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.
The Florida Sheriff’s Association conference in Orlando happened last week.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “I have to go twice a year to get continuing education. It’s also a good time to see the vendor hall, see what’s new in technology, what’s new in the world of law enforcement. Spend time with all the other sheriffs and around the state of Florida. Get a chance to talk and see what issues, problems, questions, concerns, they have, compare them. Try to work together. We talk about legislative affairs, what are we looking at, trying to help push through legislation to help keep our community safer? Obviously, there’s always discussions lately about ICE and how that’s affecting various counties, and what’s occurring with the temperature of immigration, customs enforcement issues. So there’s a lot going on for those two, three days we’re up at these conferences. There are really, really important, and they continue to build that networking between other sheriffs in the event that we do have a need for help, aiding, assisting us here or abroad. We always rely on the Florida Sheriffs Association for post hurricane for external manpower allocation. We don’t use the Air National Guard or any of the National Guard units, because they’re very limited what they can do. They need housing. They need support. You’ve got to be able to put them up and feed them and take care of them. And after Hurricane, we know we’re not able to do that. We can barely take care of ourselves and then the National Guard have no law enforcement authority to do real directive patrols or make arrests. So when I bring in the Sheriffs Association, I’m bringing in other deputies from other counties and deputize them. So when they’re here, they have the knowledge of police work, patrolling. They have patrol cars, equipment to do the job, but more so, they have the law enforcement authority to make arrests and take care of a potential looting or crimes that may occur. So there’s just a big difference. So you build these networking relationships, which we always talk about here in Monroe and every day in our community, but also abroad, I have to have these working relationships with these other sheriffs. So these are my friends. When I pick the phone up and I call whatever sheriff and say, I need help, I know I can count on them.”
Hurricanes could affect us at any given time.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “We are in peak of hurricane season, August, September, are the two busiest months that we have to really be vigilant. Right now there are three systems that are out there that are probably not going to affect us, but it does show the magnitude that right now, we are in that peak time where we’ve got three systems. Two are north of us in the Atlantic, and one is under us, working its way up. All computer models show it to do the same thing, show to make a curve, the curve away from us. So that’s good, but again, it shows that we are in that time, that we need to be vigilant. We need to be watching. We need to be ready, have our personal hurricane plans, and that’s what we’re doing right now, is monitoring these storms that arise or are developing. We try to look at long range forecasting, work closely with our friends at the Weather Service, look at the computer models and try to determine what threat assessments we have for potential storms, and we should all be doing that. But obviously from public safety, that’s really, really important for us to be able to have plans and give guidance, directions to our citizens about what we think, what we see, and what they should do.”
National Night Out last week was fantastic.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Great events. National Night Out, these are relationship buildings with our law enforcement, public safety, partners with our community, our citizens. We want to get to know our citizens. Want them to know us. We want to know their needs, wants, desires, expectations and we try to make it a fun, interesting night. We bring out all the sheriff’s office assets for people to see what we have, what we can do, what we’re capable of. Really good time for the young kids. They love these type of things, to look at a bomb robot, and you look at the dive team stuff, and the kids just love it. We let them really get interactive, and they seem to really enjoy it, and we want to build a relationship with these young individuals right now, to let them know that we are the good guys and good gals, and that they can count on us, and that they can trust us, and if they need us, they can come to us. So these are really, really important parts of this. We do it in four parts of the county. We did it in Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon and Key West. In Key West, we partnered up with Key West Police to do a joint one, and I went to Key Largo first, then I moved down to Islamorada. I can’t catch all fours, we know, because they’re all going during the same time. Every other year, I switch between Key West and the Upper Keys to try to have a presence myself and interact with the citizens and be there, be seen, be visible, shake hands, thank everybody for coming out and enjoying the night with us.”
There have been a number of people taking traps from fishermen recently.
Sheriff Ramsay said, “Our commercial fishermen struggle with being victims of trap robbing throughout their commercial season, and trap robbing does such a negative impact on their livelihoods. Trap robbery is not easy to make these cases. They’re generally done either at night time or 40 miles out in the bay. A lot of time trap robbers are actually other commercial boats using their own trap pullers. And we’ll see and FWC will see the multiple lines pulled, clearly pulling with a trap. But then there’s also trap robbing by divers, and even trap robbing by small boats and shallow waters, which actually hand pull traps. This was this case here. This was a night before opening season. So lobster season was still closed, but yet traps were in the water, because they’re allowed to be placed prior to and we had our patrol boat out, as our listeners probably heard, with two officers at night time, and it’s really difficult at nighttime to sneak up on boats. Obviously, we had our boat blacked out. We’re using a radar on our boat, and with the radar, we pinged a boat that was in front of us that was blacked out. So we had concerns about 11:40 at night time, a boat blacked out is a probably good sign something is going on. We had night vision goggles on so we could be able to see at nighttime. Our listeners probably know that to have like a green color image when you’re looking through a night vision. We pulled up, and we could see at some point in time, him light a cigarette, when you light a cigarette, the heat flame on night vision really kicks in. So we snuck up on the boat behind them, and then when we were right in place, we hit all our lights, and we actually caught the husband and wife team. They had like a 17 foot Mako with a single engine, a 40 year old husband, 27 year old wife, on the boat. They both are co owners of this boat. They actually had a lobster trap on the boat, were going through it when we hit the lights. The officers gave verbal commands in Spanish to the individuals. The male did not comply. As he picked the trap up, after being told not to touch it, and threw it back in the water. We activated the GPS to identify the exact location the trap was thrown back in, and then we gave more verbal commands. The male continued to be non compliant to the commands to keep his hands and not move. He grabbed a red cooler which is full of lobster which had been harvested out of other traps. Then we had our body cameras on when he turned the cooler up over his head, turned it upside down, all the lobster coming out of the cooler into the water to try to destroy the evidence. After he discarded the evidence being the trap and the lobster, then he complied with commands. We did arrest him. The wife was pregnant, was having medical issues. More do to, I think, the stress that they just got nabbed. We went back and recovered the trap that was identified on a man overboard marking on the GPS. We identified the owner of the trap, contacted him. He did want to press charges, and we did arrest the male on scene that night. We went back a day or two later with a warrant for the arrest of the female. We just didn’t want to deal with her medical problems that night and have to have taxpayers pay for her to spend time in the hospital and watch her, not knowing what was going on. We knew where she was, that she wasn’t going away. Smarter things to do is to focus on the male, the boat, the evidence. We had a lot of work to do, so we did follow up and arrest her too. She was mounting off the day after we arrested her husband, before she knew she was in trouble. She was mouthing off on a Facebook video post that we saw saying that they didn’t do nothing wrong, and they were minding their own business, and we pulled the trap and planted it, show me the picture. Show me the pictures. She doesn’t realize that we have body cameras. So we actually not only have pictures, we have the video, so she’ll see it when she’s in court with her attorney.”