Mugged: Dora Smagler and DJ Tracy Young were robbed in front of a security camera at a BP station on Biscayne Boulevard, but the cops never followed up. Photo by Jacqueline Carini/jacquelinecariniphotography.com

Red and white flashing police lights lit up the Overtown night as Miami Police scrambled to contain a man who’d just pushed an officer to the ground and fled. A police helicopter circled overhead, its bright spotlight searching rooftops of dilapidated, wooden-frame houses and rundown, low-rise apartments.

The police department pulled about 15 officers from their patrols in Allapattah, the Upper Eastside and downtown to aid in the hunt for the unnamed man, who had an outstanding warrant for failing to pay child support. Cops surrounded the entire block between Northwest First Avenue and First Court, and 18th and 19th streets. No one knew whether he had a gun or would use it.

“The chopper detected a heat sensor,” Sgt. Rafael Toirac said, standing at a command post at the end of an alley.

Police officers wanted to send canines to sniff the man out of the bushes down the dark alley, but protocol called for two dogs and they only had one. They paced around, waiting more than 20 minutes for a second canine officer to arrive from the Miami-Dade County Schools Police Department, and then discovered the man had escaped.

The Miami Police Department lacks the personnel and resources it needs to patrol some of the toughest streets in the county, in part because of historically low pay, seemingly low morale and high turnover rates. To combat these problems, the department recently raised salaries and began pushing to recruit more officers. In the meantime, though, officers are struggling to keep up with criminals.

“The shortage of officers is an important issue,” Fraternal Order of Police President Armando Aguilar said.

Salaries an issue

Last year, Miami ranked 23rd of the county’s 30 police departments in terms of starting pay, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. While rookie officers in the peaceful village of Bal Harbour earned $48,000 a year, for example, those starting in the city of Miami earned only $37,817 annually.

After contentious contract negotiations that climaxed last year with police protests at the opening of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, the city and the union agreed on a new contract with higher pay. That, in turn, has helped attract more applicants.

During the last hiring drive before the new contract, the city received only 200 of the 500 applicants it hoped for, and that was only after the deadline was extended three times, according to Aguilar.

“Of those, only 11 made it to the academy,” Aguilar said.

Now that the starting pay is up to $43,293, the latest drive, which ended Sept. 14, attracted 750 applications without any deadline extensions.

“The pay was definitely a significant factor in getting more applicants,” Miami Police Lieutenant Bernard Johnson said.

Angel Calzadilla, senior executive assistant to Chief John Timoney, agrees. “With this new contract, which [Timoney] was instrumental in making a reality (he also was able to get them to add additional monies for officers with college degrees) we are now much more competitive,” Calzadilla wrote in an e-mail.

According to Miami Police spokesman Napier Velazquez, the department currently has 1,025 sworn officers, with 471 on patrol. (Incidentally, Calzadilla provided two very different numbers of sworn officers just a few days later — 1,040, according to Timoney’s office, and 1,062, according to the assistant chief’s office.)

Regardless, many cops say that’s not enough to properly protect the 36-square-mile city, particularly when Miami’s ongoing construction boom is attracting more people.

At the time of the 2000 census, the city of Miami had 362,470 residents, a figure that is expected to reach 390,191 by 2010. That doesn’t include residents of nearby cities who will work in Miami’s new offices, restaurants and other businesses.

Plus, some 80 officers are getting ready to retire and the department isn’t keeping up with attrition, Aguilar said. Although its Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP) financially rewards officers for working four years past retirement, most officers are not staying, he said.

The department hopes to add 160 officers “as a result of all the construction and the growing population in Miami, and the need for additional traffic control,” Calzadilla wrote.

But even as officers are hired, rookies generally aren’t as good at fighting crime as veterans.

“You’ve got to get street smart, and most officers when they come on aren’t street smart,” 25-year veteran Toirac said.

Overwhelmed

The department’s manpower shortage was apparent on that recent night in Overtown, when officers had to abandon their territories during the 40 or so minutes of that failed manhunt.

The city is broken into 11 patrol neighborhoods — Coconut Grove, Coral Way, Flagami, Little Havana, Downtown, Overtown, Wynwood/Edgewater, Allapattah, Model City, Little Haiti and the Upper Eastside.

On most nights, only about 21 officers patrol the huge area that includes Downtown, Overtown, Allapattah and Wynwood/Edgewater, Toirac explained.

During the night shift in Overtown, Toirac said, “I only have four officers. I wish I had seven.” As of Sept. 30, there were 11 homicides in that neighborhood — four more than in all of 2006 and almost as many as the 13 that occurred in all of 2000.

Toirac stopped his patrol car in front of a two-story apartment building at the corner of Northwest 16th Street and First Court. AK-47 bullet holes were plainly visible in the metal fence and façade of the building. A young man had been murdered there earlier in the year. A few hours later on the same night, another man was gunned down in front of the building next door. Toirac said the second murder likely was retaliation for the first, and drugs were probably at the center of the dispute.

Even though restaurants and clubs and expensive condos are being built in and around the area, it still is an open-air market for crack and heroin. Addicts, their eyes glazed over, strut in and out of the neighborhood looking for drugs 24 hours a day.

Still, Toirac explained, the way the laws are written, it’s very difficult to arrest a dealer or a customer without witnessing an actual exchange of cash or drugs. And the dealers there know the laws and the streets just as well as the cops.

Shortly after the failed Overtown manhunt, Toirac raced to an apartment building at 1130 N.W. Second Ave. to respond to a call that a woman had been shot. Officers from all over the area responded, but it turned out to be a prank call, likely made from a pay phone.

“A lot of times [drug] dealers will make these prank calls to get us away from another area,” Toirac said, adding that even when officers suspect a call is a prank, they must treat it like the real thing.

Since the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, assault rifles have flooded the streets and made their jobs even tougher. A knockoff AK-47 sells for about $300 in South Florida gun shops, and can be purchased in a few days.

In September, Timoney announced that Miami Police officers could carry assault rifles if they pay for them themselves. That same week, Shawn Sherwin Labeet sprayed four Miami-Dade Police officers with bullets from an automatic MAK-90 assault rifle, killing Officer Jose Somohano and injuring the other three, before police killed him nearly 12 hours later.

‘Mugged’

Not enough officers on the streets means police must first respond to high-priority calls like shootings and other violent crimes, often leaving other victims waiting.

Just ask Dora Smagler and Tracy Young.

At 6 a.m. on Sept. 14, the couple, who lives on the Upper Eastside, stopped for gas at the BP station at 69th Street and Biscayne Boulevard on their way to work out at a South Beach gym. Smagler was sitting in the passenger’s seat of their BMW 330 with the window down; Young was in the driver’s seat with the door open while the gas automatically pumped.

A man approached Smagler’s side.

“He asked for a dollar and I said ‘no’ and then he reached into the car,” said Smagler, 38.

The two played tug-of-war with Young’s black Tumi bag that was resting on Smagler’s lap. At one point, she pulled up her legs and kicked him in the face and chest, but he refused to let go. He allegedly pulled on the inside handle to open the car door and broke it, at which point she let go and he took off with the bag running west on 68th Street.

“I was kicking him and kicking him, but when she [Young] jumped out of the car after him I was completely panicking because anything could have happened,” Smagler said. He got into a getaway car and was gone. Smagler drove the car down the block to pick up Young and immediately returned to the gas station to call police.

“I was blown away that it took 30 minutes for a cop to get there,” Smagler said.

Smagler and Young don’t know why police took so long to respond, but Aguilar said the strong-armed robbery should have been a priority.

There was a security camera pointed at their car during the robbery, and someone tried to use one of Young’s credit cards at a nearby gas station later that morning. However, police still haven’t told them whether they obtained the man’s picture from the security camera or even checked it at all.

“Every time I call they say the officer is out of the office, out to lunch,” Smagler said. “We got mugged and that’s basically our loss. They haven’t helped at all.”

The detectives involved with the case couldn’t be reached for comment.

Now, Young and Smagler are looking over their shoulders.

“I have a convertible and I’m afraid to put the top down, or, if I do, I keep the windows up,” said Young, 36, who happens to be the DJ who played Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s wedding in Scotland. “We’re not scared walking around, we’re just aware.”

A woman named Theresa mailed Young’s credit cards and business cards back to her with a note explaining that she found them on her front porch, a few miles away. She didn’t get back the Tumi bag, a pair of Prada sunglasses, a Louis Vuitton wallet, identification and about $150 cash.

‘Misleading the public’

Morale, Aguilar said, is another reason officers are leaving for other departments, not applying or retiring early.

After more than 80 percent of the union voted no confidence in Chief Timoney on Sept. 4, the Champion Services Group began conducting one-on-one interviews with officers and holding focus groups to take the pulse on morale.

“I told them not to waste the money because our vote of no confidence already told the story,” Aguilar said.

Timoney shot back at the allegations and the vote of no confidence in a written statement:

“One, the Champion Services Group is something the city administration, including HR, implemented, not the Miami Police Department. The Miami Police Department had no say on this matter. With that said, it’s interesting that the FOP president would consider an attempt by the director of human resources to contract an outside, independent agency to do a confidential, anonymous study to identify the concerns of his union members, as ‘a waste of time.’ Second, the so-called vote of no confidence was actually more a reflection of the lack of leadership in the FOP than it was a reflection of this administration. We believe, quite simply, that Armando was duped by subversive elements on his board.”

Aguilar blames the heavy-handed management style of top brass for contributing to the low morale. During roll calls, he said, brass asks officers to express their problems and concerns, but chides those who speak up.

“If you get to work and your boss slaps you on the side of the head every day, even though you’re doing a good job, you won’t want to come to work,” Aguilar said.

Timoney denied that claim too.

“When I go to roll calls, I make it a point to ask for questions, especially on controversial issues,” Timoney wrote. “It would be ridiculous of me to reprimand an officer for responding after soliciting an opinion. I have never issued, nor am I aware of, any reprimand being issued in reference to the above.”

True or not, Timoney is the center of investigations from both state and local ethics committees and the Miami Civilian Investigative Panel, after it was discovered in August that he’d been driving an SUV from Lexus of Kendall for free for more than a year without reporting it. After he was caught, he purchased the $54,000 Lexus RX Hybrid for the full sticker price, and publicly apologized, all the while insisting he’d done nothing wrong.

When the SunPost scheduled two recent police ride-alongs, Lt. Bill Schwartz said questions about Timoney were off-limits.

 “The political things going on with the chief aren’t the focus of the story, are they?” he said. “If it comes up in conversation, you’ll be immediately driven back to the station.”

Officers would not answer questions about Timoney, citing the tense environment around the station, but they didn’t hesitate to talk about working overtime to fill in holes.

“We’re putting officers on double shifts almost on a daily basis,” Aguilar said.

During fiscal year 2005-06, the department spent $9,231,908 on overtime, up from $9.2 million the year before.

On top of it all, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is inquiring about claims that the department plays with certain crime stats to make it appear that Miami is safer than it really is.

Homicides in Miami rose by 43 percent between 2005 and 2006; sexual batteries increased 63 percent in the same period. Those percentages translated into 77 homicides and 101 sexual battery cases in 2006.

Robberies also increased 5 percent in that time.

Conversely, the very crimes that allegedly have been sugarcoated — like burglary and larceny — decreased by 17 and 14 percent during the same period.

“This guy [Timoney] is misleading the public into a sense of false security,” Aguilar said.

Julia Carfagno contributed to this report.

Comments? E-mail ben@miamisunpost.com.