‘The gloves are off.’ Why deputies went to war with sheriff appointed after Parkland
The relationship between Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony and the union representing 1,400 of his deputies soured quickly last year, shortly after his appointment amid the fallout of the Parkland school shooting.
A series of investigations, firings and suspensions of deputies in the first few months of his tenure eroded a tenuous alliance between the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association and Tony, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hand-picked successor to ousted former Sheriff Scott Israel. Within weeks of Tony taking the job in January of 2019, the union’s president had all but declared war on Tony, text messages and internal affairs documents show.
Eighteen months later, the inter-agency fight is a driving force behind the increasingly personal Democratic primary campaign for Broward sheriff, with Tony suspending the Local 6020’s president last month ahead of a vote of no-confidence against the sheriff by union members. The union is being blamed by some of Tony’s backers for releasing a bombshell document this month that showed Tony killed a man when he was a teenager.
But the first real flash point in the power struggle for Florida’s largest sheriff’s office goes back more than a year to the rough arrest of a black teenager in a suburban Broward McDonald’s parking lot. The arrest was caught on video, drawing outrage from the likes of LeBron James. It also placed Tony on a collision course with the union after he suspended the arresting deputies and launched an investigation into union president Jeff Bell when he criticized the sheriff for not backing his cops.
“The gloves are off,” Bell wrote in a text shortly after the parking lot arrest. In the texts to Hunter Pollack — the brother of a Parkland shooting victim and colleague on the governor’s public safety transition team — he promised “to make sure Greg never makes it past the primary.”
The union has little love for the previous sheriff, Israel, who was removed from office in a post-Parkland purge and is now running for his old seat again along with five other Democrats in the Aug. 18 primary.
But the union’s fight with Tony, coming during the first sheriff’s election since the Broward County shooting that killed 17 people, has grown ugly, with the sheriff’s campaign consultants blaming some of his own subordinates for the leaking of damaging personal information this month, including a sealed Philadelphia police report documenting a 1993 shooting in which Tony killed a man in front of his family’s home.
Tony’s campaign says the sheriff’s efforts to reform BSO — including firing deputies who responded to the Parkland shooting and others involved in excessive force complaints — have earned him enemies.
“Ever since he took on the issue of police brutality and shook up the Broward Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Tony has been the target of a vicious smear campaign by Scott Israel’s campaign, colluding with some disgruntled officers who believe they deserve special treatment,” Tony’s campaign wrote in a statement provided to the Miami Herald by strategist Eric Johnson.
The union denies hiring a private investigator circulating the 1993 police report in Philadelphia and counters that the current animosity is the sheriff’s fault for failing to communicate with his officers, mishandling the McDonald’s arrest controversy and repeatedly targeting Bell.
And the union isn’t backing away from Bell’s texted vow to remove Tony.
“Those texts [between Bell and Pollack] are the opinion of the union,” said Frank Voudy, a union treasurer and spokesman.
Neither Bell nor Tony would agree to be interviewed for this article. Bell, who was investigated last year over his comments to the press about the April 18, 2019, McDonald’s incident, was suspended last month. Tony’s administration accused him of lying about a lack of protective coronavirus gear for deputies following the virus-related death of a school resource officer.
But the union initially blessed Tony’s appointment, according to a Broward Sheriff’s Office internal affairs document summarizing the investigation into Bell’s criticisms of Tony last year following the rough take-down and arrest of DeLucca Rolle.
During a conversation last August with investigators, Bell admitted that he had provided names to the governor’s office as part of a discussion about replacing Israel, a summary of the investigation obtained by the Miami Herald said.
“This is something that’s never really been discussed in public,” Bell told internal affairs Lt. Barry Lindquist. “During Scott Israel’s final days, there was communication between representatives — high representatives of the governor’s office — and myself to help set up a friendly atmosphere within the sheriff’s office for a takeover where names were provided where people could be friendly towards the governor and friendly towards our cause to make it the smoothest [transition] possible.”
Bell told Linquist that DeSantis’ chief of staff, Shane Strum, called him the day before Israel’s removal to ask if he would support the appointment of Tony, a former Coral Springs police sergeant who left the force several years ago after launching a business claiming to train officers and the public in mass casualty responses.
Bell said he would, according to the records. “It wasn’t an adversarial beginning.”
But Bell has said publicly that it quickly became apparent Tony had little interest in developing a relationship with the union. That’s bolstered by comments from Gary Lippman, a union attorney, who said in his own interview with internal affairs that Tony “declared that he will never have an open channel to any union president.”
By the time three deputies on BSO’s Crime Suppression Unit waded into a crowd of high schoolers outside a suburban Broward McDonald’s last year, the relationship was already strained. The deputies pepper-sprayed Rolle in the face, threw him to the asphalt and punched him in the back of the head — all while cellphone cameras rolled.
The video generated national headlines and brought to town Benjamin Crump, the high-profile former family attorney of Trayvon Martin. Martin was the 17-year-old African-American high school student from Miami whose killing in Sanford at the hands of a neighborhood watchman triggered a widespread outcry over racial profiling and self-defense laws.
Tony responded to the uproar over the rough arrest by suspending the three arresting deputies, all of whom were later charged with crimes by the Broward State Attorney’s Office in the incident.
Tony’s decision — perceived by the union as failing to back his own deputies — added to Bell’s ire. Bell told reporters that deputies were merely putting into practice new, aggressive training techniques Tony brought to BSO in training sessions that had led to dozens of injuries. A review by internal affairs later found that Tony had brought sparring back to training sessions, but hadn’t implemented new take-down tactics. An investigator also found that Bell had conflated training injuries with all workers compensation claims, regardless of the cause of the injury.
Following back-and-forth accusations between Bell and Tony’s administration, the sheriff’s top lieutenant filed an internal affairs complaint against Bell.
“They are coming after me and trying to silence me,” Bell wrote last year in another text message to Hunter Pollack, referencing the internal affairs complaint. “Time to reach out to Ron [DeSantis] and ask for someone else.”
The year that followed has not healed the wounds. Deputies voted no-confidence in Tony last month. Bell has sued to be reinstated. This week, the union endorsed retired Col. Alvin Pollock in the race for sheriff.
The union insists it didn’t provide the police report of Tony’s 1993 shooting. Israel, too, has denied leaking documents to the press.
But with three months until the primary election, and both sheriffs on the ballot, the union may be running the most effective campaign of all.
“When the cops are shooting at each other, it’s best to get out of the way,” said Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein. “And take good notes.”
