ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — In Pinellas County, findings are out in the first report from a task force created to look at how officers handle the use of force.
The Sheriff's Office was the outside agency for the investigation. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri wrote up the report.
The Pinellas County Use of Deadly Force Investigative Task Force looked into the shooting of Jeffrey Haarsma on August 7th. An officer shot and killed him after he grabbed her around the neck. The report found the use of deadly force was lawful, but there are other aspects of the investigation that raised concerns.
St Pete police were called to French Quarter North Condominiums for petit theft.
The report found the officers knew Haarsma had a history of mental illness, but they did not discuss handling it as a mental health call, which the report found they should have.
There had been numerous calls to his condo in the past few years, eight in 2017, five in 2019 and 12 this year, including one just the day before.
10 Tampa Bay anchor Allison Kropff talked with St Pete Police Chief Anthony Holloway about the report.
"Adding in an outside agency brings more accountability to it because you're having someone else look at exactly what happened and it's also another agency is looking at things that you may have missed," Chief Holloway said.
"So I think this is a good thing as far as moving forward for accountability and building trust in the community by saying, we're not going to look at ourself, we're going to have somebody else look at what we've done and see what we can do to make it better."
St Pete police is already conducting an internal investigation. Chief Holloway says the overall system failed this man and they want to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Chief Holloway says before this report came out they already started making some changes.
He says dispatch will be different. Sergeants will be notified when officers are going to be sent to a mentally ill person and he's making sure officers get training. Right now they're getting mental health aid.
Every officer will go through an 8-hour block so they get an introduction to mental health issues. He's also looking at getting officers into Crisis Intervention Training.
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