VIDEO BELOW

Florida gave thousands of tarnished officers a second chance. Hundreds blew it

More than 500 officers who were allowed to continue their law enforcement careers went on to commit offenses that resulted in their decertification

Joseph Floyd turned Florida’s Crestview Police Department into a criminal enterprise, the judge said at his 2013 sentencing, but his willingness to break the rules didn’t start there.

Story after story from witnesses, including fellow officers, illustrated the “irreparable” harm the judge said the police major caused: accusations of excessive use of force, false arrests, sexual assault, bribery, planting drugs, falsifying police reports and intimidating other officers to force them to go along with his crimes.

A woman lost her unborn child after Floyd intentionally rammed her car with his police vehicle, flipping it multiple times, leading to a $75,000 legal settlement with the city in Florida’s Panhandle, according to court records.

“The volume of the evidence presented to the jury was remarkable, astounding really,” said Judge Michael Flowers in rejecting the minimum sentencing for racketeering and ordering Floyd to prison for 12 years.

“He ruined lives,” special prosecutor Russ Edgar said. “He perverted justice, and he did everything a police officer should never do. He used his badge to break the law. He had no respect for it, no observance for it in these incidents.”

But Floyd crossed legal and ethical lines long before Crestview hired him.

“A background investigation would have revealed that Floyd has demonstrated that he did not have the necessary character traits to be a good officer,” the grand jury foreman wrote when Floyd was indicted in 2012.

Before he became a cop, Floyd was arrested for battery, disorderly conduct and resisting a law enforcement officer, the grand jury found. As an officer, Floyd was terminated for misconduct or forced to resign from three other agencies — the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, Sneads Police Department and Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office — for offenses similar to those he was accused of in Crestview.

Thousands of tarnished officers around the state have been forced out from another Florida agency for misconduct in the last 30 years. At least 505 of those law enforcement and corrections officers who were given a second chance, including Floyd, later committed an offense that led to decertification, an investigation by the Naples Daily News and The News-Press found.

The vast majority of those officers committed some form of crime, ranging from drug offenses to sexual assault to murder, leaving a trail of victims and at least two dozen lawsuits.

These officers were able to find work because the main burden for weeding out bad hires in Florida is put on local agencies, and the minimum requirements for officers, established by a state law that some criminal justice experts criticize as weak, did not explicitly disqualify them from employment.

The same minimum requirements have left hundreds of questionable hires currently on agency payrolls, including dozens of officers with such poor character that they could be barred from testifying in court.

The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and others at the hands of law enforcement have spurred calls for police reform. But Florida lawmakers have largely failed to address how troubled officers get hired, as evidenced by the lack of proposed legislation spanning nearly a decade. A bill is in the works that calls for the creation of a misconduct registry, but that information is already public record in Florida. Another would reduce qualified immunity for police, which limits their personal liability.

“What I found is it is a terrible system for hiring officers,” said former Oak Hill (Florida) Police Chief Walt Zalisko, a policing practice expert who also had decades of law enforcement experience in New Jersey. “You can have an officer who’s been under investigation and resigns and it will say something like it was a voluntary separation. Cities will do that to avoid possible litigation down the road. We’ve seen officers who have changed departments eight times.”

State Sen. Bobby Powell, D-West Palm Beach, who will sit on the criminal justice committee during Florida’s upcoming legislative session, said the issue needs to be explored. “We need to look at the backgrounds of people being hired.”

Hundreds of officers given a second chance were later decertified

Florida’s minimum requirements to become a police officer, which are established by law, don’t prevent officers forced out from other agencies from being hired at another agency.

Since 1988, thousands of Florida law enforcement officers who were fired for misconduct or who resigned in lieu of termination were given multiple chances to continue their careers, according to a study published in April in the Yale Law Journal by Duke University professor Ben Grunwald and University of Chicago professor John Rappaport.

They made up about 2% of employed officers during that time, which the researchers said translated to nearly 800 of these officers working in any given year. The study also found that these officers were nearly twice as likely as other hires to be fired again and 75% more likely to be accused of a serious offense.

In addition to being forced out for misconduct at a higher rate than others, tarnished cops were also more likely to commit an act that resulted in decertification, according to an analysis by the Naples Daily News and The News-Press that tracked the work histories of decertified officers using employment records.

The 505 law enforcement and corrections officers who went on to commit another serious offense after being forced out for misconduct from another agency make up about 6% of the more than 8,000 decertifications since 1990, according to the analysis. Corrections officers in Florida are held to the same minimum employment requirements as law enforcement officers.

The analysis is likely an undercount based on Zalisko’s explanation of how departments have sometimes categorized officer separations.

At least 433 of the complaints against tarnished officers that led to decertification were criminal in nature, though not all of the offenses were prosecuted.

Drug offenses were the most common reason for decertification of the officers identified in the analysis, with 20% of the officers committing offenses including drug possession, sales or driving under the influence.

Sheriff’s offices have been sued at least 24 times since 1990 as a result of the actions of these officers, according to local and federal court records. This figure does not include notices of claim submitted to the cities or agencies, which could have been resolved before litigation was filed.

In some of the most serious cases, there were connections between past misdeeds and the offenses that led to decertification.

Jimmy Dac Ho was fired from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office after he was accused of domestic abuse. He was then hired by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, which fired him after he shot and killed 29-year-old Sheri Carter in 2011. He’s serving two life sentences for murder.

Before the murder, Ho also was accused of being overzealous as a police officer at Florida Atlantic University, leading to complaints about excessive use of force. The university had to settle a lawsuit by a student whom Ho injured during a false arrest and required surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff, according to court records.

The university also settled a lawsuit filed by Carter’s mother.

Also among the officers identified in the newspapers’ analysis is former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano, who was hired at the agency in 2008 despite being forced out at the Sunny Isles Police Department in 2006.

Before Atesiano became police chief, he accepted an offer to resign from Sunny Isles in exchange for the state attorney’s office declining to file criminal charges after he admitted to forging the signature of a suspect on a promise-to-appear affidavit, according to an internal affairs investigation completed by the agency.

The Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission, the body that certifies and decertifies officers, also declined to issue any further punishment, instead sending a letter of guidance to Atesiano.

“The Panel decided to take no disciplinary action against your certification, and that the profession would be best served by allowing you to learn from your mistakes,” then-Commissioner Gerald Bailey wrote.

After he became a police chief, Atesiano pleaded guilty in 2018 to directing officers to frame people through false arrests and to claim false confessions in order to clear unsolved burglaries.

A Sunny Isles Police Department memo documents an agreement with Raimundo Atesiano in which he would resign in exchange for the state attorney’s office not pursuing criminal charges against him for forgery.

“Putting an arrest statistic above the rights of an innocent man instead of working to protect all our citizens undermines the safety goals of every Miami-Dade police department,” State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said. “Miami-Dade’s residents deserve honesty and integrity, qualities that Raimundo Atesiano deliberately failed to deliver.”

Atesiano is serving a three-year prison sentence.

The officers whom Atesiano instructed to make false arrests settled with two of Atesiano’s victims.

Clarens Desrouleaux, whose settlement was subject to a confidentiality clause, spent five years in prison before he was deported to Haiti, which separated him from his wife and children, court records show. The court system also vacated Desrouleaux’s conviction.

Officers are held to a lesser standard when hired

The checkered pasts in many officers’ backgrounds show that the higher standards and expectations of law enforcement do not necessarily apply in the hiring process.

State rules require agencies to verify that officers they hire are of “good moral character” through the vetting of government databases, past employment checks and history of drug use.

Beside the training, physical and academic standards to become certified, the only disqualifiers include a dishonorable discharge from the armed services, any felony conviction or any misdemeanor conviction involving perjury or a false statement.

However, good moral character is subject to interpretation by local agencies, Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesperson Gretl Plessinger said, and is not necessarily inclusive of the moral character violations that could lead to loss of certification once someone becomes an officer.

Moral character violations, which are established by state law, include any felony offense or specific misdemeanors such as assault, battery, DUI, theft, possession of drugs, falsifying records, making false statements, exposure of sexual organs and prostitution regardless of prosecution.

They also can include noncriminal offenses such as sex on duty, excessive use of force, subverting testing or training and false statements during the employment application process.

Roger Goldman, a professor at St. Louis University and a national expert on police licensing laws, said the state’s interpretation has essentially created two different character standards for hiring and decertifying officers because there is no uniformity.

For example, Matthew Vandetti was one of 51 deputies hired by the Hendry County Sheriff’s Office since 2009 who had a history of personal or professional misconduct.

Before he was hired by the Clewiston Police Department and the Hendry County Sheriff’s Office, at least nine other agencies rejected or disqualified Vandetti, many of which stated it was because of his past conduct, selection records show.

According to pre-employment disclosures and polygraph reports, Vandetti admitted to at least 10 vehicle burglaries in North Naples, using drugs, soliciting a prostitute, having sex with a minor and inadvertently exposing his genitals at a drug store in Lee County. He was also accused of falsifying applications and using countermeasures during polygraph exams.

While Vandetti said most of those offenses occurred when he was a juvenile, according to a 2003 polygraph report, a Collier County Sheriff’s Office polygraph examiner noted “significant responses” to questions about involvement in illegal activities, use of marijuana more than 20 times and the sale of illicit drugs for profit after he became an adult, the report stated.

Vandetti said he did not remember making those admissions or the events ever happening when he applied again to the agency nearly a decade later, employment records show.

Vandetti could have been decertified if he had committed those offenses as an officer.

His past conduct did not prevent Clewiston from hiring him in 2015 and Hendry in 2018 even though the agencies were aware that he had disclosed those offenses to the Collier County Sheriff's Office, employment records show.