PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri forcefully pushed back on the call to reallocate money from his agency’s budget to specific social services on Wednesday, saying that in running the homeless shelter known as Pinellas Safe Harbor, his agency is already providing a number of such services.

“We’ve operated it for 10 years with drug treatment, reading skills, life skills, mental health services, all kinds of programmatic services to break that cycle of homeless and keep people out of the criminal justice system,” he said during a Suncoast Tiger Bay virtual discussion on race and policing in the county.

“And what I’ve said for years to all the social service providers in Pinellas County: come take it and run it,” he added. “Somebody take this over and someone be the manager of it. And you know how many responses that I’ve had to do that in the last ten years? That’d be zero.”

Pinellas Safe Harbor opened in January 2011 and sits on 49^th Street in unincorporated Pinellas County near Largo.  It serves as a shelter for homeless people involved in the criminal justice system and has an average daily population of around 400 people.

Gualtieri also said his office offers case management services in working with the Pinellas Integrated Care Alliance. That’s where the PCSO employs licensed clinical social workers to work with the mentally ill who get involved in the criminal justice system.  

“If somebody wants to take that money away from us, from what we’re already doing? Who are you going to give it to you?” he asked. “Because they’re not doing it.”

Common ground to be found?

Jabaar Edmond, an activist and Childs Park Neighborhood Association vice president, said some of the sheriff’s words were in “complete alignment” with what some of the activists on the streets of St. Petersburg have been calling for when they talk about defunding the police. 

“It’s shocking for me to hear you say it, because I’ve heard people who I know don’t agree with you saying the same things, so there is common ground that we can start on,” Edmond said. 

Dr. Dawn Cecil, a professor of criminology at University of South Florida St. Petersburg, said that calls to defund/reallocate funds from the police have been discussed for years in criminology circles.  

“This need to reevaluate the criminal justice system as a whole. What is its real goal?" Cecil explained. "But what is it doing now and how can we shift those services back to where they’re intended to be?”

While President Trump has blasted the concept, most (but not all) activists have said that they don’t want to literally defund police departments, but reallocate their budget. An exception is in Minneapolis, where the city council voted last month to dismantle their police department.

A Monmouth University poll released last week shows that the majority of the public believes that to be the case.  The survey showed that 77 percent believe those who use that phrase really just want to change the way police departments operate, with just 18 percent believing that people who use the phrase actually want to dismantle police departments. 

“Most Americans see ‘Defund the Police’ as more of a general statement of purpose rather than an actual policy demand, at least for now,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute

What is the BREATHE Act?

However, there is now the BREATHE Act, a radical proposal which among other things calls for abolishing ICE and the Drug Enforcement Administration and reallocating funds from policing and incarceration to social-welfare, health care, education and environmental programs, according to New York magazine.

It has no official sponsors in Congress yet, though U.S. Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley say they support it.

Meanwhile, the Monmouth University poll also finds that public opinion on racial discrimination has shifted in the past month, and “appears to be driven almost entirely by partisanship.”

Among self-identified Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party, 40 percent say discrimination is a big problem. That’s a 14-point drop from just a few weeks ago, when 54 percent of Republicans agreed with the idea.

The poll also finds that 35 percent of Republicans say racial discrimination is not a problem, which the authors of the poll say is substantially higher than when that question has been asked over the past five years.