Author: Chelsea Zukowski

By MICHAEL MOORE JR.
USFSP Student Reporter

He was there when Sgt. Thomas Baitinger was gunned down in the line of duty. They had been dispatched to the home of a fugitive in January 2011.

He was there when a small airplane made an emergency landing on 18th Avenue S in October 2017. He saw the plane come down in what seemed like slow motion.

And he was there when a beehive containing nearly 25,000 of the angry insects scared away some would-be burglars in November 2016. He donned beekeeper’s gear to dust for fingerprints.

In Officer David Rogler’s 17 years as a police officer, every day is different. During that time, he’s also seen a lot of change.

“In the old days, all we had was a stick and a gun,” he said. “Technology makes it so that we don’t have to put in the legwork that we used to.”

Rogler, 50, says that there are a lot of officers today who couldn’t have been on the force 10 or 15 years ago – and he’s not always so sure that’s a good thing.

“My rule is if technology makes something possible, it’s great. If it makes something easier, it’s bad,” he said.

On this particular day, technology is doing a little bit of both. The computer in his cruiser receives an alert dispatching him to a residential dispute.

That thrusts him into the role of mediator between two women arguing over money. Harsh screams and accusations of herpes fill the air. He can’t force either one of them to leave, he tells them, but he also doesn’t feel comfortable leaving them alone together.

But eventually he has to.

Nothing was resolved, but he did his best to mediate and lower the intensity of the situation. That’s how it is most days, he said.

Most days he doesn’t get a lunch break. He doesn’t like taking his police cruiser through drive-thrus because of the negative perception some people have about police. So instead he usually ends up eating a cold burrito or his kid’s leftover pizza from the night before.

Today, he munches on cold, gluten-free pizza.

When he isn’t on duty, you can find him rock climbing at Vertical Ventures, bird watching at a local park or even studying Buddhism on occasion – though he’s quick to point out that he doesn’t consider himself Buddhist.

He says he doesn’t want his son to become an officer.

Most days are spent issuing tickets and leaving his cruiser to perform what the police chief calls “park, walk and talks.”

Some days officers are killed. Jan. 24, 2011, was one of those days.

Rogler recalls the day Baitinger died as one of the scariest moments he has ever had on the job.

A second officer, Jeffrey Yaslowitz, also died, and a deputy U.S. marshal was wounded but recovered. St. Petersburg police had not lost an officer in 30 years.

“So many rounds were fired that day, I remember hearing when handguns were being shot and thinking to myself, ‘Oh, that’s only a handgun. I’m OK.’”

By JEFFREY WAITKEVICH
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG — Police Officer Christopher J. Goodwin has seen it all.

He raised two daughters by himself. He beat a cancerous tumor near his intestines in 2006. And he persevered when a fellow officer shot and killed a black man after a traffic stop in 1996, a controversial decision that led to riots.

So when high school girls engage in fisticuffs in a drive-by fight or when a homeless person breaks into an abandoned car, he doesn’t blink.

His father and sister have always supported him, said Goodwin, 52, and that’s what has gotten him through 28 years as an African-American police officer in a city and police department long marked by racial division.

“Your friends know who you are. Your family knows who you are. You kind of fall back on that,” he said.

After 28 years as an officer, Goodwin looks forward to finishing his police career with a stint as a school resource officer at an elementary school.

During his career, he has worked in community policing, narcotics, street crime, a special detail task force and the SWAT team for 15 years. He now works patrol.

His favorite role is as a grandpa, though. He wants to spend more time with his 4-year-old grandson, Noah, whom he calls his “little buddy” and “road dog.”

Goodwin keeps several photos of his grandson in his cruiser and can’t talk about him without a little smile. He is also writing and illustrating a children’s book for Noah.

Goodwin was born in Maryland but grew up in St. Petersburg. He attended middle school at St. Paul Catholic School before graduating from Pinellas Park High School in 1983.

He then attended the police academy at St. Petersburg Junior College, spent seven years in the Army and joined St. Petersburg police in 1990.

He said he always felt policing was the right job for him – growing up as a comic book geek who regularly played cops and robbers.

Once a week he gives back to the community by spending an hour with troubled children at Northwest Elementary, helping them focus on setting goals and planning how to achieve them.

He said that there is nothing he would rather do.

There was a time when black officers were second-class citizens in the Police Department.

They could only patrol black neighborhoods and arrest only black people. If they caught a white suspect, they had to wait for a white officer to come and make the arrest.

That changed in 1968, when a federal appeals court upheld a lawsuit by 12 black officers – now called the “Courageous 12” – and ruled that black officers should have the same authority as white officers.

Being a black officer in St. Petersburg wasn’t as hard as he first thought it might be, Goodwin said, adding that officers in the department “don’t see color, creed or race.”

For him, the department is a brotherhood. He knew the three white St. Petersburg officers – David Crawford, Jeffrey Yaslowitz and Thomas Baitinger – who were fatally shot in the line of duty in early 2011.

Losing fellow officers is one of the toughest parts of the job, he said, and he “takes it to heart every time (an officer) is shot anywhere.”

By TIM FANNING
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – For Nicole Stutler, being an officer with the St. Petersburg Police Department is like improv theater – it’s adapting to every situation. It’s staying on her toes and rolling with the punches.

Sometimes it’s difficult to keep a straight face. Other times, it’s hard not to cry. Dark sunglasses help.

“Every day challenges me. It gives me stories I can try to laugh about when I go home,” said Stutler. “I’ve never had a bad day because I’ve always gone home. That’s the key at the end of the day. To be able to go home.”

The 29-year-old officer is two years out of the academy and patrolling her first real beat in the sprawling neighborhoods and strip malls of north St. Petersburg in a squad made up almost entirely of women.

“A lot of bad— chicks to look up to,” she said.

For Stutler, home is in Manatee County with Ellliot Stabler, a 6-year-old chihuahua named after the hunky detective on TV, and Nes, 3, a mix between a “chihuahua, a terrier and a hyena.”

Stutler grew up in Woodbridge, Virginia, the daughter of a metropolitan transit officer and a Colombian-born coin room supervisor.

Stutler never saw her father in uniform. He always got dressed at the station and never brought his work home. He gave her a positive view of law enforcement officers, she said, but she never thought she’d wear a badge herself.

She thought she’d be Barbara Walters. Growing up, she asked a lot of questions. It was a running joke in the family that Nicole never asked just one question.

Her inquisitiveness was fostered by watching 20/20, the network news magazine. Her hero, Walters, was classy, respected and smart – just like Stutler wanted to be.

She said she realized that Walters, much like herself, could be “intelligent and personable without cheapening it with dirtiness and sexiness.”

She enrolled at Arizona State University intending to pursue journalism. An undeclared major, the only thing she knew was that she liked to write and ask questions. At least, that was until she took her first criminology class.

That’s when she knew criminology was right for her.

By graduation, Stutler found herself in social services. For several years she worked with the homeless, victims of domestic violence, and rape and sexual assault survivors in northern Virginia. That’s where she learned that public service is like improv theater.

“There I saw the dark side of life,” she said.

There she saw child abuse victims with bruises and dried tears. There she saw drug users in all stages of addiction. There she saw people looking for a second chance. No one case was the same.

“You learn to adapt quickly and to read people,” she said. “You’ve got to be able to go from a stern look to a smile in seconds.”

In her work in social services, she learned to cope through her daily reports.

“Writing them was therapeutic,” Stutler said. “The more detail I added, the better I felt. It was like a giant weight being lifted from me. The more complete my report was, the better I felt.”

Eventually Stutler moved from Woodbridge, Virginia, to Tampa. That’s when she learned about a program that turns social workers into police officers.

In her two years on the force, she said, she’s learned a lot. Covering crime in real life isn’t like it is in the movies with high-speed chases and daily gun fights. She finds police officers aren’t as stoic as she thought they were.

For Stutler, police work is more like social services.

“In both, you’re helping people in a crisis,” Stutler said. “I swear that I do more crisis management than I do arresting. I give out more community resources than I do tickets.”

On a recent shift, Stutler parked off the road, watching for stop sign runners.

In her cruiser, TLC’s “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls” played softly over the speakers as dispatch chirped over the radio.

On the driver’s side, next to the turn signal, was a purple unicorn hand sanitizer dispenser and a rosary. And on the dashboard was a Triforce from the Legend of Zelda video games and a prayer card of Saint Michael, the guardian saint of law enforcement.

“As an officer, everything you do is unscripted,” Stutler said. “You have to stay in character, no matter what.”

By WHITNEY ELFSTROM
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – When he walks into a restaurant or public place, Luke Lapham says, he can feel the stares of people and sense a switch in their demeanor.

Lapham, 33, is a police officer, and that means “as soon as you wear this uniform, you’re automatically hated” by some people.

Those people, he said, have “a prejudgment of police officers – a bully, meanie, power, pig.”

Being a cop is the equivalent of living in a fish bowl, he said, with every move closely examined by the public.

But Lapham, who joined the department in 2010, wants people to remember that police officers are “human, too.” He wants to change the mindset of people who jump to conclusions about him.

Lapham said that the news media skews the public’s perception of officers, or at least that’s how it seems to him.

“There’s never anything positive” about police in the news, he said. Rather than doing positive stories – like the efforts of police to help children in need – journalists only run stories about officers who mess up, he said.

The key to changing people’s minds, he said, is educating them on what goes on during a typical officer’s eight-hour shift.

That’s why the Police Department welcomes people who want to ride along with an officer for a day.

People who ride – and walk – with him, Lapham said, will see that he is flexible, especially on parking and traffic violations.

When he sees a car parked where it’s not supposed to be or someone driving the wrong way down a one-way street because they’re lost, he gives the offenders the chance to explain things before taking action.

For him, the best thing about being an officer is helping people.

“(Finding) a true victim that wants your help, and you (also) can put the bad people away – it’s probably the best part.”

By ANNA BRYSON
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – Officer Nick Fasanella’s first call of the day brought him to a sweaty, barefoot man trying to break into an apartment by beating on the door with a wooden plank.

Wide-eyed and twitching, the man said it was his apartment. He had locked himself out and had been trying to get back in for more than three hours.

The FBI, the CDC, the CIA and the DEA had been following him for the past three years, he said, and they had broken into his attic the night before.

For Fasanella, the scenario was not unusual. The wide-eyed man appeared to be under the influence of methamphetamine, he said.

The officer took away the sweaty man’s plank but determined there was nothing else to do. It was the man’s apartment, and he did not appear to be a threat to himself or others.
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When he was a boy in Mississippi, Fasanella thought he might become a teacher. For a time at college there, he was in ROTC and majored in history before deciding to go into police work.

Fasanella, 28, moved to Florida from Mississippi in December 2016 for his significant other – a dumb decision, he said. But it ended up being a good decision because he has grown to love Florida, where salaries for police officers are higher.

The district Fasanella patrols includes some of the city’s toughest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods. He said he encounters at least one death per week there.

Fasanella said he has never had to fire his weapon during his three years as a police officer, but he sympathizes with officers who do shoot – and sometimes land in controversy.

“In that split second between life and death, you don’t know what (suspects) are holding, what’s going to happen,” he said.

Patrolling a gritty district like his makes the days go by quickly, Fasanella said, and there are plenty of opportunities to help people.

After leaving the wide-eyed man, Fasanella chatted with customers at his favorite coffee shop, then helped a woman jump-start her car, which he noticed while driving by.

“When I’m not busy, I love to help people when I can,” he said. “It’s what I’m here for.”

Within two hours, however, dispatchers sent Fasanella and a backup officer back to his first stop of the day, where the situation had escalated.
The drug-addled man had apparently scared employees of the apartment complex with his erratic behavior and rants about the FBI agents in his attic and the helicopters watching him from outside his window.

First, Fasanella got somebody from maintenance to help the man get back into his apartment – a formidable task because the door was badly damaged and the doorknob was missing.

Once inside, the man continued babbling about the FBI in his attic. (The apartment had no attic.)

In the bedroom, Fasanella found a loaded handgun under the bed and confiscated it. He told the man he should go to a hospital to be checked out, but the man balked, trying to shoo the officers away and promising to “sleep it off” at home.

Fasanella took out handcuffs. He told the man that if he didn’t go to the hospital, then he would be involuntarily committed under the Baker Act and held in a psychiatric ward for 72 hours.

That worked. The man agreed to go to the hospital, then from the back seat of Fasanella’s cruiser rambled on about his job as a real estate broker.

Once the man was admitted to St. Anthony’s, Fasanella took the loaded firearm to the police station for safekeeping. Since the weapon was registered in the man’s name, there was no legal way to keep him from regaining possession once he left the hospital, the officer said.

For the rest of his eight-hour shift, Fasanella regaled coworkers with descriptions of the wide-eyed man with FBI agents in his attic.

“It is a sad situation,” he said, “but you have to have a sick sense of humor to get through this job.”