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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email
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In Praise Of Reallocations
Posted Feb 20, 2009 by Tom Jackson
Updated Feb 20, 2009 at 10:03 PM
A couple of weeks ago, Sheriff Bob White performed a press conference that, while informative and necessary, was so hopelessly inside-baseball it threatened to put even him to sleep. The bottom line: He had rearranged some assignments and consolidated others, shrunk some platoons and killed off certain non-vital projects, all with an eye to putting more deputies into patrol cars—more rubber on the road, more boots on the ground.
And all some folks wanted to talk about was that in the redeployment process, White had given a key aide about a 15 percent raise. This was an eye-poke he could have avoided simply by conjuring up a new title for her (and it doesn’t help that he relied on the precedent set by his predecessor). That said, the events of the past 10 days are pretty much galvanizing White’s decision to create a troop surge on the cheap.
Last week, in cooperation with the feds and New Port Richey police, the sheriff’s office presided over an attention-getting bust of 10 gang-bangers. And just before dawn Friday, SWAT deputies serving a search warrant at a suspected crack house in Holiday’s Beacon Square were forced to violently eliminate a self-proclaimed bad actor whose overdeveloped sense of machismo saw to it that he would never become a burden on taxpayers.
Killed in a hopelessly foolish exchange of gunfire with a single sheriff’s deputy was Luther K. Hudson, described in one published report as 365 pounds of militant ex-con. Word on the street was if cops showed up to short-circuit his business model, “He would take care of them.”
What we especially like was White’s jargony media debriefing, which served the dual purpose of being precise and oddly amusing: “Only a couple [of] rounds were exchanged, and as a result the person who attacked our deputies is deceased this morning.” We will leave it to others to apply more colorful nomenclature.
Anyway, at the risk of co-opting a phrase that came to describe the Bush-Patreaus reversal of fortunes in Iraq and applying it locally: “The surge is working.”
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