Osceola Sheriff ’s Office does away with gang unit
Department had years of cuts, shifts of original mission
After years of cuts and shifting missions, the Osceola County Sheriff ’s Office last month transferred the remainder of what used to be its gang unit to other areas of the agency, effectively ending a specialized squad created in the late 2000s to address gang crime.
Starting in early January, a lieutenant, a sergeant and two detectives were transferred from the gang unit, which was part of the agency’s intelligence unit, including then-Lt. Ryan Berry, who became part of Sheriff Marco López’s command staff as a captain.
The rest of the unit’s members were later reassigned to other areas of the Sheriff ’s Office, with a sergeant and a detective being assigned to patrol while another detective was transferred to the agency’s tourism policing unit.
Agency spokeswoman Nirva Rodríguez said the transfers made from the gang unit and the community services unit, from which four other deputies who had been assigned to school safety were also reassigned, were the result of shortages in the patrol division.
The gang unit’s disso
lution comes as leaders in neighboring Orange County are combating a monthslong gang feud that has been tied to a slew of shootings and deaths, including those of two children, ages 3 and 14. The earliest killing publicly linked to the dispute by authorities occurred last April at a house party near Davenport, in Osceola.
A Feb. 15 memo said two detective spots made vacant by the move would now belong to the Narcotics Enforcement Team “to address the demands of the agency and to more effectively combat crime.” There, the memo continued, the detectives hired to fill the jobs would be tasked with continuing to document gang activity and monitor alleged members.
“This would give the NET Unit additional manpower to assist with the work demands of combating street drugs in our community,” the memo said.
The remaining detective positions that were formerly part of the gang unit will continue working in the intelligence unit, to provide “desperately needed” manpower in electronic surveillance and digital forensics, “due to the increased demands from the entire agency for surveillance and phone downloads,” the memo continued.
The sergeant spot would then be filled to supervise the unit.
The Sheriff ’s Office maintains a list of alleged gang members it tracks, which gets updated monthly as detectives add names and purge others based on the information they collect. While the agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for the number of members and gangs it’s currently tracking, former OCSO Sgt. John Pearce told the Orlando Sentinel the unit at one point was monitoring as many as 1,000 people in the county.
But the criminal organizations operating in Osceola are different and less organized than those in other areas in Florida and elsewhere, he said.
“Here, gang members live throughout a subdivision, and they might hang out at someone’s house but live within miles of each other’“said Pearce, who was notified of the shake-up in December and retired shortly after being sent back to patrol in February, following 10 years in the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division, including six in the gang unit. “In New York, you can go from block to block and come in contact with different gang members that actually run that block. It’s almost like that in Orange County too, in certain areas.”
Rodríguez ignored an emailed list of questions on the matter and several other messages requesting an interview with López.
The specialized squad was formed from what used to be the Street Narcotics and Gang unit, or SNAG, which was created to tackle violent crime and drug trafficking, until Sheriff Bob Hansell took office and made a separate gang unit. At the time, authorities said the unit’s mission was to prevent gangs from gaining a foothold in Osceola County and not because there was a problem with them, The (Lakeland) Ledger reported.
Among their duties were surveillance, criminal investigation, providing material support for other units and putting on classes for school teachers on how to identify students with possible gang ties. Over the years, with cuts to the unit by Sheriff Russ Gibson and now López, the mission had been pared back, Pearce said.
“The unit itself was basically disbanded [under Gibson],” he said. “There were still some detectives, we just could not do the objective that we were supposed to have been doing under Hansell. Our objective changed, and now I don’t know what their objective is going to be.”
The unit’s creation was part of a trend among law enforcement agencies in the 1990s and 2000s to fund gang units using federal grants to combat a perceived surge in gang violence, said Jodi Lane, a criminology professor at the University of Florida.
The unit’s absence, she added, shouldn’t necessarily be cause for alarm.
“In my experience, the people who are in these agencies typically focus on the crimes they think they can solve and the ones that are more serious,” Lane said. “They basically focus on what they can strategize to solve and to get managed. So if they have those characteristics, I don’t think there’s a problem, but it really depends on how the agency will set up the change.”
The changes could also open the door to more prevention programs for at-risk youth. Ruben Saldaña, who runs Ru Camp, an acclaimed martial arts and dance gym based in areas around Orange County, is working to start boxing classes in Kissimmee next month as part of what he calls a “guns down, gloves up” initiative.
A former leader of the Miami-based International Posse, he began training kids and teens for free as a way to move their energy away from street crime. He described the need for “credible messengers,” often former gang members and other community figures, to guide youth away from criminal behavior.
“Who’s going to reach those [gang] leaders? It’s definitely not going to be law enforcement,” he said. “... It’s going to be those with lived experience who have demonstrated a change in their lives.”
Saldaña, who served prison stints on-and-off between 1993 and 2014, and now sits on the Orange County Safety Taskforce created by Mayor Jerry Demings in the wake of the recent gang feud, said gang activity won’t go away without proactive steps to address the problems that lead young people to join them.
“As long as there are broken families, gangs are going to exist,” he said. “As long as kids feel like they’re not getting love and attention in the household, gangs are going to exist.”
The Sheriff ’s Office has not said whether there are plans to create any new prevention programs for the community. Pearce, the retired sergeant, is skeptical of the future of the agency’s efforts to tackle gang crime as Osceola’s population continues to grow while he said the gang unit “has gone backwards.”
“I don’t know what makes them think that... gang members aren’t here anymore,” Pearce said.
While the unit’s disbandment isn’t necessarily a cause for alarm, Lane warned there could be backlash if crime trends worsen after its dissolution.
“In the sense of trusting the police to do their best, that part won’t change,” Lane said. “But if community members see that the problem’s increasing but the police have decreased their strategy to fight it, then that might be something that people need to worry about.”