Rose gets a pass from Ethics Commission for going to second job while on duty at Venice Police

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The Florida Commission on Ethics dismissed a complaint filed by me against Venice Police Lieutenant Mike Rose. I am publishing the entire document (PDF file, 18 pages) along with a 2007 investigation into Rose performed by then-Captain Dave Dunaway (later interim Chief Dunaway and now retired) into an allegation that Rose was knowingly selling stolen Shimano reels through his bait shop, Mahi Mac's.

The main allegation I made against Rose was that he was working at his out-of-town bait shop during his work shifts and that he was using city police vehicles to travel back and forth between his two jobs.

The Ethics Commission found that the allegation was true, that Rose was indeed working at a second job while on duty and that he was using city vehicles to go to and from his second job. Normally, both would be prohibited actions, yet the commission recommended against taking any punitive action. The reason? According to the ruling, Rose didn't do anything wrong as he had been given permission by Dunaway, this in spite of the fact that (in the official narrative anyway), such permission was allegedly rescinded by then-Chief Julie Williams when she found out about it and that Williams immediately held Dunaway responsible.

Williams made it a point to publicly state at the March 25, 2010 city council meeting that giving such permission was improper on the part of Dunaway.

The dates on the documents provided to the commission should have raised some serious red flags as to the credibility of Williams' and Dunaway's version of events.

For instance -- Williams claimed in a now-famous city council meeting on May 25, 2010, that she had taken care of the matter when she first discovered what was going on. According to documentation at City Hall, this would have been in the first week of March, 2010 -- March 5, specifically, as that is when the city's H.R. Director, Alan Bullock, first made Williams aware that allegations had been made against Rose to the effect that he was working at a second job while he was supposed to be on duty at the police station (we are asked to believe that Williams and Dunaway, whose offices were next to Rose's, never noticed his frequent absenteeism on their own).

To be sure, Williams made Rose reimburse the city for hours misused by way of Rose giving five vacation hours back to the city, but this didn't happen until May 24, 2010, just one day before the May 25 council meeting in which Williams appeared before council to try to defend herself against public allegations of lack of oversight of her department (allegations made public by me, which the Venice Gondolier referred to at the time as an unfounded "rant").

Even odder is the fact that according to city responses to my prior public records requests, there is no paper trail prior to May 24, 2010, to indicate that Williams or Dunaway did anything in the way of investigating or documenting the problem, a direct violation of Williams' own written policies on how complaints against officers are to be handled. Then-City Manager Isaac Turner was reportedly told by Williams that she had handled the situation, this sometime prior to the May 25 council meeting. Williams stated the same thing to council on May 25.

Which leads to an obvious question, one that still hasn't been satisfactorily answered to this day:

Where's the paperwork to indicate that Williams had done anything?

If you have ever worked in or around law enforcement, you know that such organizations as the Venice Police Department are fanatical to the point of near-extreme paranoia about documenting every tiny mundane detail of daily life within the department.

So I ask again -- if Williams "handled it" prior to the city council meeting of May 25, where's the paperwork?

There's not even a memo to Rose telling him to stop going to his bait shop while on duty. No email either.

Additionally, Dunaway's memo where he takes the blame for giving permission to Rose to work at Mahi Mac's while on duty (memo included in Ethics Commission report) is dated July 1, 2010, some five weeks AFTER Williams told council that she had taken care of it and some four months after (she claims, anyway) she first learned that Rose was engaging in employment synchronicity.

This comes amid reports to this writer to the effect that within days of Williams making the public statement that Rose's supervisor (Dunaway) had given the permission to Rose to go to Mahi Mac's while on duty, Dunaway reportedly told several Venice Police officers that he had never given such permission, that Williams had thrown him under the bus, that he was furious, and that he wasn't going to play along.

If that last part of the story is true, and I believe it is, it would mean that Dunaway's memo of July 1 was a falsified document made in an attempt to save Mike Rose's career. As it turns out, that one memo saved Rose from further legal complications from the Ethics Commission.

It all makes sense when you understand that, at the time all of this was happening, Dunaway was up for retirement soon. He would go on to become interim Chief when Williams was later forced to resign, this due to the audio recordings of her in which she claimed that the entire police department building was bugged for surveillance and that she was more powerful than the President of the U.S.

Dunaway has since retired and moved out of state.

Prior to all of this comes another interesting story, that of then-Captain Dunaway investigating Rose for allegedly selling stolen Shimano reels (new and still in original packaging) at a price way under Shimano's stated retail value (PDF file - 2 pages).

The reels in question had been purchased with a worthless check by a Shimano dealer who was going out of business. These in turn were sold to Rose at an apparently ridiculously low price. Rose, in turn, was reselling them at prices lower than Shimano's listed retail value (Shimano does not allow their dealers to sell or resell new Shimano equipment at anything under their listed retail prices).

When Shimano sales rep Steve Barnhill started making inquiries about the stolen reels to the Venice Police Department, Dunaway quickly investigated the matter, determined that it was a civil matter, and instructed Rose to give the stolen reels not to Shimano rep Barnhill or to the police evidence locker, but to the man who originally acquired the reels by writing a worthless check, this in spite of the fact that Barnhill is quoted as stating that he would be filing a criminal complaint about the bad check.

The big irony in all of this is that Rose was the main officer involved in the numerous internal investigations that the department did, including the demotion and near-firing of a school resource officer for working extra unpaid hours at Venice High School and the accusations of destruction of electronic records that were aimed at former officer Mike Frassetti (an administrative hearing on Frassetti ruled that the accusations against Frassetti were false, that Rose and the department had been "overly zealous" in their persecution of the office; the hearing officer stopped just short of accusing Rose, Williams, the city's I.T. department, and City Attorney Bob Anderson of fabricating evidence).

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is this: if you work for the city and you want to get into some serious slacking, make sure you are very good friends with your supervisor (or, better, have some serious dirt on him/her) and get him/her to give you permission to do whatever you want -- steal a fire truck, sexually harass your co-workers, smoke dope at your desk, whatever. Here's the beautiful part: your supervisor can later use the Steve Martin defense ("Your Honor, I forgot it was against the law to rob a bank!") as Dunaway did in his July 1 memo. Smile sheepishly and say it was all a learning experience.

Trust me on this, as this is Venice and this is the way things work here. If you do all of that, whatever you have done will be forgiven. You and your supervisor will come out of this unscathed, even to the point of looking like inncent lambs who have been wrongfully persecuted by the nasty residents of this vengeful little burg.