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E-Mail Keeps Police In The Loop

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By GRETCHEN PARKER, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 25, 2007

TAMPA - The crime in Southeast Seminole Heights is still old-fashioned.

The methods are conventional.

Dump a mountain of trash on a curb after dark. Climb through the window of an abandoned home, pull in an old mattress and start a prostitution/meth house. Establish an illegal car dealership on an unused parking lot.

On a Friday night, haul in cages of dogs and hold gruesome, high-stakes fights. Be gone by morning.

These days, neighborhood organizers are gaining on the troublemakers by using a nonstop, always-pulsing e-mail connection to their police and code enforcement officers and city staffers.

From their laptops, they send messages night and day and usually get a response, they say.

The flow of electronic information - between the activists and those paid to safeguard the city - streams out over the neighborhood and forms what residents describe as a tight net of surveillance that gets accomplished more easily than in the old days of endless missed phone connections and trips to the police department.

The e-mail has forged a stronger bond than would have been possible in years past, because the officers who patrol their neighborhood are more accessible, said Sherry Genovar-Simons, president of the Southeast Seminole Heights Civic Association.

"It works. Look at the crime statistics. Look at the difference. It's phenomenal," she said. "It's their attitude, but part of the attitude is the accessibility and part of the accessibility is the e-mail."
Serious crimes - including burglaries, larcenies, robberies and stolen cars - dropped 31 percent in the neighborhood between 1999 and the end of last year, according to Tampa police reports.

The area runs from Hillsborough Avenue south to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and from about Interstate 275 east to North 15th Street.

Link Is Always There

Simons sends so much e-mail to her police contacts, a crime prevention officer and the major who oversees District 3, that they wonder what's going on if they don't hear from her for a week. It's a link that's always there.

As crime has gone down, she sends fewer complaints - these days it's only three or four a week, she said. She also forwards messages from members of her association, and neighbors send police e-mail on their own, as well.

Simons sees it almost as a return to beat police work, before cops got into cars and lost some of their one-on-one contact with residents.

"If I don't get a response from Major Bob Guidara in two hours, it's because he's not working. It's his day off," Simons said.

Guidara forwards her e-mail to the officers who need to see it and to the managers of departments that can help.

"Then I get responses from those people," Simons said. "And they will tell me, 'This is what we're going to do.' And then they'll go out, and I'll get an e-mail afterward saying, 'This is what we found.'"

Often, she'll get an e-mail two weeks later with an update.

Many e-mails are sent to police the day after or in the middle of the night, after a neighbor has spotted an illegal car-repair shop or prostitution. It's not for reporting emergencies or dangerous crimes that are happening at the moment.

"It's not like there's a major crime bust as a result of this, but what it really is, is a system of communication that allows better policing," Simons said. "Because it's insane to expect that any kind of police force would know what's going on in the house next to you."

At the same time, the e-mail relationship has evolved and expanded, so that it now includes code enforcement and city managers who oversee services in neighborhoods. That is key, because usually coordination is needed to address problems that a code officer or police officer can't solve on their own.

"This system we've got really is the best thing ever to happen to Southeast Seminole Heights, because they can get whatever they want, pretty much in a few minutes," said Kristin McRae, the code enforcement officer who covers the neighborhood and e-mails with residents there almost daily.

E-Mail Exchanges Solve Problems

McRae acknowledges the weekend e-mails and usually says she'll take care of the problem on Monday. But sometimes she has to work immediately, coordinating with police, to shut down a dog fight or haul away a mountain of trash. She says her e-mails to the police department get a response, day or night, within minutes.

Simons and other neighborhood leaders offered endless examples of problems solved between nightfall Friday and sun-up Monday, thanks to e-mail exchanges.

Sometimes, all of this happens at once: e-mail flies between residents and police and departments to resolve an issue, said police Officer Bob Barrett, who covers Southeast Seminole Heights.

Barrett gets an e-mail from Simons about a problem, such as a lack of no-parking signs that is causing a traffic hazard. She puts it on her e-mail list of 160 residents.

"Everyone will start chiming in that they noticed this happening at this address," Barrett said. "And I can send this e-mail to the appropriate department and say, 'See, all these people are having the same problem.'"

Southeast Seminole Heights isn't the only neighborhood Barrett keeps in e-mail touch with. He is in regular contact with 30 neighborhood groups. E-mail is the only thing that makes that possible, he said.

The system allows an exchange of information that is made for neighborhood crime fighting, Barrett and McRae said.

Barrett sends out crime maps weekly that lay out every robbery and burglary and car theft. Residents also get a spreadsheet that displays the addresses, so they can know what to look out for.

Last week, for example, Tampa Heights' map had more than its usual amount of those kinds of crimes, Barrett said. He sent residents there a specific alert.

It also lets residents contact police anonymously, which encourages more crime reporting, said Guidara, who commands District 3. "Some people don't want to get directly involved in the process, so indirectly we get the information," he said.

He keeps an eye on the neighborhood blogs, too, he said, for problems that need police attention.

Now, there's no more waiting for in-person meetings or visits to the police station. Residents can speak up about problems and not have to wait for business hours to call in.

"It's just another way to get hold of us," Barrett said. "With e-mail, you can voice your opinion from your living room, and I'll get the e-mail."

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at (813) 259-7562 or gparker@tampatrib.com.

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