Escambia County Sherif Chief Deputy Eric Haines Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Studer Community Institute)

When Escambia County Chief Deputy Eric Haines began his career in law enforcement, he says the guiding philosophy was clear.

“It was find bad guys, put same in jail,” Haines says. “Now they’re expecting a lot more out of law enforcement with no extra resources or training, no college requirements, no increase in salaries. Just add this to the list of things we’ve got to do. To think that the police are the solution to the crime problem is a cop out from all of these other things in my opinion.”

That list, Haines says, is growing and directly impacts law enforcement’s ability to address the crime rate, one of 16 quality of life metrics in the Studer Community Institute’s Metro Dashboard.

At the six-month mark, crime rate data from the Escambia Sheriff’s Office and Pensacola Police show crime is on the increase in both the county and the city.

Sheriff’s Office data through June shows a 3.2 percent increase in crime compared to the same period in 2014. PPD data shows a just under 1 percent increase for the year so far. Santa Rosa Sheriff Wendell Hall said his agency doesn't report mid-year data; they only report the annual data. Pensacola Police Assistant Chief Tommi Lyter didn't return messages seeking comment for this story.

That follows a year when both agencies reported decreases in the crime rate. It shows the complexity behind the numbers, Haines says.

“There’s alot to these numbers,” he says. “People don’t want to hear that. They start falling asleep about that. It’s not sexy. We have the uptick in violent crime but that’s coming off of a year that we did great on.”

The crime rate for crimes in the Sheriff’s Office’s jurisdiction in 2014 was 4,610.8 per 100,000 people — down 10.4 percent from 2013 according to data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

That was close to the rate in 2009, but the trend was on the uptick after that.

“The triple homicide threw the homicide rate through the roof, but violent crime was trending down,” Haines says.

He refers to the late July killings of Voncile Smith, 77, John William Smith, 49, and Richard Thomas Smith, 47. The mother and sons were found in their home on Deerfield Drive. They were killed with a hammer and their throats slit. Richard Thomas Smith, who worked for the Department of Homeland Security, was also shot in the head.

No one has been arrested in those killings, but Haines said the investigation is continuing pending forensic lab analysis, he said.

Retention of experienced deputies is a challenge that Haines says impacts his agency’s work.

“Lack of experience is killing us,” Haines says. “I get a report every so often on how many deputies a year are leaving and average age of our deputies. Six or seven years ago, we might have 15, 20 deputies leave. For the last three years we’ve been at 50. We’re almost twice the state rate of deputies leaving our department. That’s training money walking out the door.”

Haines said the starting salary for a deputy is $32,800. “After a year you’re at $35,000,” he says.

“The problem is, a deputy that’s been here for 10-12 years is only making a couple more dollars an hour than that. And Navy Federal will hire you if you’re one of my computer crimes investigators for $50,000 or $60,000 year.”

“PPD pays their lieutenants $84,000; ours make $54,000. Their sergeants start in the $60,000 (range); ours is $43,000. Why stay here?”

As older deputies retire, Haines says deputies in the middle of their careers are leaving for better paying jobs, leaving him with a young police force.

“I’ve got shifts out there where the highest person has six years on the road,” he says. “When I went out on a shift, there were multiple officers with 20 years on the road.”

“Look at me. I have 16 years experience and I am the chief deputy of Escambia County. That’s not good. I’m not saying I’m not capable of the job, but there should be four or five people lined up for this job with master degrees, FBI academies in their training, but there’s been no succession planning in the past.”

I spoke with Haines about the data as it stands so far this year, what trends he sees and what steps law enforcement and the public can take to address it.

QUESTION: So it looks like things are on an upward trend so far this year.

HAINES: In the last two weeks our murder rate for the year has doubled. Our violent crime in month of July, even with those four homicides, was down 25.1 percent over July of last year. Almost one of the lowest on record, so we had six crazy months and then this awesome month.

August figures will be coming soon.

Q: One of the things that stood out to me was the increase in sex crimes.

Haines: I did notice that, too. When it comes to stats, if the police make a big push to report domestic violence, crimes go up in domestic violence. That’s not the only reason why they go up, but it can seem counterproductive to do more reporting.

Anytime I see a rape stat, we always hope that when that number goes up, it's just people being confident and coming forward. It's always considered a very under-reported crime. That's one that's difficult to say is there a trend.

Most of them are people they knew or a casual acquaintance so I don't know if it's a trend, hopefully not, or just more people comfortable in reporting that. If it were linked to a trend, like if women were getting raped in parking lots, then we’d be concerned about that, but these are people that they knew or a casual acquaintance. I hope it’s not a trend, but it’s hard to say.

Q: Is there a way you can address it?

Haines: That’s one of those difficult crimes, like what can law enforcement do to fix that? If it’s a date rape, how do we put an officer in that situation to stop that from happening? That’s an educational type thing for the long-term.

Q: Car thefts are declining I see.

Haines: They’ve been trending down for many years. It used to be you could steal a car 20 years ago, chop it up sell the parts and nobody knows. Then they started putting serial numbers on every part. Then Onstar and GPS or cell phone so people get their car stolen, they can call police and we know right where it is. So it’s not a very profitable business anymore.

We haven’t done anything different in stolen vehicles. In fact, that’s one of the things I use to rebut my deputies when they say ‘we should be able to chase stolen cars. If everyone can run away from us, car thefts will go up.’ Car thefts have gone down for years now. Again, I think it's that technology has found a way to beat that.

Q: Crime is up overall, property and violent crime?

Haines: Property crime up 3.2 percent; violent crime is up 14.4 percent. Property crime can happen to anyone, but a lot of those are drug ripoffs.

But (Uniform Crime Report) stats and I'll tell you now, we're not doing anything this year because it's going to look that we did it for political purposes but I think we need to. There’s a new person in charge of (Uniform Crime Report) for (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) who contacted us because we are outside the norm.

What he is telling us is we’ve been, not over-reporting crime, but it says in UCR it’s up to the agency how we interpret the results we give to them. If anyone in county says, this happened to me, we write the report and count it as a UCR stat. He’s saying if you don’t have reason to believe that it actually happened, you don’t have to claim the stat.

Like if someone says, my car was stolen at the Stomping Ground. We all know that they traded their car for a couple pieces of crack. So was the car ever stolen? If you can show that they lie about their story. He’s saying don’t declare that stat.

Or someone says I was robbed, a prostitute, and you get a hold of the guy and there’s evidence to show that she wasn’t robbed, it was a transaction and he said he’d give $50 and he only gave her $20. Do we want to report that? Or she claims a rape. Do we want to report that a rape occurred in Escambia County because right now we do and that skews us against the rest of the state when people look at these crime windows.

The touchy part is the example he gave, we have a huge domestic violence rate compared to other people. The way we count these right now is if I call the law and say my wife hit me, and she says no he pushed me. There’s no witnesses and no evidence or injuries, many agencies will say they’ll take an information report but there’s no determining who the victim is here. In Escambia County, we report that as two victims, get two battery domestic violence, where a county in South Florida would say there’s no domestic violence that takes place here.

That’s why they caution never use UCR for comparative analysis to other agencies. Use it to compare your own agency to itself.

What’s going in Escambia County why do we have this ratio of 5,000 violent crimes per 100,000, when down there they only have 3,000. Well, we can make those stats change.

If we do anything about it right now, (it can seem that) we’re trying to make it look like crime’s going down. So I talked to Dr. (Richard) Hough at UWF, Sue Hand at Favor House, and the Domestic Violence Coalition, if we decide to start following what other counties do, that we are very open about it after any election, and say the numbers are going to go down for this specific reason.

Unfortunately people use this to compare against other counties, so should we do it like other counties do? Is there any benefit to logging it the way we log it now, expect to make it look like we’re much worse? I don’t know how all that will pan out.

It would be easy to make it look like we had a 20-30 percent drop in crime this year. But that doesn’t serve the purpose of saying are we having more crime or less crime than we did last year.

Because if I'm doing that artificially, I really haven't learned anything from it.

Q: The way you describe that, it sounds like, well, gaming the system.

Haines: Absolutely.

Q: Is there a state standard you are supposed to use, or is it on the honesty policy?

Haines: (There is an employee who goes through every police report and checks to see if it logged according to FBI and FDLE standards for UCR reporting.) Whatever the officer says it is, is how we declare it. If I walk into a theater with a gun and there’s 300 people in there, that’s 300 incidents of aggravated assault that just took place in one incident. That one year we had a spike in homicides we had like three double homicides in year. If you looked at actual incidents of murder, there was nothing unusual about it, it’s just that when they were killing people, two people were there when they killed them. And people eat these things up to either the sheriff is doing a great job or the sheriff is doing a terrible job just like they do the president on the economy. Many studies have shown the president really can't affect the economy.

What can a sheriff do to stop homicide? You’ve noticed in our press releases what we’ve started doing is listing all the times this individual has been arrested for felonies before. Because no one lives the perfect life and then goes and puts a gun in somebody’s face and kills them if they don’t know them unless it’s a crime of passion. But all along we arrested that kid as a juvenile for a petit theft. We arrested him when he beat somebody up. Then he started selling drugs. Then he shot at somebody but missed. Then he shot somebody, and these people have been arrested 20+ times, and then when they finally kill someone it’s like, ‘what is law enforcement doing about this?’ Do you want me to post a deputy on every drug dealer in Escambia County to make sure that they don’t get killed so that our homicide rate goes down? There’s only so much we can do about these types of things.

Q: What can the community do about it?

Haines: The first thing I’m always going to go to is funding. The sheriff’s office budget is about $200 per citizen in Escambia County. (Pensacola Police Department’s) budget is about $400 per citizen. They have 50,000 residents with $20 million to put toward law enforcement. That’s one of the reasons why they have a very high clearance rate because they can hire a lot of detectives. We have $50 million budget for 250,000. So we have 2 ½ times the budget for five times as many people.  

The county is much more spread out. We do a good job with what we have. where we get in trouble is on property crimes because I don’t have the resources. (Property crimes) have a really low clearance rate nationally, but when I’ve only got (seven investigators, two supervisors and one secretary) in property crimes we have to turn a blind eye to the petit thefts. If there’s a guy hitting sheds and stuff, it’s hard for me to put the resources to find out who that is and the community gets frustrated with that.

Q: (Former PPD) Chief Chip Simmons noted last year that they chose to focus on two things they felt they could move the needle on: residential burglaries and gun crimes. They set up a thing where they would go over all the residential burglaries at the morning roll call, supervisors and if they noticed a trend, they’d increase patrols.

Haines: Intel-based policing and yes we have something like that. That fact we keep up with state average on clearance rates is almost miraculous. Some of them have caseloads in the hundreds. That’s where we get a lot of dissatisfaction. You leave your shed unlocked, and I’m not justifying that you should be a victim, but you forget to put the padlock on. Your chainsaw gets stolen. You never wrote down the serial number. Then you call the police and expect us to dedicate dozens of hours to track down this chainsaw, when the likelihood of finding it is very slim and the chainsaw might be worth $50. So we have to prioritize things. And that torques people. Well there’s a lady down the street who got scammed out of $100,000. Which one to we now select to investigate? If we come across a chainsaw and you’ve got the serial number, that makes it easy. If anyone tries to pawn it, it will come up and that’s an easy arrest. But the citizens don’t take the time to do the small things like that click the padlock. If every citizen in Escambia County did, we’d have the lowest property crime rate.

And I’m not pointing fingers without pointing fingers back at me because I don’t write down my serial numbers and I try to remember to lock my shed. It’s human nature.

A still from security camera footage of the Get Money car burglary ring operating in 2014.

When we see a trend in a neighborhood, like the Get Money team. When we start having atrend. Right now we’re having a bunch of burglaries on vehicles that are unlocked up in those same neighborhoods. Which is probably coincidence, because we have to keep an open mind, but a lot of these kids have done their sentence and are back out. So we’re going to start that, follow these kids around, see what they’re doing. Residential burglaries are kind of hit or miss. Sometimes we’ll have a trend and then it goes. Sometimes they happen around the interstate where you’ll have people hop the interstate, hit some homes and leave. Our supervisors always looking for trends….

Usually what you have is a car gets stolen in Cantonment. A car gets stolen in Warrington. A car gets stolen in Brownsville. And when you look into them. This guy traded his for crack. This one, his son took the car keys after he said he couldn’t. This one, they woke up and there was glass in driveway and someone obviously hotwired it. That one there is legitimate but I had to sort through these other two and realize they’re not all related.

Yes, they were getting killed by their residential burglaries. And they were all along the bayou, they’re all happening in the day. It doesn’t take real rocket science to find the trend on that. Just like we were getting killed on burglaries at hotels a couple years back. We started paying overtime for investigators to just sit in their personal cars in hotel parking lots until we finally saw them coming and robbing a place. Those are the easy pickings that we’re already taking care of.

Q: Is there a through line for this year so far?

Haines: We’re  making a big push for vehicle burglaries right now, that’s one of those low hanging fruits.You’ve seen our ‘Lock it or Lose it’ campaign. We could drop hundreds of crimes out of Escambia County by people locking their cars. If a third of the people in Marcus Pointe leave their car unlocked, I can assure you every three months somebody’s going to come through there and get whatever they can out of Marcus Pointe. Then it’s ‘what kind of neighborhood is this turning into?’ Lock your cars.

It’s all about target hardening when it comes to property crimes. Make them go to another county. (Santa Rosa) Sheriff (Wendall) Hall will joke we’re pushing the people into his county. If there’s X number of criminals, I don’t want them in my county, go somewhere else. Let’s harden the targets and make it difficult.