By Brittany Wallman
Staff Writer

July 25, 2005

FORT LAUDERDALE * Police Chief Bruce Roberts has less than a week to convince his boss, the city manager, that he can turn around the city's alarming increase in violent crime. Police officers stood up for the chief this past week, in the aftermath of a damning report that criticized Roberts' police department management and his failure to reverse the city's double-digit, crime increase. Police officers said Roberts is taking the heat for city commissioners' devastating budget cuts the past two years. They claim City Manager George Gretsas is only offering political cover to the elected officials, who face the voters in March. "I don't know why people can't put two and two together," said police Sgt. Greg Kridos. "When you took away your cops, all the criminals came. It's really that simple." Roberts, meanwhile, is scheduled to address the Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce to assure the community he has an anti-crime strategy. Violent crime in Fort Lauderdale increased 28.7 percent the first part of the year, and property crime increased 16.9 percent. Overall for the period January-April, crime was up 18.3 percent, according to the report. Last year, crime increases were more modest, with an overall 4 percent rise. But crime had been dropping for eight years before that. Gretsas gave the chief until Friday to come up with a new strategy for combating the increase, in light of a report by consultant SafirRosetti of New York. SafirRosetti concluded that the two-year escalation was driven more by mismanagement of police resources than the number of officers, the amount of spending, or how many arrests officers make. Gretsas said Roberts' response to the report is critical. "The ultimate goal is to get crime down," he said recently. "I'm hoping he'll do what he has to do." Roberts has declined to be interviewed. Kridos, a 27-year officer and a part-time assistant state attorney in Palm Beach County, said officers don't have time for pro-active policing anymore, because there are too few officers to handle the scores of victims' calls. "One of our primary goals is to have officers out on the street preventing crime from occurring, pre-emptive strikes," Kridos said. "We've not been able to do that. The City Commission has cut our legs from under us." In a letter to the mayor last week, Fraternal Order of Police Union President Jack Lokeinsky attacked the $106,000 SafirRosetti report and its statistics. Among other things, he said, it underestimated the number of calls each officer handles per shift. He also sent a letter to Howard Safir of SafirRosetti. "One could wonder what topics, numbers or recommendations might appear in a report that was commissioned by a group other than city officials who are scrambling to find scapegoats for their own mismanagement," he wrote. Commissioners have been publicly mum about the report and have said little about the increase in crime. City memos from prior years show they were warned their cuts could lead to a crime increase. In a November 2003 memo, as Roberts was ordered to find $6.4 million to delete during a second round of cuts, he issued a warning to acting city manager Alan Silva. He wrote that "this will return the department to staffing levels only slightly above 1994 levels, when the city earned the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of serious crime in the nation." In May the following year, Roberts warned commissioners that because of budget cuts, the department already was "at a threshold that makes recruiting and retention very difficult." Additional cuts, he warned in his memo, could "greatly reduce the amount of time available for problem solving and may have a negative impact on future crime trends throughout the city." Commissioners closed the jail in 2003 to save money. As the city's population grew with several new annexed neighborhoods, commissioners reduced the police force from 514 to 498. "The FLPD has been authorized fewer officers per resident than at any time in the last five years," SafirRosetti concluded. On top of that, vacancies left unfilled starting in 2003 continue to plague the department. New hires take eight to nine months to get on the street, because of time spent in the justice academy and training, police officials say. The department hasn't been able to keep up with the churning vacancies. The SafirRosetti report concluded that vacancies must be filled immediately, and hinted that many of the department's offices can't function efficiently until that happens. The department has 26 vacancies, and 34 officers hired but still in training. Budget records dramatize Roberts' failure to fill jobs: When the budget year ends, he will leave behind $2 million he was given to spend on salaries. Roberts has been with the department since 1973, and became assistant chief in 1994, when the city was known for its crime. He was named chief in 2001. "To me it isn't rocket science," said Lokeinsky of the police union. "The same guy you thanked for reducing crime, you cut his budget and crime went up. We're not great friends, but when someone gets set up, it bothers me."

Brittany Wallman can be contacted at bwallman@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4541.

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