Anthony Holloway, St. Petersburg’s new police chief, instituted a policy that requires officers to leave their cars and walk the streets for at least an hour every week.
BY SALEM SOLOMON
NNB Student Reporter
On Feb. 7, 2014, Andrew Joseph III was one of hundreds of teenagers hanging out with friends at the Florida State Fair. They had gotten free tickets from their school district and were taking advantage of the night out.
As the night wore on, things became rowdy. To restore order, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies responded to what they called a “giant stampede” and ejected 99 young people. One of them was Joseph, 14, who was struck and killed by a car while attempting to run across Interstate 4 in the dark.
For his father, Andrew Joseph Jr., it was both a tragedy and another example of mistreatment of young black men by law enforcement.
“He was officially taken in a police car off of the fairgrounds and simply abandoned,” Joseph Jr. said during an Oct. 9 town hall meeting at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “Why are our children being illegally detained at this fair? Why are they being illegally transported in official police vehicles without notification to anybody? … In the state of Florida, you can’t do that to a dog.”
Across the nation, protesters are voicing anger at a series of deaths of unarmed black males at the hands of police. Although Tampa Bay has not been the center of any of the latest protests, police and community activists agree that the potential exists for an eruption of racial anger.
A divide of mistrust between the police departments of both Tampa and St. Petersburg and the black communities they serve has festered for decades. Issues like racial profiling by police, excessive use of force and harassment are brought up regularly by residents of both cities.
In years past, both cities have had racially fueled violence growing out of incidents involving police.
In St. Petersburg, riots exploded in 1996 following the shooting death of 18-year-old TyRon Lewis and the subsequent decision of a grand jury not to indict the white police officer who shot him. After the shooting and again after the grand jury’s decision three weeks later, rioting, looting and arson did an estimated $6 million in damage.
In Tampa, there were three nights of riots in 1987 after a 23-year-old, mentally disabled black man named Melvin Hair died in a police choke hold. In 1967, an unarmed, 19-year-old black man named Martin Chambers was shot in the back and killed by Tampa police chasing three robbery suspects. It sparked three nights of rioting.
Today, officials in both cities hope to avoid a repeat of that history.
On Dec. 5, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman promised reforms to address racial unrest sweeping the nation. Along with the city’s deputy mayor, Kanika Tomalin, and Nikki Capehart, its director of urban affairs, he announced a series of actions to celebrate diversity and promote racial sensitivity in city government.
“While we recognize that unrest is a part of St. Petersburg’s history, we also recognize that today is a new day. This is a new city,” Kriseman said. “After the grand jury decision in Ferguson, several residents assembled peaceably downtown in protest, and our police officers demonstrated professionalism and respect. This was a welcome and stark contrast to the rioting and disturbances we saw on the news.”
Reforms include a “park, walk and talk” initiative by the city’s new police chief, Tony Holloway. All 550 officers in the Police Department are required to spend one hour per week walking around neighborhoods and chatting with people there.
The city plans to hold community conversations about diversity early in 2015 and follow-up conversations throughout the year as part of an outreach.
Tampa is also responding to the national issues. During the meeting on Oct. 9, police Chief Jane Castor told the audience at USF that the Tampa Police Department is taking bids to buy body cameras for its officers to wear at all times while on patrol. The department will begin by putting 20 cameras in each of the three districts of the city.
“We would never, as everyone saw in St. Louis instance, in Ferguson, bring armored vehicles out in those circumstances,” she said.
Critics, however, say that reforms addressing racial unrest or plans to cut crime rates in communities are just a continuation of pulling political tricks from old, tired books. Some even argue that the appointment of certain city officials will not change circumstances on the ground.
One of the strongest voices was Tampa Bay Times opinion columnist Bill Maxwell. He wrote that the root causes of problems lie in “high unemployment, high crime, low graduation rates, a high number of single-parent homes, a high number of out-of-wedlock births and a disproportionately high number of incarcerated males, especially the young.”
Maxwell, a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, also suggested that Tomalin and Gaskin-Capehart – both born and reared in St. Petersburg – might not be the right fit for the difficult job since the problems in Midtown are “generational and systematic.” Change, he wrote, might need to come from residents themselves, not from city officials.
Gaskin-Capehart responds that it’s not about talking the talk but walking the walk.
In a presentation to a journalism class at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, she said that “you can be tough in your words but you also have to be, in your actions, approachable enough to address the issue … I have to get in there and roll up my sleeves, and that’s not what I see enough of from his (Maxwell’s) generation.”