Eyes on crime

INVERNESS — Citrus County Sheriff’s Office East-side Patrol Commander Capt. Buddy Grant has thrown down the gauntlet for the criminally inclined.

Special to the Chronicle

Deputies Thomas Indorato, left, and Joe Casola talk to a Citrus County resident recently. The Citrus County Sheriff’s Office is on the second year of implementing Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP). The technique involves information gathering and analysis to both deter and solve crimes.

“If you don’t like what we are doing, you really have three options: quit committing crimes, move out of the county or you go to jail,” Grant said.

What the sheriff’s office is doing is assiduously following a new kind of policing that is quickly gaining favor by both disrupting the activities of criminals and drastically cutting crime rates.

Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP) involves the collection and analysis of information on habitual offenders and their affiliates.

The method began in the U.K. back in the 1990s, but quickly gained currency as law enforcement agencies began tackling terrorism. It has since taken root in the U.S. and Florida. Hillsborough County and Pasco County also use the policing technique.

“It is heavily driven by technology, but our deputies are out there making contact with the persons of interest and all these other people they know. That information is then fed back to our analysts, who put everything together. It’s a team effort, and if a crime happens, it helps us quickly identify who we think is involved,” Sheriff Jeff Dawsy said.

He said in police parlance, the process is called “scrubbing.”

It is Grant and his crew who take the lead in the scrubbing process.

Grant meets with unit leaders every Tuesday to list and de-list Citrus County’s most watched. This week, there were about a dozen on the list and just as many who went off the list.

“It is all based on intel we gathered about them,” Grant said.

He said those who were removed from the list either cleaned up their acts or are in jail. Others may have moved. A new list is generated every month, Grant said.

“The thing is, we have a few people committing most of the crimes, and a lot of them know each other,” he said.

Grant said the process is like a series of circles of friends, relatives, acquaintances and partners in crime.
If a person of interest is identified, they are watched both overtly and covertly to establish all their links — from close friends to their friend’s cousin’s baby’s mothers to their immediate family.

For some, Grant said the watching is extremely overt, especially if the person a habitual offender and continues to persist in the life of crime.

“For some, the pressure is so great they would just leave the county or quit committing crimes,” Grant said.

Dawsy said the policing technique has undoubtedly helped reduce major crimes in the county by nearly 9 percent in the past year. He said the sheriff’s office’s 2012 goals are to fight drug and property crimes. He also wants to aggressively keep the pressure on would-be offenders, another feature of ILP.

Intelligence-led policing is predicated on the notion that a principal task of the police is to prevent and detect crime rather than simply to react to it, according to Capt. Grant.

“We are not going to let them (criminals) dictate the terms of engagement. We have decided to be proactive and make it uncomfortable for them to commit crimes in our county,” Grant said.

He points to an anecdotal case of a couple who moved into Floral City, but had a checkered background elsewhere and even had a warrant to answer to if they ever returned. The ILP pilot program was started in Floral City in 2010.

“But we watched these people and made contact with them at every opportunity and made it known to them that we were aware of what they used to do. Anyway, they ended up packing up and returned to where they came from knowing there was a warrant waiting for them,” Grant said.

He said many of the persons of interest have complained about ILP tactics. Grant said those complaints are invalid since every action the sheriff’s office engages in is within legal bounds.

He, however, urges those who feel harassed to do something simple — stop engaging in criminal activity.

“Our goal is the safety of the law-abiding residents of this county and we are not going to let a few people disrupt that,” Grant said.