Who gave police Lieutenant Mike Rose permission to double dip and how much double dipping did he do?

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(pic, from left to right: Julie Williams, Mike Rose, Mike Frassetti, from Frassetti's reinstatement hearing last year -- Chief Williams was forced to rehire Frassetti after a hearing that determined that charges against Frassetti were the result of a department-created fiction)

Chief Julie Williams is finally speaking out on some of the allegations being levied against her, but her answers are about as illuminating as the silent treatment that she has been giving the media up until this point.

The Herald-Trib's Kim Hackett was finally able to get Williams to repeat to the media the same thing that Williams said to council on May 25: that Police Lieutenant Mike Rose had been double dipping by going to his business while on the city's dime. Williams states that Rose had a supervisor's permission to do so.

This opens up a whole new set of  questions, ones that Williams and staff are still successfully ducking with the aid of City Manager Isaac Turner. Two that immediately rise to the surface: how much double dipping did Rose do and which supervisor gave Mike Rose permission to, well, steal from the city (because that's really what was happening)?

In answer to the second question, if indeed Rose actually had been given permission, it could only have been one of three people giving Rose permission, as Rose is a lieutenant and there are only three people in the department with a higher rank: Captain Tom McNulty, Captain Dave Dunaway, and Chief Williams. Since Williams insists it was someone other than her, that leaves McNulty or Dunaway. Neither of those two are in any hurry to do a mea culpa and fall on the sword that Williams has handed to them -- in fact, both of them have created a wall of silence in response to any citizen or media inquiries.

So far, the department is claiming no paperwork exists to support Williams' version of events, this in response to numerous public records requests by this web site and by the Herald-Tribune.

As to how much double dipping? According to documents leaked to Venice Florida! dot com and the Herald-Tribune, the answer is quite a lot. A huge amount.

Several officers working together started compiling a partial list of times that Rose left the city on city time to work at his store. This list shows that during a four-month period ending in February of this year, Rose left the city nearly every day he was on duty to attend to his store, often for as long as two to three hours a day, sometimes as many as three times during the same day.

At this point, I have no idea how to calculate the amount of money that the City of Venice was paying to secretly pick up the tab on Mahi Mac's Bait Shop's staff time, but from the partial list I have, it looks like it's a hell of a lot. Moreover, it's a hell of a lot of missing money that Chief Williams hasn't investigated and that Captain Tom McNulty OR Captain Dave Dunaway has given away as a freebie to Rose and his fledgling business.

The list was compiled using a variety of methods, and includes CAD numbers (computer dispatch) where Rose had radioed in that he would be out of city limits on personal errands.

Rather than investigate Rose, the department's initial reaction was to remove access to the CAD database from police cars, thus preventing any further tracking of Rose's time away from the department. Unfortunately, that also removed a wealth of investigative data that officers in the field need, info that could very well save a cop's life, like how many times police have been called to a given address on domestic violence complaints, e.g.

NOTE: Access to the CAD database has just recently been reinstalled on some police vehicles as a result of a software upgrade from the police department's software vendor, HTE.