Crime is down in Monroe County

Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the county.

Reports have shown there has been a 13% reduction last year in crime over the previous year in Monroe County.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “I’m so happy about this and so proud, as you can imagine. This is what my job is, make this community safe. This year, we are down 13% in crime, we remain at record low levels of crime per capita, meaning it’s never been safer to live, work and play in the Keys. It doesn’t mean that crime doesn’t exist, but it means it exists at such a low level compared to most areas across the nation, as well as our violent crime is so low compared to most areas across the nation that you can truly go out and walk 11 o’clock at night. People aren’t breaking into homes, not doing drive by shootings, not doing car jackings. We are so lucky to be in this community and have a safe community as we do. I always say it’s because of a three prong approach. Number one, the hard working men and women of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office doing a difficult, challenging job each and every day. Number two, strong partnerships I always talk about with the state, local and federal law enforcement agencies, working together as one big team. And number three is the outstanding citizens of Monroe County who I really work so hard between me and my team to build these forever, lasting relationships. I consider the citizens an extension of the sheriff’s office, all of us working better to combat crime, identify needs, work on quality of life, all of us together, trying to make this community what it is, one of the best places ever.”

Michael Stapleford of KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM said, “Certainly every day we give thanks for the dedication and bravery of our men and women in law enforcement in the sheriff’s office.”

A drug dealer was caught in a traffic stop recently.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “This just happened this morning. This is a very fluid case. We stopped a vehicle coming into Monroe County for traffic violations. We got the car stopped around the 106 mile marker. Once the vehicle was stopped, officers approached the car, we immediately smelled a strong odor of marijuana coming out of the vehicle. The individual did not have a medical marijuana card. We wanted to search the car for the marijuana. We have probable cause. The individual was very agitated, did not want to comply. But we do have probable cause from marijuana smell. We do have the ability to do a search of a vehicle because of the mobility factor of that vehicle. We ultimately did get inside this car, a 23 year old male from Miami Dade County. This person’s a suspected drug dealer. This person is known to be a gang member coming in our county, we found inside the car a short barrel AK 47 as well as a nine millimeter Glock in his vehicle. So this is a drug dealer gang member. He’s a convicted felon in possession of weapons coming into our community, so he is a threat to this community, has no lawful business to be here, and the fact you’re coming in here with an AK 47 and handguns with marijuana in your car continues to send the message of his intent is not to do something good, but his intent is nefarious and is detrimental to the safety and well-being of our citizens and visitors. So a great, outstanding case by our patrol division this morning to get these guns off the streets, to get this criminal off the street, hold him accountable, continue to send the message to our neighbors to the north that if you come here and you’re looking to commit a crime, you are more likely to get stopped here, more likely to get arrested here, and you’re going to spend more time in jail and or prison from cases that emanate out of Monroe County.”

Traffic stops can be a very dangerous situation for law enforcement personnel.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “It highlights just how dangerous our job can be. While this is one of the safest places ever, we have bad people that want this to change, want this to be like a Miami Dade County with some of the violent crimes. That’s why we have to have this full court effort to prevent that from occurring in our borders of our county. But it is a dangerous job. You see here we’re out with AK 47, handguns, drug dealers, drugs, but we take this job serious, and we’re going to keep our citizens safe and secure no matter what it takes.”

There were also car burglary charges in the Upper Keys recently.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “Last week, we spoke on your show about a 20 year old and a 17 year old male from Key Largo who were arrested by the sheriff’s office for a vehicle burglaries. We had investigated a burglary that occurred up there. It took a little while, but we eventually tracked down these two individuals as our suspects, arrested them, and then a few days later, we’re able to identify five additional auto burglaries that these two have perpetrated. So we got warrants for these two individuals, and we arrested them again on additional charges. So both have been arrested on six vehicle burglary and theft charges, and are in Monroe County Jail and/or DJJ custody, care, control. So they’re both in Key Largo but good to apprehend these two people, to get some closure for the victims of six cases we know of, and stop their ongoing crime spree. If we didn’t arrest them, they would continue to burglarize cars, steal people’s stuff, and just be a menace to our community. So these are two young men who were on a pathway to destruction.”

An individual who was already in custody for fraud charges, who tried to defraud about $4,800 from an individual claiming that he had a house for rent that didn’t exist, has also been charged with child pornography and sexual battery charges.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “He’s already in jail for a fraud. You’re ripping people off. But this individual had sold a vehicle to somebody else. And after selling the vehicle, the new owner was going through the car cleaning it, and found a phone in the car, and was able to access the phone somehow. When he accessed it, he found the phone was full of child pornography. He contacted the sheriff’s office, turned over the phone. We started an investigation into this child porn case. We identified some 70 images of a juvenile, very young, minor. There also was a video on there. And on the video was our suspect sitting in jail having illegal sexual battery contact with a child under the age of 12, disgusting, sick. So we’ve charged this individual with just multiple, multiple charges of these sexual pornography pictures, the sexual battery of a minor. This person’s in jail now on super high bond, he’s not bonding out. He will be remaining in our jail until his court cases are resolved, and his court cases are going to ultimately result in him going to prison. We’ve got good cases on him, both are solid, and we’ve got pictures and videos on his phone, so I feel confident that he’s going to be with me in my jail for a period of time, year or two, but ultimately, he’ll be going off to prison for a long time. He’ll be out of our community and won’t be able to offend other juveniles. But people like this, how many victims are out there? You just never know. Sick, sick people. But we are again, myself and Dennis Ward are going to take these cases to the mat. We’re not going to be giving these people any type of breaks and they’re going off to prison.”

The Citizens Police Academy is coming up.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “This is one of the most important parts every year to get together to build these relationships. We do it in three parts of the county. We’ll do a class in Key Largo, we’ll do a class in Marathon. We’ll do a class here at our headquarters in Key West. We want to make sure it’s accessible to all our citizens to show up, and it’s a great time. I’ve never known someone who has gone through that has not said it was one of the best experiences. We make it fun, action, adrenaline, hand on excitement. We do role playing, scenario based stuff. You’re not sitting there being lectured to, other than the day one, the first class, other than that, it’s all let’s get into it. Let’s do it. People get a chance to see what we’re about, how much we do. People are shocked to see how much the sheriff’s office does. But our classes will start in April, and the classes are 6pm to 9pm, so three hours a night for five weeks. It is Tuesday in Upper keys, Wednesday in the Middle Keys, and Thursday in the Lower Keys. Very hard for us to run three classes simultaneously like this, but again, we want to make sure they are accessible to our people. You can go online, you can stop by and call any station or lieutenants and captains are there, ask questions, get the information out there, and the classes are limited, and we’re going to probably have 20, 25 max to each class. But again, you will have a great experience. Actually, we’ve had people take our CPA and later on apply for jobs. They’ve become so excited about MCSO that they’ve become various jobs in the agency, police, corrections, civilians, but it is a really good experience. We have forever friends who go to the CPA and wear their CPA shirt and a little sheriff office star and tell people how great we are, how great the class was, and they become lifelong ambassadors of MCSO, it’s such a great thing. It’s a win/win for everybody.”

20th Street in Marathon got cleaned up recently. FDOT owns the property and asked for the homeless encampment to be removed.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “I saw the request, we work well, and they are property owners asking for help. So they asked us to remove the people who’ve been living on 20th Street out of there, been there for a long time. So we wanted to make sure we gave people notice. We gave them 48 hours notice. We weren’t just going to throw people out without time. I told this district secretary that we would help her, but we weren’t going to just come up there like Gestapo and throw people on the streets. We also showed up with a four page document, which gave contact information for everything that can help somebody in their situation, from care to cots, to social services, to VA’s, to health departments, to you name it, we wanted to make sure they had the ability to have a number or a name or contact to seek some help. When they’re going to a difficult, challenging time in their life, where I go from here? What am I going to do? Where am I going to stay? How am I going to feed myself? We have to be humane and have empathy for people that are in this situation, whether they want to be in a situation or not. A lot of people are homeless, want to be homeless. There are those who fall on bad times, who don’t want to be homeless, want to get back into society. Those are the ones I want to spend more time with a helping hand out, and a hand up, than the ones who just want to be homeless. That’s what they want, that’s what they got. But we still don’t want to be bad. So we had to go out there. It was pretty bad. They lived out there for years. So it wasn’t so easy. About 30 people. Had to bring out a half a dozen police officers to make sure we gave due notice, warned them, gave them time. Before the county, city came in there started doing cleanups. Make sure the tents were empty, because we didn’t want to have trucks and heavy equipment, with people still in the area, maybe still in a tent, so we had to make sure everything was crystal clear and no one’s out there. We had one martyr, a female who didn’t even live out there. She lived on a boat in Boot Key Harbor, but was mad because the people were being told to leave that refused to comply, wouldn’t leave. We spent about two hours talking to her, trying to convince her to just go peacefully, and we did not want to arrest her, but she was sitting in middle of the street. We couldn’t get heavy equipment workers to start working. After about two hours, we had no choice but to arrest her, unfortunately. So we did have to take one person to jail. Once they were gone, the city of Marathon had a really good plan in place with some contractors to come in and clean that area. I think it took about 10 roll off dumpsters to clear out all the mess, junk, wood, tables, stuff that’s been built out there, junk brought in there, barbecues, you figure a couple years of 30 homeless people bringing stuff back, it can accumulate quickly, let alone after years. So it was about 10 dumpsters full of trash, garbage, debris that was cleaned out of there. So that’s good for our environment, all that stuff was an environmental hazard and just disgusting. It was pretty nasty. But anyway, they’re out. We’re going to see what happens now with these homeless, where they wind up. But we gave them every opportunity that we could. We did as much as we could at MCSO, only so much I can do.”

MCSO was called to humanely remove a crocodile from a development in Key Largo recently.

Sheriff Ramsay said, “We respond to everything, no matter what it is. But interesting, a homeowner found a large saltwater crocodile in their pool, and called the sheriff’s office, and we get called for pythons and other animals and alligators and crocodiles in the past, and then we had a good video, but the hero was more so the homeowner. My deputy, was there trying to help with the shovel, but his homeowner was fearless. He eventually got a pool broom, and came up behind was just pushing this large thing, banging and pushing it, was relentless. This guy was within feet, and just did not have any fear. I was impressed with this guy. He was like a wrangler. I was like, man, look at this guy. Wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t mind trying to help, but, man, he didn’t give himself any distance for this thing to turn around, get mad and attack him and crocodiles can be pretty aggressive at times and this was a big, big beast, but eventually, our help, but more so mostly, I give credit to the homeowner, eventually, kept pushing it to the point that it went over to the dock and jumped in the water and swam away. But boy, I tell you what it was a big Mama Jama.”