Geoff Dougherty

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A special report: the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office; understaffed or poorly managed?

By Geoff Dougherty | St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer

Shortly after midnight on March 7, 1998, J. Swanson’s boyfriend attacked her. He threw a coffee table at her and punched her in the eye. Terrified, she called the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.

At that moment, an unassigned deputy was nearby. But he was not sent to help.

Swanson’s boyfriend leaned into her face, screaming.

At the Sheriff’s Office, the dispatcher in charge of west Pasco sent a deputy to handle a criminal mischief complaint and another to take a missing-persons report. In the 14 minutes after Swanson’s call, the dispatcher handled 40 other matters, ranging from calls for service to inputting computer data. None was urgent.

Finally, the dispatcher sent the nearby deputy to Swanson’s aid. He got there in two minutes – 16 minutes after her original call.

“When he saw the deputy coming down the street, he quit screaming,” said Swanson, who asked that her first name not be used in this story. “They should have gotten there sooner. Somebody could have been getting killed.”

In his campaign for a special taxing unit to pay for 220 new deputies during the next decade, Sheriff Lee Cannon threw out reams of statistics, including one that fit Swanson’s case almost to a T: His agency’s response time to life-threatening calls, he said, was 15 minutes, 52 seconds.

Cannon said he just didn’t have enough deputies to respond more quickly. The county government’s failure to provide more tax money, he said, put the public and his deputies at unacceptable risk. So in 1998 he proposed a law enforcement tax that would raise up to $ 80-million over 10 years. The goal: boost his complement of deputies by 70 percent.

But a Pasco Times investigation finds that staffing is not at the root of the sheriff’s problem, that there is little justification for the huge tax increase he sought – and that fixing the real problem, inefficiency at the dispatch center, could greatly improve response times at very little cost.

Another finding is almost as troubling: Many of the statistics Cannon cited in justifying the tax are wrong, the incorrect information invariably supporting his position more than an accurate number would have.

Perhaps most disturbing of all: The Times found in Swanson’s case and hundreds of others that crime victims in potentially dangerous situations waited needlessly for help because the Sheriff’s Office failed to quickly dispatch deputies after their calls.

In a letter to the Times, Cannon acknowledged some of his statistics are wrong, but said the errors were “unintentional” and do “not contradict the clear need for additional law enforcement personnel.”

Not understaffed

What happened to Swanson, the Times found, is an extreme example of what routinely happens when Pasco residents call the Sheriff’s Office for help. On average, dispatchers take four minutes just to assign a deputy to a potentially life-threatening call. And it’s not that there’s no one to send. In four out of every five such cases, a deputy is available.

At the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, the types of delays Pasco routinely tolerates would be reason to retrain a dispatcher. If that didn’t work, officials said, the dispatcher could be transferred or terminated.

The Times hired a nationally known police staffing consultant to study the Pasco Sheriff’s Office, using data obtained from the agency’s own dispatch logs.

“I wouldn’t say that across the board they need more cops out there,” said the consultant, George Sullivan. “What he (Cannon) needs is nowhere in the ballpark” of the number of deputies called for in the tax plan.

In fact, Sullivan found that adding just 22 road deputies to Cannon’s 1998 staff, along with some improvements in efficiency, would offer response times equivalent to those Cannon was hoping to obtain with his massive hiring program. Sullivan’s analysis was limited to patrol staffing and did not examine other areas of the department.

The newspaper’s investigation also found that:

The Sheriff’s Office is adequately staffed to ensure safety of its deputies. Although Cannon said it takes an average of nearly 16 minutes for deputies in danger to get backup, the Times analysis found deputies are alone at the scene of life-threatening calls for an average of just less than four minutes before backup arrives.

The department failed to adequately analyze its staffing needs before proposing the costly special-taxing district.

“The suggestion by the sheriff is premature,” Sullivan said. “The last thing you want to do is ask for more money.”

Cannon’s executive assistant, Harold Sample, said his agency rejected the idea of an expensive staffing study before the tax vote. It would have been a waste of money without the county government’s agreement to abide by its findings, he said.

While Cannon continues to believe the department is critically understaffed, his staffing consultant, hired after the department became aware of the Times investigation, said the newspaper’s consultant was correct.

“I would agree with his (Sullivan’s) findings,” Cannon’s consultant, Peter Bellmio, wrote in an e-mail. “I have used the same model and formulas many times and his analysis is reasonable.”

The Times’ findings, experts say, raise questions about the management ability of those running the Sheriff’s Office.

“The old days of the sheriff being able to say “I need more people’ are gone. You need to have solid data to make that argument,” said Bonnie Bucqueroux, a community policing expert at Michigan State University. “This adds to the cynicism. This is going to be seized upon as evidence that people cannot trust government.”

But Sullivan was more understanding of Cannon’s situation. Police agencies throughout the country have similar problems using data from computerized systems, he said.

“If management is to be faulted ... it should only be directed toward those who ignore the problems and inefficiencies of a poor information system after it has been pointed out to them,” he said.

Sullivan’s study was based on Sheriff’s Office computer data that covered all of 1998.

He found the agency would need 22 more deputies to ensure an average response time of 10 minutes to urgent calls, the standard Cannon said he hoped to meet with the big expansion of his force.

In October 1998, the county allocated money to provide Cannon with 24 deputies.

“As soon as they could put those people into patrol, they should make their 10-minute average,” Sullivan said.

In fact, Sample said the new deputies funded by the commissioners have already improved response times and decreased workload.

“We are seeing the effect of ... the additional bodies on the street,” Sample said last week.

Sullivan further recommended that the Sheriff’s Office spend $ 100,000 on new computer software and hire two data analysts to help in regularly adjusting the department’s staffing.

He found that the Sheriff’s Office did not make efficient use of its existing staff. He noticed the department has an unusual number of deputies in specialty positions – people flying helicopters, riding motorcycles and driving boats. For a department that claims a critical staffing shortage in patrol, Sullivan said, a heavy focus on other responsibilities isn’t appropriate.

“Couldn’t he (the sheriff) get some of these people from other parts of the department instead of adding to taxes? There are a lot of specialists out there,” Sullivan said.

Other departments, he said, staff their patrol units first and then use only the excess personnel to establish special positions.

Scheduling problems

Pasco’s scheduling system, too, needs revamping, Sullivan said. His study shows the department schedules roughly the same number of deputies to work each day of the week. But early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, calls for service spike.

That means there are not enough deputies working at those times to handle the calls, Sullivan said, probably causing unnecessary delays in response times. During the same period on other days of the week, Sullivan found, the situation is reversed.

“I would say: “Look at your scheduling so you can put more people on Friday and Saturday night,’ ” Sullivan said.

Sullivan further found that the Sheriff’s Office does a poor job of keeping data that would allow for intelligent decisions about how many officers the department needs and where they should be working.

For example, the agency, like others, uses a priority system to decide which calls will get the quickest response. A stabbing in progress would be a priority one. A call from a woman who finds her lawn furniture stolen upon returning from vacation might be a four.

But Sullivan found Pasco’s system classifies an unusually high number of calls as priority one, including some that clearly are not urgent.

Both dispatchers and deputies know this and respond more slowly to those calls, even though officially they have the highest priority. The sloppy classification system thus inflates the average response number the Sheriff’s Office reports as the average response time to all priority one calls.

Sullivan found that Cannon used other questionable numbers to push his tax.

Cannon and his predecessors have long cited Pasco’s deputies-to-residents ratio – which is among the lowest in the state – as a justification for hiring more officers.

But Sullivan and other experts said such comparisons have little use.

Drew Diamond, a former Tulsa, Okla., police chief who now works for the Police Executive Research Forum, said: “Comparisons are really of limited value. What you really want to know is what’s happening in terms of the needs of the community and are officers deployed to meet that need?”

Cannon criticized Sullivan’s study as so limited that it could not be accurate. Assessing the department’s staffing, Cannon said, would require a study of every facet of Sheriff’s Office operations at a cost of up to $ 135,000.

Responding to Cannon’s concerns, Sullivan said it is true he did not do a complete staffing study for the Times. But, he added:

“This is the most rigorous and complete analysis of their patrol staffing that has ever been done. ... what we did is look at how much patrol staff it would take to reach certain response time standards. ... We answered that question. I think we are in the ballpark. This is an acceptable degree of accuracy.”

Cannon also questioned how the Times could uncover flaws in the Sheriff’s Office data while simultaneously relying on Sullivan’s study, which was based on the same data.

But Sullivan said his approach involved cleaning up much of the bad data. He’s also used to encountering such problems.

“I brought to bear my experience with other jurisdictions to see if we (in Pasco) were in the ballpark,” Sullivan said. “To some degree these are estimates, but all researchers have to make estimates. The question is: Is it reasonably accurate? I think these estimates give a fairly accurate picture.”

Not too busy

The Times also conducted a computerized analysis of the Sheriff’s Office data. The study, while separate from Sullivan’s work, supports his conclusions.

The newspaper found the department’s average response time to priority one calls was inflated by a small number of incidents with unusually long times.

The department said those calls had originally been labeled as priority one, but were later changed to a less urgent classification, which resulted in longer response times. Sheriff’s officials said dispatchers often do not have time to change the computer data to reflect that the call is not an urgent one. On Monday, the Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that those record-keeping problems make it impossible for them to calculate an accurate average response time.

The Times analysis also found the department has deputies immediately available to answer all but 20 percent of the urgent calls for service. Depending on the department, Sullivan said, any number up to 35 percent is acceptable.

The newspaper’s work also shows that road deputies spend 26 percent of their time responding to calls from the public.

Many experts say anything under 33 percent means deputies have sufficient time for training, report-writing and crime prevention.

“It sounds like they have got a substantial amount of free time,” said Bucqueroux, the Michigan State professor.

7-minute response time

Sullivan’s findings did not always run counter to Cannon’s positions.

He found the department was understaffed for the first part of 1998. It was only in October that the county authorized funds for an additional 24 deputies. Putting those deputies on the street and giving them an efficient dispatch system, Sullivan said, should bring the Sheriff’s Office response time down to Cannon’s goal of 10 minutes.

During some parts of the day in the western part of the county, the deputies are too busy, Sullivan found. However, deputies in east Pasco are not overworked, Sullivan found. Nor are deputies in west Pasco during the early morning weekday hours.

Sullivan’s study did not address growth in the county, which will place additional demands on the Sheriff’s Office and require additional deputies.

But the majority of the deputies in the tax plan were intended not to account for growth, but to cure what the department saw as a current staffing crisis. At the time of the tax campaign, it would have taken about 130 deputies to bring the department up to the Sheriff’s goal of 1.5 deputies for every 1,000 residents.

Sample said the department wanted to hire that many, but couldn’t train them all at once. So the tax plan called for the department to hire 40 deputies in each of the first four years of the plan. The remainder of Cannon’s 220 deputies would have kept the department at a ratio of 1.5 deputies for every 1,000 residents as the county grew during the next six years.

Ninety more would have maintained that ratio as the county grew between then and 2009.

Sullivan also questioned Cannon’s use of the 10-minute response time as an effective standard.

“If I lived in the community, I wouldn’t want calls being held that long,” said Sullivan.

Many law enforcement agencies that hire Sullivan strive for a seven-minute average response time to urgent calls. To meet that higher standard, Sullivan found, the agency would need no more than 25 new road patrol deputies, on top of those approved by the county in 1998.

Coincidentally, county commissioners budgeted for 24 new deputies in the current budget year, which started Oct. 1. If the new hires were assigned to patrol, Cannon would need just a few additional deputies to meet a widely accepted level of performance – one that is far more stringent than his previously stated goal.

It’s not just Cannon

Despite the questions raised during his campaign for the tax, Cannon continues to push for more deputies.

Every year, he appears before the County Commission to plead his case. And during the last legislative session, the Florida Sheriff’s Association said Cannon was lobbying for a bill that would have allowed him to use sales tax revenue to fund additional deputies.

He is hardly the first sheriff to show such resolve.

In 1981, Sheriff John M. Short was so dissatisfied with the budget county commissioners gave him that he appealed it to the governor. Short, a Democrat, wanted to hire 29 additional staffers, and the state Cabinet decided he needed the money to do it.

A year later, Short went before the commission again. He sought to hire 18 new employees. To justify the move, he used the same types of statistics Cannon has relied on. The Sheriff’s Office had a below-average ratio of deputies to residents, Short said, and spent less on law enforcement than surrounding communities.

Commissioners granted his budget request.

Short’s replacement, Republican Jim Gillum, faced even more trouble. He suggested that double-digit increases in the department’s staff were needed. The commission refused to believe him.

In the late 1980s Gillum hired a consulting firm to study the department’s staffing and make recommendations.

The firm, Cody & Associates, noted the agency had a deputies-to-residents ratio that was among the lowest in Florida. Cody recommended the Sheriff’s Office hire a total of 100 new employees, including 65 new deputies.

Commissioners ignored Gillum’s request to implement that plan. In 1990 the Pasco Sheriff’s budget once again turned up at the governor’s office, where the cabinet voted to give Gillum a fraction of the 44-percent budget increase he had sought.

The most important leftover from years of budget battles is the Cody report. Cannon has used it as the bedrock of his campaign to boost personnel, emphasizing that the study was independent and clearly shows the department is understaffed.

But some police experts told the Times that Cody & Associates, a well-known municipal consulting firm that continues to work for the county government, did not choose the best method. The study is based on a review of the ratio of deputies to residents across Florida and in counties similar to Pasco. The study also examined the programs operated by the Pasco Sheriff’s Office compared to other programs.

Nick Pellegrino, a consultant at Cody, said recently that those methods were probably not as accurate as the ones employed by the Times consultant.

As far as comparing Pasco’s staffing ratio with other counties, Pellegrino said it has limited use.

“It’s not the overriding thing that you use,” he said. “It’s an easy measure. But there are a lot of other measures that you have to look at.”

One of those measures would be the type of analysis performed by Sullivan.

“That is the ultimate,” Pellegrino said.

It’s unclear whether Cody determined which methods to employ in the study or whether Gillum asked the consultants to use the deputies-to-residents ratio. Gillum said he couldn’t remember. Pellegrino said he did not work on the project and the consultant who did has since retired.

“You are almost at the mercy of what information is given to you,” Pellegrino said.

Jan. 23, 2000