BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Telegraph Staff Writer
STARKE—Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith and Col. Brad Smith said their agency continues to respond to technological changes and has benefited from many of those innovations.
The officers discussed several opportunities and challenges law enforcement has taken on recently and said one of the most severe challenges their agency dealt with lately had little to do with technology.
Recruiting challenges
Col. Smith said law enforcement is still recovering from two state and national developments that impacted the agencies’ recruiting and staffing efforts: the George Floyd death and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
He said the cultural fallout from the George Floyd incident caused many young people to shy away from law enforcement careers.
“We saw a dramatic shift away from people wanting to apply here, and we had to actively recruit and go out and try and find people,” Col. Smith said. “Even the numbers of people going through the police academy had diminished quite a bit.”
Smith added that graduating classes from Santa Fe College’s police academy dwindled from between 25 and 30 to between six and eight.
“You’re like: What is going on? Smith recalled. “We’d never had to recruit before.”
The sheriff added that after the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act passed in 2021, his agency had to find eight additional deputies quickly.
The new statute required a law enforcement officer in every public school.
“That was our biggest hiring at one time ever,” he said.
Both officers said police academies appear to be returning to normal class levels, but it will take some time for graduates to reach the numbers seen before 2020.
Col. Smith said last year’s legislative session in Tallahassee appropriated money for fiscally constrained counties, and the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office received over $500,000 in additional funding from the appropriation. He added that the extra money helped the office compete with higher-paying law enforcement agencies like the St. Johns County sheriff’s Office.
“We saw that have an immediate, positive impact,” he said. “Right now, our starting salary for a law enforcement officer is higher than Clay County because they didn’t receive a fiscally constrained (appropriation).”
Col. Smith added that Florida’s $5,000 one-time bonus for new officers also helped the Bradford office, with four of the agency’s new deputies getting the bonus.
“Two of them were explorers that we’d been developing for many years that finally came of age,” he said. One of them was retired military; I think it was Army. And then the fourth one was a correctional officer with us that we sent through the police academy, and then it was his first time starting in law enforcement.”
People are smarter
The sheriff said technology has served to educate the people deputies interact with.
He said younger people ask deputies more questions and are more knowledgeable, which some may misinterpret as disrespect.
“I think they question things a lot more now,” the sheriff said. “I don’t necessarily take that as a negative. Nowadays, everything’s at their fingertips. They go to YouTube or Google to see what they’re looking for.”
Smith said that when a young person is pulled over, their first response is: “Why did you stop me?”
“If a cop would’ve stopped me back then, I would have said, I’m sorry, sir, what did I do?” he added. “They’re smarter than we were at that age. We had encyclopedias. They have Google and YouTube.”
Body cams
Both officers said body cameras have revolutionized the collection of evidence in criminal cases and have assisted the agency in enforcing its policies with its personnel.
“The body cam has been the best thing we have ever done as far as evidence,” the sheriff said.
Col. Smith added that deputies, at first, were resistant to the new technology.
“A lot of the officers didn’t want to do it, thinking it was just going to be disruptive to them,” the colonel said. “We have seen them way more times save an officer during a complaint-type of a situation than be detrimental. I would venture to say in the 95% range, it shows the officers did what they were supposed to do within the policies and within the law and were professional in doing it.”
Both men said they have received fewer complaints about deputies since officers began wearing body cameras.
“I don’t get many anymore,” the sheriff said, “maybe two or three a year. I’ve got a big T.V. in my office. When a (complainant) comes in, I get the video, project it up to the T.V., and we see what happened.”
Smith said the only recent complaint about a deputy he could recall was that of Jacob Desue, who resigned after body cam and dash cam footage showed the officer violating agency policy after pulling over a mother driving between Starke and Lawtey for speeding.
The sheriff said another benefit of body cams is that deputies can use the video while writing their reports, increasing the accuracy of the documents.
Witness statements, victim claims, defendant statements, 911 calls, deputies’ GPS locations, Miranda warnings— they’re all recorded.
The GPS data is particularly useful for investigating complaints about deputies not timely responding to calls or complaints of deputies speeding.
Ring cameras
The sheriff added that private surveillance cameras, such as the Ring cameras near the front doorbells of residences, have also revolutionized law enforcement.
“We used to canvas the neighborhood when a crime occurred,” Smith said, “go-door-to-door asking people if they heard or saw anything. Now we do a video canvas.”
“Just a week ago, at the country club,” Smith recalled, “had a guy steal a trailer right there at the golf course during the day.”
The sheriff said cameras captured the suspect’s every move.
“We’ve got him sitting in the parking lot for nearly an hour, watching. He slowly gets out and does some things, and he sees nobody’s looking. He hooks up the trailer. We’ve got him driving away. He actually drives by my house and past my son and my wife on their bicycles. My Ring camera catches it.”
Smith said his agency posted images of the crime on social media, and within 24 hours, the defendant was in jail, and the trailer was back at the country club.
Like many of his neighbors, the sheriff has deployed Blink cameras around his home that are activated by motion detectors.
He added that between his own cameras and his neighbors, everyone passing through his neighborhood is tracked.
“We assume there’s a camera everywhere,” he said. “Technology works.”
The sheriff added that courts are restricting the use of cameras in cases when a property owner’s camera is viewing his neighbor’s private property.
“(The courts) are saying if they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then you’re intruding on them,” the sheriff said.
In addition, some camera owners could be prosecuted for voyeurism if their cameras peer into their neighbors’ homes.
The sheriff said he hopes to one day stand up a real-time crime center like those in larger agencies like Clay County.
The Green Cove Springs-based agency operates a control room with live video feeds from roads, schools and other public locations. It is also obtaining permission from business owners to tap into private surveillance cameras. In addition to monitoring crime in real-time, the center has analysts that look for trends and predict where crimes might occur next.
Cell phones
The sheriff said mobile phones continue to be a valuable tool for solving crimes.
“Every child now from middle school up has got a cell phone in their hands,” he said. “Everything they do is tracked on that cell phone. Whether it be Snapchat where you think it’s gone. Well, it’s gone to you and me, but we send those phones off. It’s a treasure trove of information.”
Smith said judges are now restricting the type of information investigators may view on cell phones.
“We used to get everything from your cell phone in a search warrant,” he said. “Now, in the search warrants, the courts are saying, what exactly in that cell phone are you wanting to search?”
“We’ve got to pinpoint it,” he continued. “And that’s the only information we can get from that cell phone because they’ve learned that the cell phone’s a computer. And if I’m looking for a specific crime, that’s what I can go into your cell phone for. The judicial system is catching up with technology.”
The sheriff said that if investigators happen across evidence on a phone not related to the case they are working on, like discovering child pornography on a phone while investigating a theft, then investigators would have to go back to the judge before taking further action.
Social media
Sheriff Smith said social media continues to be a challenge for the office.
He added that what he calls social media court is always in session, with defendants being accused, defended and sentenced to public humiliation or a damaged reputation on social media.
“The sad part is most of the time, they get it wrong,” he said. “Opinions, wrong people. We spend a lot of time on inaccurate information. People report what they’ve heard through gossip via social media, and many people get falsely accused.”
The sheriff said new libel and slander laws might begin to hold people accountable for posting false information on social media.
“I’m all for it because I see too many people’s lives get ruined for no reason other than you put it on social media,” he said. “And I may be the only person in Bradford County that thinks that way.”
“When we’re talking to people that are victims of crimes or had, say, a family member get killed or something like that, one of the first things that we do as law enforcement now is to tell people: don’t get on social media,” the sheriff said. “Don’t listen to these threads going back and forth because they will drive you crazy. You’re going to focus on all the negative ones, not see the positive ones, and it’s going to distract you from what’s really important right now.”
Brad Smith said he used to follow the several Bradford County word-of-mouth pages.
“I followed it initially when it came out,” he said. “I realized there’s too much gossip on it. I just deleted it off of mine. I don’t even track it.”
Sheriff Smith added that many people can’t keep the details straight when his agency posts information on social media.
“Even when we post a vehicle (we are looking for) on Facebook, we state the type of vehicle it was,” he said. “It’s a Ford Escape, white, blah blah blah.”
Smith said that while his deputies may be looking for a Ford Escape, social media posters sometimes send back information on other models.
“No, that’s a Ford Explorer,” he said. “Now you got a spiderweb effect, with people online posting that so-and-so drives a Ford Explorer. Well, we’re not looking for a Ford Explorer. We’re looking for an Escape.”
The sheriff added that social media has expanded the number of critics his agency has to deal with.
He said that after news broke of Deputy Jacob Desue’s actions during a traffic stop between Lawtey and Starke, the sheriff’s office fielded complaints from across the U.S. in addition to Europe.
“When we had the Desue case, we had to 24-7 monitor our social media because we had these people from England, some from Denmark, some from other countries, they would just go on our (page) and just write ugly things, send stupid stuff,” the sheriff said. “We just hide, hide, hide, hide, hide, hide. We destroy nothing. It’s public record. We just hide it.”
“We had to set up a phone line specifically for calls coming in on Desue,” added Col. Smith.
The officers said that initially, complainers accused the agency and the deputy of racism because the mother pulled over in the traffic stop was African American. However, as news broke that the deputy was bi-racial, the accusations changed to excessive force.
The sheriff said he still gets letters over the Desue traffic stop and retrieved from his trash can a letter he had just received from a man complaining about Desue’s conduct.
The envelope had a return address in Tallahassee and a postmark from San Antonio, Texas.
“I am an auditor for the IRS and am told many of the sheriff’s deputies were holding other jobs and not reporting their income,” the letter writer with an illegible signature wrote. “This is tax evasion and is punishable by time in jail and enormous fees for tax lawyers and defense lawyers.”
The letter writer claimed that he would look for unreported income by Desue and would also be on the lookout for any unreported income by any officer at the Bradford sheriff’s office.
“They don’t give you a number to call,” Sheriff Smith said. “You can’t read the name that signs it. It’s File 13 for me. A lot of people would take that personally, and they would get upset.”
The sheriff added that when his agency started posting warning signs in the yards of sexual predators, he was criticized nationwide and even received death threats.
Many people claimed that vigilantes would show up at these poor sexual predators’ houses to seek revenge, Smith said. We’ve never had any of that.
The sheriff said social media posts often provoke violent crime.
“Ask a high school principal or a middle school principal or teacher because many of our calls start with: ‘She was saying this about me on social media,’” Smith said. “A lot of our school fights, school problems that arise, start through social media.”
The sheriff added that social media has prompted many domestic battery cases.
“I caught her sending my husband something, or she put two hearts on a repost,” the sheriff said, citing examples. “We deal with that in a small county, in some shape, form, or fashion almost on a daily basis.”
The sheriff added that when social media first emerged, his agency needed to learn how to adapt to the new technology, but now law enforcement is using social media to its advantage, and the courts are also catching up to the technology.
He also said some posters hide behind a false sense of anonymity.
“They think they can create a fake profile, and we can’t figure out who they are,” Smith said. “Well, if it’s a criminal case, we’re going to figure out who you are and where you’re going. Facebook and all those social media companies have a law enforcement side that works with us. It may take a little time, but we’ll figure it out.”
