3 Polk County deputies arrested for evidence tampering

good morning everyone thank you for being with us today on the first day of employment at the sheriff's office and we hire once a month i meet with men and women and i said i expect you to be honest ethical and moral all the time i expect you to treat people like you'd want your mother treated and if you do that you'll have a wonderful career here and then i go on to explain that you know if you work for a fast food restaurant and they catch you sliding pizzas out the back door to their friends they will terminate your employment and run you off but there's a difference if we find you violating the law at the sheriff's office we'll we will also terminate your employment but we will lock you up in the county jail we're held to a higher standard you can't police a community if you don't hold yourself to a higher standard than you expect of the people from the community then i look at them and i say do you understand what i said and i have them all say yes sir i understand these folks forgot they forgot what they were taught they obviously didn't pay any attention to my warning and as a result we locked these three deputies up on friday night and here's how it started these three folks were on our crime suppression team we were receiving complaints and actually fears of gang activity and narcotics activity in a community and they were set there to try to keep the community safe stop the narcotics dealing and as a result break up the gang activity while patrolling in the winter haven or the central district area they came upon a suspect who ran a red light john rozinski who has been with us for about three and a half years stopped the vehicle he was backed up by jamal lawson and garrett cook when they stopped they asked for permission to search the vehicle which was denied which is traditionally what our suspects do we call the canine the canine did a search and alert it to drugs they searched the vehicle and they found in the trunk of the vehicle marijuana and alprazolam control substances so they arrested the suspect and in the suspect's pocket it was a female she had more marijuana in small quantities and 723 dollars when they wrote in their affidavit to put her in jail and john rosinski was the arresting deputy they wrote that they seized a large quantity of cash so they wrote it in the arrest affidavit and they also wrote it in their initial report so this was on the 21st of december they take the suspect to jail they have a day off they come back to work on the 23 3rd of december where john writes his report and he processes evidence that he puts several pieces of evidence into property and evidence but they don't put any cash any money into property and evidence what the three of them talk about on the 23rd is uh-oh the money's missing they counted it all three of them at some point in time counted the money and determined it was 723 dollars and then i'll fast forward to the investigation ruzinski said lawson had the money lawson said he didn't have the money rozinski had the money and garrett cook said i never had the money but they all admitted counting the money so they decided on the 23rd of december we've really got a problem here we're missing money we've lost the 723 dollars they decided at that point what they would do is they would all kick in and replace the money which is inappropriate by the way but they never did and they did not go to their supervisor and say we lost the money so time goes on rezinski even has a conversation and says you know i'm afraid before this is over with i'm going to get arrested for theft so they still do nothing now let's advance into march when our suspect's felony charges are reduced to misdemeanor possession of marijuana once that happens our suspect calls property and evidence and said hey i'd like to have my cell phone and my money back she said it was somewhere under 730 dollars she didn't know exactly how much exactly how much property and evidence refers her back to the district and to the supervisors where the event occurred she calls and talks to what we call the rid regional intake detective that detective was filling in actually for the red detective and she said look i would like my money back so he looks he pulls up the reports and he says we'll get back to you he calls rezinski and says um i don't see any money here ruzinski gets panicked rozinski starts talking to his buddies and i'm giving you the thirty thousand foot view because at the and you can see in in the press release they have different versions of this conversation in the meantime rozinski also calls down to p e property and evidence the property and evidence lady goes no there's no mention of any money in any of that property and evidence that was that was seized and ultimately we have but the property and evidence lady went forward and searched all around to see if maybe a piece of evidence got logged by mistake under the wrong case number and she found none and then rozinski says when he called the lady at p and he says she said he said call me back on my on your personal cell phone so they had this conversation and he said did anybody hear you talking to me just forget this conversation occurred she hangs the phone up and she says to herself self that doesn't sound right so she goes to her sergeant her sergeant goes to rozinski sergeant rozenski sergeant calls him in and goes what is this all about the money don't worry about it sarge we got it covered i'm writing a supplement report and the sergeant says stop i don't know what you're talking about but stop what you're doing everybody did what was right when it came to their attention by our suspect who is now the victim of a theft but these three folks so our brzezinski sergeant gets with his supervision we start a criminal investigation immediately this all happens from last monday last monday's when the lady made the initial request for her money back we do an investigation and our detectives and supervisors are simply the very best did what they were supposed to do when they saw something that wasn't right they immediately investigated and within five days of this being first brought to our attention and us sorting through and talking to the supervisors and the p e and completing an investigation on friday night we locked all three of these deputies up now i can tell you i've been with the sheriff's office my entire adult life and from memory i can only remember two other occasions in almost 50 years where we've arrested more than one deputy at a time and that was both of those occasions were back in the 1970s this is the first time ever that we criminally charge three deputies and it wasn't just for the event it was for the cover-up they attempted a cover-up and they all three committed criminal charges or about criminal violation of florida statutes let it be clear that i commend everyone from the suspect who made the initial report to the property and evidence lady who said this call is not right to the supervisors on the ground when they first became aware to the investigating supervisors and command staff for doing the right thing because that's what we do here the right thing if this group of people had done the right thing we would have done the right thing they did the wrong thing we still did the right thing we locked them up and in jails where they belong so let me give you some background as a result of this horrific totally illegal in violation of all the policies conduct we will go back to each of these folks and audit every report they ever wrote that dealt with an arrest or seizure of any property it will take us some period of time and here's my pro promise to the community and here is my promise to these three folks if we find evidence of any other criminal event we will go back to your house and we will arrest you again and we will put you in jail at this point in time obviously we've not had time to do that audit because we were working all week long on arresting them in the first place but we took this a step further command staff from the sheriff's office supervisors from the sheriff's office contacted the state attorney's office and requested that the criminal charges against the suspect be dropped because we can't vouch for their credibility any longer we also promised to the state attorney's office that we would audit their case reports and the cases they've made and certainly that will be a decision by the state attorney's office as to whether they accept their testimony on any pending cases but i am mad beyond words that these three folks have impugned their reputation and more importantly of the other thousand plus deputies that work here with their criminal conduct i'm going to request when i have a conversation with our state attorney that if there's any negotiated pleas it all requires them to spend some period of time in jail in polk county vernacular i'm pissed they know it i want the community to know it we've also made arrangements through our now victim to not only drop the charges but we will be working with our legal affairs department and our finance department to give her to her money back and certainly will go back as part of any criminal prosecution on them to try to get us reimbursed we don't know where the money is we highly suspect that one of the three of them stole it that it was never lost we think that's just a lie along the way but which of the three of them ultimately got the money we don't know it appears to us from everything we can put together from all of these convoluted stories that john rosinski was the last one with the money before it disappeared and you just don't lose 723 dollars in small bills so i'm pretty hot about that as you can well imagine well mikaya butler mikayla butler who's 25 and a detention deputy she decides to go to a some kind of an event over the weekend down south with some friends and she gets arrested for dui she's a detention deputy she was driving erratically on state road 31 in desoto county she ran off of the roadway she crossed back over the center line and a deputy from desoto county stopped her i applaud the deputy for enforcing the law and taken her into custody for driving under the influence she is suspended pending investigation and obviously if our investigation supports their investigation that's also a termination event i've said it a lot i'll say it again we enjoy trust from this community because we hold our deputies accountable into a higher standard i appreciate the fact that our deputies as and supervisors and employees support staff as soon as they got information about wrongdoing they brought it to us our attention and we're always going to do the right thing and this is one more exception or one more example of doing the right thing so with that do you have any questions i don't know what else i can tell you i've told you everything that i know yes ma'am i know that you said john rosinski was with the department for three and a half years the other two do you have jamal was with the department three and a half years and garrett cook five years garrett cook and jamal lawson were also on the swat team sheriff do you believe that money was drug money that the woman had on her you have no way to approve any of that well that was that was the original charges because it was in small bills and it and small bills are what we see on street sales of drugs however once again the that money was taken from her and never made into property and evidence and it's the craziest thing in the world because they wrote in their report that they took the money they wrote in the affidavit that they took the money and then they didn't put the money in evidence it just makes no sense initially you would think well missing money maybe it's true well if it was true all they had to do was go to their sergeant and say we lost the money we dropped the money whatever little bird got the money but that's not what happened they had this grand conspiracy from the day they discovered it missing well i suggest to you it's not missing it's stolen and we're not absolutely sure which of the three got it we suspect the strongest that john because he was the last one seen with the money but at the end of the day makes no difference they're all in trouble they're all arrested they're all they all resigned we didn't have to go through the termination process with them they resigned on friday night upon their arrest did they say they were sorry or anything like that they said a lot of things when we put those handcuffs on them they found out getting handcuffs put on you is not near as exciting as putting handcuffs on people who commit crime but our detectives were really pleased to put handcuffs on the three of them it seems like a lot of risk for such a relatively small amount of money they didn't just risk their job they risked their reputation they risk any future opportunities to work in law enforcement they risk everything over a tiny amount of money can you talk about how it feels i guess for you all because now what if people are hesitant about other officers well do you know there's you're exactly right there's always going to be a few people going uh-huh i told you well here let me tell you something the system worked the checks and balance worked and you can suspect people and that's per that's people but i can tell you clearly and unequivocally i've got over a thousand deputies here working in detention law enforcement and the courts i've got support staff working here that are honest ethical moral and they do the right thing every day and every time without exception we find someone that violates the law we investigate them and we arrest them and i go a step further i hold a press conference we're going to be transparent i could have arrested them and then hoped that you didn't hear about it that's not the way we do things here we lead from the front if we're going to hold this community accountable we're going to hold ourselves more reports how accountable could that possibly take i know you said a period of time well they've one's got two of them has three and a half years of experience and one has five years experience fortunately things are computerized so we'll go in and all of your calls for service don't require an arrest or a seizure so we'll start at the top and work backwards and if it takes you know three months six months however long it takes that's just how long it'll take but we want to make sure that we're comfortable with there's not been another episode of this and if there has been they'll be held accountable for that as well that's the only way we can be comfortable and that's the only way the community can be comfortable is for us to do a complete and thorough audit of all of their work and it'll be a much easier than it would have been back in the day because everything's computerized you said that at one point they tried to replace the money kicking and replace the money which obviously you said is inappropriate did they ever do that or did they just say they were going to well lawson actually jamal lawson actually within the last week or last week when this thing started scurrying around he sent rozinski 500 through his apple pay ruzinski obviously had to put it in his account because that's how it moves rozinski was doing a supplement report and he also dummied up a swear to that's part of his criminal charge as a swear to affidavit and that's when we said time out so whether or not he would have put the money in evidence or not we don't know because he never had a chance to because we stopped it we were involved in it so jamal is out 500 dollars more that brzezinski has in his account but we'll let them deal with that we're dealing with the criminal part i don't know maybe jamal will want to come back and file a theft charge on him later if he doesn't get us 500 back we'll take the report we'll file another charge but right now it appears to be a a a civil engagement involved in the middle of a criminal event anything else if we find that they have violated other criminal charges we'll send out another press release thank you god bless you we'll see you next time

Channel: ABC Action News

Views: 3,773,259

Rating: 4.8391423 out of 5

Keywords: polk county, polk county sheriffs office

Id: RzJ4GoXk6qw

Length: 23min 19sec (1399 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021

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[u/alleycat2-14]

I love the Grady Judd press conferences. I check every day for a new one. He's been a cop since he was 19 and could not purchase a firearm.

[u/sonofmarley76]

Whenever I hear or see cases like this, I think of all the cops that did get away with shit like this and never got caught. The fines and penalties should be double when people in authority do stuff like this. Just like you get extra charges if you molest a child and you are in charge of their care.

[u/LarryD217]

"In Polk County vernacular, I'm pissed."

[u/sweetwhistle]

THOROUGHLY enjoyed listening to the Sheriff! Thanks for the post!

[u/Embarrassed-Image-66]

Our lord and savor Grady Judd

[u/cLuckb]

Every cop under Grady's jurisdiction should know that Grady Judd is a 0 bullshit kind of guy. These clowns should of known better than to pull this stunt.

[u/Dont_touch_my_elbows]

Why do cops do shit like this?

Theres so much risk for seemingly minimal reward...

[u/electric4568]

TLDW: deputies pulled someone over for traffic violation, found weed and money, stole the money. Got arrested.