Well I will tell you, I am more than a little frustrated with the rising crime rates. In the Alachua County/ Gainesville area the statistics the public sees does not even BEGIN to tell the story of the number of criminals that walk simply do to lack of prosecution. It is not unusual here for criminals to have a criminal history of felony arrests longer than your arm before they first go to prison.
Is this all the fault of the state attorneys office or law enforcement. Yes and no. One limiting factor that everyone involved in arresting and prosecuting criminals is funding.
It is common for me to talk to crime victims now days who are frustrated at the slow response time, slow investigation, lack of investigation, or slow/ no prosecution of their case. Honestly, I have kinda quit being totally dishonest about the total situation when people talk to me about it, especially off-duty. When the citizens/ county government are unwilling to fund more law enforcement officers or prosecutors dis spite growing population and crime…..What are we in criminal justice to do?
For example, I suspect there are now hundreds of burglaries per year for everyone Detective alloted to investigate them. So, I don’t find it a big surprise that our local clearance rate for burglaries is horrid compared to some other jurisdictions.
Every year it becomes easier for criminals to victimize people to start with because our number of law enforcement officers on the road patrolling is not growing with the population. There is simply to much area for officers to effectively cover and suppress crime.
There is also a side… that the law enforcement environment, state wide mostly, has not encouraged officers to perform aggressive pro-active law enforcement. Alot of that can be thanked to 20 years of having far more lawyers than society needs. I can’t tell you how sick street level officers get of hearing about potential “liability” being a reason for not doing our job. There are supervisors now that will gladly walk away and leave a bad guy on the street than risk any small chance of “liability.” Unfortunately, some supervisors and street cops get so beat down by liablity arguements….they eventually decide the only way to avoid liability…is to do nothing unless called somewhere or it jumps right up in their face.
Of course hand in hand with this, is the non stop progression in the law enforcement community to investigate each and every citizen complaint no matter what or when.
It is now common place for cops to even get in trouble at work for incidents away from the job that have NOTHING to do with work. State wide there are many examples of this happening. Just a for instance.. a cop goes to his local hardware store where they sold him a broken drill. He is off duty, not in uniform, never mentions where he works or that he is a cop. He gets into an argument with the manager because he will not take the return. This kind of things happens to citizens all the time right?? Well, lets say this manager has seen the cop in uniform before and knows he is a cop and where he works. Now agencies are actually taking complaints about incidents like this and investigating their officers. They even will hand out extreme discipline actions…just like this happened on duty, in uniform.
I would ask regular citizens out there… How would you feel about getting days off without pay from your job because you got into an argument at the hardware store? Well that is the state of things now…. it is sad.