Crime & Safety

Pasco Sheriff's Proposed Budget Focuses On Pill Crimes, Better Analysis

Chris Nocco submitted his budget to county commissioners June 1.

The Pasco County Sheriff's proposed $83.3 million budget seeks to add 23 staff, including detectives who will beef up the agency's battle against prescription pill crimes and analysts who use data to make the agency more "proactive."

Chris Nocco’s budget request is about 3.5 percent lower than the current Pasco County Sheriff’s Office budget.

Nocco said that the county is in a tough budget cycle, but he said he has gotten “positive feedback” from county commissioners. Much of the budget reductions come from new statewide legislation that requires employees on the Florida Retirement System to kick in 3 percent of their salary.

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“It’s important that we work together,” Nocco said after releasing his budget to commissioners and the press June 1. “Not only for the protection of our citizens but for the county as a whole.”

Twelve of the new hires would be added to the Sheriff’s vice and narcotics team. One team of five new detectives and one new sergeant concentrates on street-level distribution of pills, doctor shopping and fake prescriptions.

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The other team, also comprising five detectives and one sergeant, concentrates on long-term investigations, major violators and working with other law enforcement agencies to target the prescription drug problem.

In 2009, the sheriff’s office seized 13,598 pills compared to 28,412 in 2010. Prescription pill-related crimes accounted for 64 percent of the cases generated by its Vice and narcotics Unit in 2010. The year before, they accounted for 45 percent.

Nocco, appointed by Gov. Rick Scott in April to finish out Bob White’s term as sheriff,  also wants to add six licensed practical nurses and two certified nursing assistants to the jail staff. He said that Maj. Ed Beckman, head of the Pasco Detention Bureau, told him there are currently 70 inmates in detox.

“The numbers within the jail are staggering,” Nocco said.

The three analysts Nocco wants to hire fit into the second lynchpin of Nocco’s budget plan.  Nocco says he is trying to move his agency toward “Intelligence-Led Policing,” a technique which uses “optimal, targeted resource allocation” based on a “full understanding” of the community in which police are operating, according to Nocco’s budget letter.  

“Instead of being a reactive law enforcement agency that, if there’s a crime, we just focused on what happened in the past, we’re going to be proactive,” Nocco told the press.

The plan revolves around the notion that 6 percent of the population is responsible for 60 percent of the crime.

“If we target them, then we’ll be successful in all of our operations,” Nocco said.

The analysts will be responsible for developing "relevant" and "timely intelligence strategies", according to Nocco's budget letter, and monitoring criminal trends in Pasco and surrounding counties. They will review calls to place deputies in Pasco's most crime-ridden areas. They will analyze data from the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, a database which tracks a person's prescription history and was recently given the OK to move forward in the state, and liaison with other policing agencies.

Under this model, developed in Kent, England and used by the U.S. military, Nocco says, a deputy responding to a shoplifting incident in Holiday might notice the suspect had gang ink identifying him as a "Blood or "Crip" member.

The deputy writes the information down. It goes to the analysts, who realize that gang isn't active in that neighborhood. On a traffic stop later that week, a suspect in a traffic stop has the same tattos. The detention deputies start talking to the suspects and see the gang is trying to form up in Holiday.

"It's the small little dots that once you start connecting them, show a large picture," he said.   

Nocco’s predecessor got into a battle with commissioners over the budget. White wanted $4 million more in the budget than commissioners were at first willing to add. He wanted the extra money so he could hire more deputies and cover escalating insurance and pension costs. White appealed the budget with the governor, but he and the county reached a settlement right before a hearing in Tallahassee.


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