Truth or entrapment?9-25-2012 Florida:
LARGO — Faced with unprecedented budget cuts as chief deputy of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office four years ago, Bob Gualtieri set about deciding where the county's biggest law enforcement agency could safely scale back its workforce.
Among the casualties the budget crisis claimed was the sheriff's fugitive section, a bureau of 16 deputies whose primary responsibility was to review and serve arrest warrants. The disbanding of the unit in 2009 led to $1.6 million in savings — and now, serious questions about whether it should have been preserved.
The case of Gregory J. Johns, a Safety Harbor man who authorities say raped and impregnated an 11-year-old girl while his felony arrest warrant sat unserved, has brought renewed scrutiny to the Sheriff's Office's effectiveness in tracking dangerous fugitives.
That job has been outsourced to about 550 front-line patrol deputies tasked with searching for fugitives and serving warrants when not responding to other calls. Gualtieri, now sheriff, asserts that a warrants database accessible from squad car computers allows those deputies to do the work once done by detectives.
But experts and officials at other large law enforcement agencies cast doubt on that claim. Tracking down fugitives, they say, requires a level of investigative zeal that cannot realistically be expected from deputies who are also responsible for policing the streets. ...continued.. by Peter Jamison, Times Staff Writer
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