Florida Sheriff's Association and other Tallahassee lobby groups oppose necessary reforms. Dull Republicans won't talk about their hypocrisy, defined as "the tribute that vice pays to virtue."
Thanks to GANNETT's Naples Daily News:
Florida gave thousands of tarnished officers a second chance. Hundreds blew it again. (Devan Patel, Naples Daily News, December 29, 2020)
Joseph Floyd turned Florida’s Crestview Police Department into a criminal enterprise, the judge said at his 2013 sentencing, but his willingness to break the rules didn’t start there.
Story after story from witnesses, including fellow officers, illustrated the “irreparable” harm the judge said the police major caused: accusations of excessive use of force, false arrests, sexual assault, bribery, planting drugs, falsifying police reports and intimidating other officers to force them to go along with his crimes.
A woman lost her unborn child after Floyd intentionally rammed her car with his police vehicle, flipping it multiple times, leading to a $75,000 legal settlement with the city in Florida's Panhandle, according to court records.
“The volume of the evidence presented to the jury was remarkable, astounding really,” said Judge Michael Flowers in rejecting the minimum sentencing for racketeering and ordering Floyd to prison for 12 years.
“He ruined lives,” special prosecutor Russ Edgar said. “He perverted justice, and he did everything a police officer should never do. He used his badge to break the law. He had no respect for it, no observance for it in these incidents.”
But Floyd crossed legal and ethical lines long before Crestview hired him.
“A background investigation would have revealed that Floyd has demonstrated that he did not have the necessary character traits to be a good officer,” the grand jury foreman wrote when Floyd was indicted in 2012.
Before he became a cop, Floyd was arrested for battery, disorderly conduct and resisting a law enforcement officer, the grand jury found. As an officer, Floyd was terminated for misconduct or forced to resign from three other agencies — the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, Sneads Police Department and Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office — for offenses similar to those he was accused of in Crestview.
Thousands of tarnished officers around the state have been forced out from another Florida agency for misconduct in the last 30 years. At least 505 of those law enforcement and corrections officers who were given a second chance, including Floyd, later committed an offense that led to decertification, an investigation by the Naples Daily News and The News-Press found.
The vast majority of those officers committed some form of crime, ranging from drug offenses to sexual assault to murder, leaving a trail of victims and at least two dozen lawsuits.
These officers were able to find work because the main burden for weeding out bad hires in Florida is put on local agencies, and the minimum requirements for officers, established by a state law that some criminal justice experts criticize as weak, did not explicitly disqualify them from employment.
The same minimum requirements have left hundreds of questionable hires currently on agency payrolls, including dozens of officers with such poor character that they could be barred from testifying in court.
The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and others at the hands of law enforcement have spurred calls for police reform. But Florida lawmakers have largely failed to address how troubled officers get hired, as evidenced by the lack of proposed legislation spanning nearly a decade. A bill is in the works that calls for the creation of a misconduct registry, but that information is already public record in Florida. Another would reduce qualified immunity for police, which limits their personal liability.
“What I found is it is a terrible system for hiring officers,” said former Oak Hill (Florida) Police Chief Walt Zalisko, a policing practice expert who also had decades of law enforcement experience in New Jersey. ”You can have an officer who’s been under investigation and resigns and it will say something like it was a voluntary separation. Cities will do that to avoid possible litigation down the road. We’ve seen officers who have changed departments eight times.”
State Sen. Bobby Powell, D-West Palm Beach, who will sit on the criminal justice committee during Florida's upcoming legislative session, said the issue needs to be explored. “We need to look at the backgrounds of people being hired.”
Hundreds of officers given a second chance were later decertified
Florida’s minimum requirements to become a police officer, which are established by law, don’t prevent officers forced out from other agencies from being hired at another agency.
Since 1988, thousands of Florida law enforcement officers who were fired for misconduct or resigned in lieu of termination were given multiple chances to continue their careers, according to a study published in April in the Yale Law Journal by Duke University professor Ben Grunwald and University of Chicago professor John Rappaport.
They made up about 2% of employed officers during that time, which the researchers said translated to nearly 800 of these officers working in any given year. The study also found that these officers were nearly twice as likely as other hires to be fired again and 75% more likely to be accused of a serious offense.
In addition to being forced out for misconduct at a higher rate than others, tarnished cops were also more likely to commit an act that resulted in decertification, according to an analysis by the Naples Daily News and The News-Press that tracked the work histories of decertified officers using employment records.
The 505 law enforcement and corrections officers that went on to commit another serious offense after being forced out for misconduct from another agency make up about 6% of the more than 8,000 decertifications since 1990, according to the analysis.
The analysis is likely an undercount based on Zalisko’s explanation of how departments have sometimes categorized officer separations.
At least 433 of the complaints against tarnished officers that led to decertification were criminal in nature, though not all of the offenses were prosecuted.
Drug offenses were the most common reason for decertification of the officers identified in the analysis, with 20% of the officers committing offenses including drug possession, sales or driving under the influence.
Other types of offenses included:
- theft or robbery: 12%
- assault or battery: 13%
- sex crimes: 8%
- making false statements or falsifying records: 11%
- homicide or manslaughter: 2%
The Naples Daily News and The News-Press found cities and sheriff’s offices have been sued at least 24 times since 1990 as a result of the actions of these officers, according to local and federal court records. This figure does not include notices of claim submitted to the cities or agencies, which could have been resolved before litigation was filed.
Warning signs
In some of the most serious cases, there were connections between past misdeeds and the offenses that led to decertification.
Jimmy Dac Ho was fired from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office after he was accused of domestic abuse. He was then hired by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, which fired him after he shot and killed 29-year-old Sheri Carter in 2011. He’s serving two life sentences for murder.
Before the murder, Ho also was accused of being overzealous as a police officer at Florida Atlantic University, leading to complaints about excessive use of force. The university had to settle a lawsuit by a student whom Ho injured during a false arrest and required surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff, according to court records.
The university also settled a lawsuit filed by Carter’s mother.
Also among the officers identified in the newspapers' analysis is former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano, who was hired at the agency in 2008 despite being forced out at the Sunny Isles Police Department in 2006.
Before Atesiano became police chief, he accepted an offer to resign from Sunny Isles in exchange for the state attorney’s office declining to file criminal charges after he admitted to forging the signature of a suspect on a promise-to-appear affidavit, according to an internal affairs investigation completed by the agency.
The Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission, the body that certifies and decertifies officers, also declined to issue any further punishment, instead sending a letter of guidance to Atesiano.
“The Panel decided to take no disciplinary action against your certification, and that the profession would be best served by allowing you to learn from your mistakes,” then-Commissioner Gerald Bailey wrote.
After he became a police chief, Atesiano pleaded guilty in 2018 to directing officers to frame people through false arrests and to claim false confessions in order to clear unsolved burglaries.
“Putting an arrest statistic above the rights of an innocent man instead of working to protect all our citizens undermines the safety goals of every Miami-Dade police department,” State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said. “Miami-Dade’s residents deserve honesty and integrity, qualities that Raimundo Atesiano deliberately failed to deliver.”
Atesiano is serving a three-year prison sentence.
The officers whom Atesiano instructed to make false arrests settled with two of Atesiano’s victims.
Clarens Desrouleaux, whose settlement was subject to a confidentiality clause, spent five years in prison before he was deported to Haiti which separated him from his wife and children, court records show.
The court system also vacated Desrouleaux’s conviction.
Officers are held to a lesser standard when hired
The checkered pasts in many officers’ backgrounds show that the higher standards and expectations of law enforcement do not necessarily apply in the hiring process.
State rules require agencies to verify that officers they hire are of “good moral character” through the vetting of government databases, past employment checks and history of drug use.
Beside the training, physical and academic standards to become certified, the only disqualifiers include a dishonorable discharge from the armed services, any felony conviction or any misdemeanor conviction involving perjury or a false statement.
However, good moral character is subject to interpretation by local agencies, Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesperson Gretl Plessinger said, and is not necessarily inclusive of the moral character violations that could lead to loss of certification once someone becomes an officer.
Moral character violations, which are established by state law, include any felony offense or specific misdemeanors such as assault, battery, DUI, theft, possession of drugs, falsifying records, making false statements, exposure of sexual organs and prostitution regardless of prosecution.
They also can include non-criminal offenses such as sex on duty, excessive use of force, subverting testing or training and false statements during the employment application process.
Roger Goldman, a professor at St. Louis University and a national expert on police licensing laws, said the state’s interpretation has essentially created two different character standards for hiring and decertifying officers because there is no uniformity.
For example, Matthew Vandetti was one of 51 deputies hired by the Hendry County Sheriff’s Office since 2009 who had a history of personal or professional misconduct, according to a USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida investigationpublished in October.
Before he was hired by the Clewiston Police Department and the Hendry County Sheriff’s Office, at least nine other agencies rejected or disqualified Vandetti, many of which stated it was because of his past conduct, selection records show.
According to pre-employment disclosures and polygraph reports, Vandetti admitted to at least 10 vehicle burglaries in North Naples, using drugs, soliciting a prostitute, having sex with a minor and inadvertently exposing his genitals at a drug store in Lee County. He was also accused of falsifying applications and using countermeasures during polygraph exams.
While Vandetti said most of those offenses occurred when he was a juvenile, according to a 2003 polygraph report, a Collier County Sheriff’s Office polygraph examiner noted “significant responses” to questions about involvement in illegal activities, use of marijuana more than 20 times and the sale of illicit drugs for profit after he became an adult, the report stated.
Vandetti said he did not remember making those admissions or the events ever happening when he applied again to the agency nearly a decade later, employment records show.
Vandetti could have been decertified if he had committed those offenses as an officer.
His past conduct did not prevent Clewiston from hiring him in 2015 and Hendry in 2018 even though the agencies were aware that he had disclosed those offenses to the Collier County Sheriff's Office, employment records show.
Vandetti did not respond to a request for comment.
After he declined to be interviewed, Hendry County Sheriff Steve Whidden wrote in a Facebook post in response to the investigation into his hiring practices that his agency performs “rigorous ‘boots on the ground’ background checks, Polygraph exams, Psychiatric exams and drug screens.”
While the state's Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission recommends agencies disqualify officers with a history of substantial “unlawful conduct,” it relies on the agency’s findings. There are no administrative repercussions for certifying an officer is of good moral character when evidence suggests otherwise, Plessinger said, adding that prospective officers “just have to meet the minimum requirements.”
The hands-off approach and reliance on local agencies are some of the reasons many tarnished officers continue to find employment in Florida, Zalisko said.
“This is one of the worst states because there is little oversight,” Zalisko said. “Many agencies don’t do a comprehensive background check. The system here is really flawed.”
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, past president of the Florida Sheriffs Association and its legislative chair, disagreed with Zalisko.
“I take offense to that,” he said. “I’ll put our hiring process here (in Pinellas County) up against anyone else. We have to go conduct a comprehensive background check, psychological exam and polygraph. Is it perfect? No, but what always comes after that is ‘What is (perfect)?’”
Barred from testifying in one area, dozens of cops find new homes
Ambiguity in the meaning of good moral character has not prevented agencies from hiring officers whose credibility has been questioned by prosecutors, including up to the point of being barred from testifying as a witness in criminal cases in some judicial circuits.
Prosecutors are required to turn over all exculpatory evidence, including that which may impeach a witness, as a result of the 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland.
One of the ways prosecutors do this is by maintaining a formal list of officers with credibility concerns.
While placement on the list can mean disclosure of the credibility issues in some circuits, some state attorneys have documented their stances that these officers will not be called as a witness for the prosecution.
In nine of 20 state attorney’s offices that maintain a formal Brady/Giglio list, the Naples Daily News and The News-Press found that at least 32 officers in the last decade were hired by another agency, including at least 11 officers who moved to other judicial circuits, after being placed on a list.
The analysis is likely an undercount because 11 state attorney’s offices do not maintain a formal list to document officers' credibility concerns.
The newspapers identified the officers by gathering Brady lists from around the state and building a database that tracked their employment histories.
Among those 32 officers is Jeff Van Camp, a former Escambia County deputy also known by his professional wrestling stage name “Lord Humongous.” Van Camp retired from the agency in 2012 shortly after the State Attorney's Office for the First Judicial Circuit placed him on its Brady list because he was under investigation for untruthfulness.
An internal affairs investigation by the Escambia County Sheriff's Office found that Van Camp was involved with disseminating a police report about an attorney in the public defender's office and then lied about doing so.
Before the allegations of perjury, Van Camp had also received a letter of acknowledgment from the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission after a sexual harassment complaint was made against him, which resulted in a written reprimand and mandated sexual harassment training.
Van Camp found work at the Okaloosa County Airport Police Department in 2014 before moving in 2015 to the Ocean Ridge Police Department in Palm Beach County, which is part of the 15th Judicial Circuit. He worked there until 2019. His separation was listed as an administrative termination not involving misconduct, according to employment records.
The Naples Daily News and News-Press were unable to reach Van Camp for comment.
In some cases where an officer on one Brady list moves to another judicial circuit, the state attorney’s office is unaware of the past credibility concerns.
The State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit put Michael Rowan on its Brady list when he was police chief at the Avon Park Police Department, where he was accused of being “untruthful and insubordinate” after being questioned about making “inappropriate recordings,” according to a letter from the state attorney's office obtained through a public records request.
Yet he was then hired by both the Clewiston Police Department and Hendry County Sheriff’s Office in the 20th Judicial Circuit.
The State Attorney’s Office for the 20th Judicial Circuit was unaware Rowan had been on a list elsewhere until the Naples Daily News questioned the office in 2019 about his testimony in a Clewiston Police Department drug case.
The analysis does not include offices like the State Attorney’s Office for the Second Judicial Circuit, which does not maintain a list but issued a memo in 2012 documenting credibility concerns about Clifford Carroll while he was employed at the Wakulla County Sheriff’s Office.
Prosecutor Lorena Vollrath-Bueno outlined her concerns that spanned a few years, including her belief that Carroll had been dishonest with her and the court.
In addition to her suspicions, Vollrath-Bueno also noted that Carroll had made assurances to defendants and “it appeared Capt. Carroll was becoming involved in possible witness tampering, or attempting to influence the investigation and/or outcome” of a case in 2010 when she was working in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Carroll retired from the Wakulla County Sheriff’s Office in 2015 and was hired just over a year later by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, where he is currently a major and in charge of its patrol division, despite the state attorney’s office's concerns about his credibility.
Carroll did not respond to a request for comment.
How Florida compares
Criminal justice experts and law enforcement officers differ on how they think Florida rates compared to other states that certify law enforcement and corrections officers.
While Zalisko believed Florida to be among the worst states when it came to the basic requirements, Michael Scott, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University and the founding police chief of the Lauderhill (Florida) Police Department, disagreed.
“My general impression is that it’s near the top in terms of open records laws and state regulations on both requirements to be an officer,” Scott said. “It has both a decent certification and decertification process.”
Goldman of St. Louis University said other states do have individual requirements that are more strict than Florida, pointing to a state law in Connecticut that prevents agencies from hiring an officer who resigned under investigation or was “dismissed for malfeasance or other serious misconduct calling into question such person's fitness to serve as a police officer.”
Connecticut’s law was “probably going too far,” said Scott, who has worked in about half a dozen states, including Missouri, Wisconsin and New York.
Just as employment records can be misleading, like when an officer’s resignation for misconduct can be categorized as a voluntary separation, there may be more to why an officer had trouble at a former agency, Scott said, adding that it was plausible that the person was a good officer at a bad agency.
While agencies try to glean as much as they can from interviews and personnel records, determining what kind of officer a person will be is a crapshoot, Scott said.
“I hired a lot of cops, and I found myself firing more than I was glad to have done,” Scott said. “I found myself asking, ‘How the hell could this thing have happened and we not have predicted it’? I came to a humbling understanding of the limits. What we don’t know about the person is pretty significant.”
Gualtieri said the Florida Sheriffs Association would oppose a requirement like Connecticut's because taking out subjectivity and making criteria black and white can make the process unfair by disqualifying officers.
“Differing situations require a different response,” he said. “You want to ask, ‘How long ago was the conduct someone engaged in and was this an example of something you did when you were young and stupid?’ The better approach is to look into the situation.”
Zalisko and David Thomas, a former Gainesville police officer and professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, disagreed and said that agencies should not be allowed to hire officers discharged for misconduct.
"The reality is that the person is ineffective and incapable of doing their job,” Thomas said. “As a community member, I wouldn’t want that. I would want quality service, quality employees and people I can trust."
State Sen. Powell agreed and said it is a topic the legislature needs to explore.
“There needs to be legislation filed to prevent something like that from happening,” Powell said.
Florida Democrats and members of the Legislative Black Caucus had attempted to call a special session to discuss police reform after the death of George Floyd but were rebuffed by Senate leaders because they believed discussions would be ineffective at finding solutions due to the session being time-limited.
Many of the Florida bills proposed thus far don’t focus on how troubled officers are hired but rather draw similarities to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was passed in the U.S House of Representatives before stalling the U.S. Senate.
That bill included calls for a national registry of police misconduct, the lowering of standards to convict police for misconduct, requiring implicit bias training and limited qualified immunity as a defense for law enforcement officers.
Gualtieri said the Florida Sheriffs Association would oppose bills involving a registry and reducing qualified immunity, calling some of them “political grandstanding.”
“Before they call for things, they need to be informed about what is in place or not in place,” Gualtieri said. “That’s not helpful or beneficial.”
Calls for consistency
While experts disagreed on automatically disqualifying officers that had been fired before, there was some agreement that the state could do more in terms of improving character requirements in the hiring process.
“I would prefer that states have more precise language,” Scott said.
Currently, there is no definition of what good moral character means in the certification process for law enforcement and corrections officers in Florida, despite the state’s overall reputation for burdensome occupational licensing requirements. The state laws were ranked fifth-most burdensome when it came to occupational licensing in general by the Institute of Justice.
Some states, like Colorado, spell out more past actions that will result in a loss of eligibility for hire. The same occurs in Missouri, which has a slightly more robust definition of what moral turpitude constitutes.
Zalisko and Thomas said moral character hiring standards should closely mirror the higher standards and expectations law enforcement are held to that could result in their decertification, adding that there needs to be consistency.
There are uniform standards for other officer qualifications but not moral character.
“The system is uniform when it comes to the number of hours of training, annual firearms qualification, minimum scores on tests for recruits,” Thomas said. “Because of this, there is no question as to a standard and minimum qualifications.”
State Sen. Powell said the current character requirements for certification cannot be subjective and need to be addressed by the legislature in the same manner as decertification.
“I’m a supporter of good policing and work with the (Fraternal Order of Police) and Police Benevolent Association to work on what we think is good legislation,” Powell said. “I would hope something like this is on their radar.”
Connect with reporter Devan Patel: @DevanJPatel (Twitter) or devan.patel@naplesnews.com
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