As police at the Beaches have been reexperiencing recently, false reports and cases that don’t necessarily result in immediate arrests with indisputable charges come with a price.
The most recent was Tuesday night’s report of a swimmer lost at sea off Atlantic Beach.
Law enforcement agencies of all shapes and sizes turned out to look for the “lost” swimmer: Atlantic Beach police. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. The Coast Guard. The Marine Patrol. The list goes on.
Turns out the guy’s friends had been drinking when they made the report. Unbeknownst to them, he had taken a taxi cab home.
He called the police from there. Case closed.
Atlantic Beach Police Chief David Thompson estimated the case, when you tally up everything from officers’ hours to helicopter fuel, cost “tens of thousands of dollars.”
“Those things do happen,” Thompson said Wednesday. “Fortunately, they are the exception rather than the rule. But we have to go into these situations assuming that it’s real every time. Every burglar alarm. Every missing child. Every missing adult. Every sexual assault.
“Then we can back out of the case if the evidence says it didn’t happen that way,” he said. “But we start out as if it’s real.”
Neptune Beach police have also been enmeshed in a case — a much lengthier, more involved one — that ended up without the intended results.
State Attorney Harry Shorstein announced recently that, because of a lack of evidence, no charges have been filed in a rape case involving a 15-year-old girl and that the case has been suspended. For two months, detectives investigated allegations that a teenage girl was raped after a June 4 party at a Neptune Beach oceanfront home. Neptune Beach police said about 20 students attended the party. The girl was found passed out, facedown in the sand, the morning after the party. She told police she had been at the house party and that after the party moved to the beach, she was attacked, possibly by five people.
“We don’t consider this a false report,” Neptune Beach Police Chief David Sembach said this week. “We just don’t know that we have the evidence to prove that this happened.”
Sembach said an exorbitant investment of money or any other resources weren’t necessarily invested — except for his officers’ time.
“This case was a worthwhile investment,” he said. “It just turned out that we didn’t get the evidence we needed to prove this happened. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. We just didn’t get the evidence to prove that it did.”
But Sembach, like Thompson, knows the inevitability of false police reports.
“In a city like Neptune Beach, with our limited officers on duty, sometimes all the officers have to respond to anything. We don’t mind doing that when it’s a bona fide incident, but when it’s a false report, that really irritates us.
“And the one that irritates me most is when people file false reports against officers. They’ll report brutality or excessive use of force. Usually they’re just trying to get back at the officer. But we can’t discard it,” Sembach said. “We have to thoroughly investigate it. And that takes a lot of time. You can’t just accuse someone of lying if you’re not absolutely sure.”
n Speaking of incidents that require police attention, here are a couple recent gems from the police blotters:
— A drunken naked 28-year-old woman was arrested about 3:45 a.m. on July 26 after she went into the ocean in the 300 block south of the beach in Jacksonville Beach. The woman told police that she was “going to go swimming to cleanse her soul and to tell her family that she loved them very much.”
— The next day, a 27-year-old woman was arrested and charged with domestic battery after she slapped a man in the face and threw frozen lasagna at him in the 900 block of Plaza in Atlantic Beach.
