violence or cover-ups.”
Domestic violence, particularly officer involved domestic violence, has been a central topic to Maynard’s campaign, and it also figured centrally in The Times and Frontline pieces.
Maynard claims such cases are not properly handled and has in her possession paperwork from three cases that she says were not reported to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission as they should have been.
Of those, the Sheriff’s Office says two of them did not meet the criteria requiring them to be reported to FDLE. In both instances — one from 2007 and one from 2013 — the cases were handed over to the 7th Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office and prosecutors did not pursue charges.
The third — a 2009 case from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office involving two St. Johns deputies who were involved in a relationship — is currently under investigation by the standards and training commission. The Sheriff’s Office said both deputies — only one of whom still works for the department — were disciplined at the time of the incident even though no primary aggressor was identified and a criminal case was not pursued against either deputy in Duval County. That it wasn’t reported to FDLE initially was an oversight discovered during a review of records, officials said.
Shoar maintains that his department is tough on deputies who commit domestic violence. He has cited a handful of cases to support the claim, including a recent one in which a corrections deputy was fired after he was arrested on a single charge of domestic battery in June.
“We’re tuned up on holding our people accountable,” he said in a July interview.
Other issues the two candidates part ways most significantly over are the personal use of patrol cars and the use of body cameras for deputies.
Maynard told The Record’s editorial board (in an interview that can be viewed at staugustine.com) that she believes deputies who live outside of the county should leave vehicles at the county line when they are off duty. Shoar said the percentage of deputies who don’t live in the county — about 12 percent — is so small that it would not make much difference in terms of cost savings and there are a number of benefits to the use of assigned cars.
As for body cameras, Shoar said in an Aug. 8 public forum, hosted by the League of Women Voters, that he remains adamantly opposed to their use, saying he believes the push for such devices is part of a “false narrative that law enforcement is the problem and we need to be watched.”
“I reject that and I find it patently offensive,” he said.
In a position paper on the subject, Shoar cites a number of concerns he has with the use of cameras including that they can only “capture moments in time and rarely capture an entire incident” and that there are significant cost, data storage and public records issues that would need to be addressed.
Maynard had answers for a number of those concerns at the forum and argued that the benefits of cameras outweigh the drawbacks.
She cited a University of South Florida study that found use of force incidents dropped 53 percent and that citizen complaints dropped 65 percent in a study group of 46 officers with the Orlando Police Department who were outfitted with cameras.
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