ST.PETERSBURG DRUG ARRESTS DOWN

St. Petersburg Police Officers Donny Jerring, Sgt. Karl Lounge and
Rusty Zitzelberg work with the street narcotics unit. Three RESPECT
squads, with six members each, were formed as part of an overhaul.
Now, teams have only two or three members.

ST. PETERSBURG - A retired sewer construction worker living on a
disability pension, Floyd Lewis often drives around in the early
evening to check out his south St. Petersburg neighborhood.

He doesn't like what he sees.

From the wheel of his 1983 Ford pickup truck, with a Bible on the
dashboard, what Lewis sees through his black-rimmed eyeglasses are
drug dealers, small packs of men on street corners or at empty lots
in the predominantly black neighborhood.

"You see a bunch of guys hanging," says Lewis, 66. "You see someone
come up, and you see someone pass the stuff."

"If I see it," Lewis says, "I know they should see it."

Lewis is referring to the St. Petersburg Police Department. By the
measure of many people in poor pockets of this area, the agency is
not doing enough to combat street-level drug sales.

Though they generally laud the improved state of police-community
relations, to them it looks like the department hasn't made such drug
sales a priority.

If staffing reports are an indication, they are right. An exodus of
officers in recent years has had drastic repercussions for the units
specializing in street narcotics investigations across the city.

Since 1998, administrators under former Police Chief Goliath Davis
III and current Chief Chuck Harmon have cut the street narcotics
squads by almost half.

In those four years, drug arrests are down 20 percent citywide. In
the district that includes Lewis' neighborhood, drug arrests are down
much more sharply - 70 percent.

Residents of south St. Petersburg say they've noticed dealers are
increasingly brazen.

"They just stand under the tree all dressed up," said Evangelist
Johnson, 28, a single mother. "They don't even have the sense to put
out a table and play cards."

A History Of Violence

Some of the St. Petersburg Police Department's most violent
encounters with black residents occurred while the agency's narcotics
officers fought drug dealers outdoors.

One noteworthy standoff was nearly 10 years ago, Aug. 6, 1992, at
19th Avenue South and 19th Street, near Lewis' house. Seven vice and
narcotics investigators were involved in a melee involving some 50
people.

A sergeant smacked a teenager in the head with a flashlight and
struck the teen's mother in the head. Rocks, bottles and chunks of
concrete were thrown at officers arriving to quell the disturbance.

The tactics of the squad involved in the standoff - called the Green
Team, after the color of the uniforms they wore - came under fire.
Consultants recommended it be disbanded, and it was.

Since 1994, an overhauled vice and narcotics unit largely has
abandoned the street sweeps that put the Green Team under scrutiny.
Detectives have focused on individual houses. They often use
confidential informants to make undercover buys at crack houses,
after which they return to execute search warrants and, in many
cases, make arrests.

The issue of street dealing was left to three new six-member squads
whose positions were funded in part through a $1.35 million federal
grant, vice and narcotics administrators say.

Their program was dubbed RESPECT. Unlike the vice and narcotics unit,
which was under the criminal investigations division, RESPECT
officers work in the patrol division. Until he was named police
chief, Harmon was assistant chief in charge of patrol.

It was these RESPECT squads whose numbers Davis and Harmon allowed to
dwindle during the past four years.

After The Riots

Willie Walker, a 69-year-old retired concrete truck driver, used to
live next to a house where drugs were sold, but that has changed. The
vice and narcotics unit executed a search warrant and made arrests at
the house. Since then a day care center has opened in its place.

As far as Walker is concerned, the recipe for keeping drugs off one's
block includes the cohesiveness of the block. Walker knows his
neighbors, and rattles off their occupations - school teacher, fish
market owner. The subtlest sign of drug chicanery near any of the
properties prompts one of them to call police, he said.

"If they're coming in, we're going to get them out," he said.

No one is filing complaints of excessive force against vice as was
common in the Green Team's heyday, internal affairs statistics show.
Most of those past complaints never were substantiated.

After vice was overhauled, the next significant time anyone raised
the specter of police brutality or racial insensitivity in the black
community was Oct. 24, 1996 - after Police Officer James Knight shot
and killed TyRon Lewis after Lewis repeatedly bumped a stolen car
against Knight rather than follow the officer's instructions to stop
and get out of the car.

The city's worst race riots broke out shortly thereafter. Within a
year, Goliath Davis III was named the city's first black police chief.

Davis pressured officers he thought were acting inappropriately
through strict discipline.

The new chief also concentrated the patrol division's efforts on
issues he believed residents were concerned about citywide -
especially traffic enforcement. Black residents took note of Davis'
efforts and supported him. They appreciated that officers weren't
arbitrarily confronting groups of black men who happened to be
hanging out. And if they did stop and approach people, officers were
courteous and respectful.

"Since TyRon Lewis, everything is all gravy," said "Beanie" Davis, 28.

The exodus of officers began in 1999, department staffing reports
show. And it worsened in 2000 and 2001. More than 60 officers - about
10 percent of the force - resigned during those two years. It cost
the city almost $3 million, mostly in training, to replace some of
them.

Some officers who left cited Davis' strict discipline as the reason;
others cited the department's pay.

The department also has fallen victim to demographics, as groups of
veteran officers reach the required 25 years of service to retire on
full pensions, and have in some cases been replaced with new recruits.

Some south St. Petersburg residents say a law enforcement approach
that once seemed respectful now seems lackadaisical.

"You don't see the police," said Carl Calhoun, 64, a retired school
system maintenance worker who lives in south St. Petersburg. "If you
do see them, they stop for a minute and they're gone."

"I feel they haven't been up on ... basically, the drug thing," he said.

Draining Respect

Chief Harmon said there was never a "conscious decision" to deplete
the RESPECT squads. He acknowledged the street narcotics units may
have been affected disproportionately.

St. Petersburg police have other priorities, he said, such as making
sure each police district has enough patrol officers. Community
policing commands a high priority, too.

And, Harmon said, each of the city's three RESPECT squads might not
need six members. RESPECT officers can be reinforced with officers
from other units for particular operations.

But RESPECT officers say the numbers are crucial. The sergeant of
each squad typically keeps an eye out for a street dealer. Other
squad members track buyers as they leave a street corner and then
close in on the seller.

If there are only three members on a squad - which sometimes has been
the case during the past four years - that leaves one officer to
confront a dealer who may be surrounded by associates or friends.

"We had a way of doing things, and six officers were more highly
productive than four," said Lt. Greg Schwemley, who used to head the
RESPECT squad in south St. Petersburg. "When you have six officers,
you're going to have officer backup quickly."

Last year, a notorious drug hole - at 12th Avenue South and 12th
Street - had gotten so out of hand that Maj. Cedric Gordon told his
troops to put together a special problem-oriented policing project
involving RESPECT, community policing, and vice.

It was one of two such projects initiated citywide last year that
involved combating drugs, out of a total of 22. The other
concentrated on Williams Park in downtown St. Petersburg, where
homeless people were said to be hawking marijuana.

One evening in January, six officers from two RESPECT squads teamed
up to patrol the intersection at 12th and 12th on bicycles. A man was
seen throwing down cocaine and marijuana, then running.

The officers gave chase and arrested him. After the suspect was
driven away in a squad car, a group of 40 people gathered. One person
threw an explosive device, likely an M-1000 firecracker, at the
officers, and five of them had to be treated at a hospital.

Some people in the crowd taunted RESPECT squad members.

"The police don't run the streets down here anymore," they're quoted
as saying in a police report. "We do now."