Who’s Looting Who?

October 4, 2022

Sheriff Carmine Marceno with Sheriff Wayne Ivey

During Hurricane Ian, Lee County, Florida, Sheriff Carmine Marceno refused to evacuate the people inside the Fort Meyers jail even though it was in an evacuation zone. The jail holds almost 500 people, and, according to an official statement, the sheriff decided just to move people to a higher floor and deem them “safe.” (Most of the people held in the facility are pretrial.)

This, despite the fact that Marceno said on Good Morning America just after the hurricane that Ian was one of the deadliest hurricanes ever. As of yesterday, there have been at least 54 deaths in Lee County and at least 100 people in the state overall. (DeSantis did his own flip-flop, arguing the hurricane was not so bad, presumably just to spite Biden and the libs. DeSantis on Sept. 29: “Most of the residents are just waving, thank you for coming, but they say that they’re fine.” Later that same day, he then backtracked and announced he would take aid from the Biden administration.) Marceno also appeared on multiple news programs to talk about the effects of the storm in the immediate aftermath.

The daughter of a 60-year-old woman incarcerated in the jail told the Miami New Times that the toilets were overflowing and her mother was given brown water to drink while the officers drank bottled water. Amidst a general sense of panic, officials still refused to evacuate even after, according to the daughter, a fire broke out. When she called the jail to offer to bring bottled water for her mother and others, she said the answering staff member hung up.

According to the mother’s attorney, she was about to plead guilty and be released; however, her hearing was delayed until September 27, then canceled because of the storm. She has been in the facility since September 14 for allegedly breaking a condition of her supervised release, and there is no word on when courts will reopen. Some people have been moved since the storm ended, and the county appears to be under a boil water order still

Marceno has historically been one of a number of “tough-on-crime” Florida sheriffs, posting TikToks of his SWAT team arresting children and boasting about militarized searches and arrests of people suspected of selling illegal drugs. He regularly posts photos to social media of arrests and searches. These ill-advised PR stunts do little except undermine the chances of a conviction by giving defense lawyers an argument for community bias against their clients should they go to trial. Still, he calls himself “The Law and Order Sheriff.”

This week, in keeping with this tradition, his office advertised that his deputies were arresting “looters” and that his office has a “zero tolerance” policy. One of the Facebook photos (that I won’t post because he shows the faces of people who have not been convicted of a crime) shows a group of young people in zipties, surrounded by a few bottles of liquor. There is also a county-wide curfew in place, which means law enforcement can arrest people for being outside. DeSantis doubled down on the message, saying in a press conference, “I can tell you, in the state of Florida, you never know what may be lurking behind somebody's home. And I would not want to chance that, if I were you, given that we're a Second Amendment state.”

Today, Marceno triple downed on his threats to looters – even though, he said, there have only been three reports of such activity. “I will tell you this with certainty. When I say zero tolerance, I mean zero tolerance. We are out in full force…If someone [chooses] to loot, they might be able to walk into someone’s home, they might, but they will, they will be carried out.”

What do sheriffs and their deputies do with their time when not posting TikToks or talking tough about a crime that it seems nobody is committing? Well, we don’t really know. The few studies out there focus mainly on urban police departments. One sheriff I talked to in Louisiana told me that he spends most of his day answering calls from community members – mainly, he said, complaints about neighbors whom the callers believe are making meth. Marceno said that during the storm, he received “double” the usual 911 calls, many of which were routed to other counties. He describes his deputies’ activities as “boots on the ground,” as if they were on a foreign military mission. True to the form of most law enforcement who talk like Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men, Marceno himself has never served in the military.

The little information out there on sheriffs as a whole mainly extols the values of the rural sheriff, who, according to the purely observational research, spends his (and in these narratives, it’s always a “his”) time getting to know people and solving workaday problems like the fictional Andry Griffith of Mayberry. In a 2003 article called “Policing Mayberry,” the two (male) authors point out that prior studies found that “officers in small-town and rural agencies perform a wider range of activities, especially those outside the purview of law enforcement, including service functions, crime prevention, and problem-solving.”

How they came to that bucolic conclusion is a mystery.  The authors did ride-alongs in five different departments, choosing shifts randomly, and found that “as a whole, observed officers spent 85.4% of their total shift time performing activities that did not involve direct contact with citizens.” The top categories were motor patrol, “administrative,” and “non-task/personal.” About one hour each shift was spent interacting with people, mostly for traffic violations. The researchers observed that most of the people were “residents” and not “mere passers-by,” but, otherwise, the time tracks closely with urban police departments who spend very little time “solving crimes.”

Sheriff Andy didn’t seem to need a SWAT team, however. Or half or more of the municipal budget.  Or a PR operation to put smaller nation-states and continental royals to shame.  What, compared to the fleecing of the public purse for so little benefit, is a few liquor bottles? 

ICYMI

In my last newsletter, I wrote about the civil trial against the Hillsborough Sheriff’s Office for killing a boy at the state fair.

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