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Carlton: A new sheriff — make that police chief — in town

 
Ward
Ward
Published July 11, 2015

There is a small detail you notice about Tampa's new police chief, Eric Ward — beyond the impeccable uniform, no-nonsense eyeglasses and clean-shaven head. (He had hair when he started this job two months ago, he says, a rare quip.) It's a detail beyond his careful, formal way of talking.

It's the holes in his ears.

Two in one lobe, one in the other, they are remnants of being a teenager, of growing up in public housing in east Tampa, raised by a single mother after a divorce. He already stood out because of his deeply religious family — piercing his ears, he figured, made him like the other kids.

And his mother, who expected her oldest to be a role model for his siblings?

"I knew," he says decades later, "I was doomed."

Today he is a 27-year law enforcement veteran taking over the police force of a city riding an alarming tide of gun violence. "I'll take a kid piercing his ears over picking up a gun any day," he says.

If his predecessor Jane Castor was a rock star in town, the new chief is more reserved.

Already, he's made news. On a recent Saturday, he stood in a city park for a buyback that took in 521 guns a kid would never get the chance to pick up, he said. He told reporters who inquired that his department would generally be "all for" the option of civil citations instead of criminal charges for small amounts of marijuana.

And he's dealt with questions — this week, about the death of William Dale McIntire, hit one night while lying in the road by a vehicle that kept going. Acting on a tip, the Times asked last week if a police vehicle hit McIntire. Only this week did officials confirm DNA on Officer Jeremy Dabush's unmarked SUV linked him to the incident.

So why not disclose an officer's potential involvement earlier to avoid speculation that police protect their own? Ward says he has worked under five police chiefs, all with different styles. He is a deliberate man. "I will release information when I have facts," he says — in this case, this week's DNA results.

Being top boss is a different job from anywhere else in the department, and dealing with reporters and their questions "is a lane I'm not used to being in," he says. Newly hired police spokesman Stephen Hegarty — the voice of Hillsborough schools through some tumultuous years — starts Monday.

Perhaps it's a quirk specific to Tampa, making police chiefs and mayors celebrities. Ward has learned you cannot go to the South Tampa Publix in a T-shirt on a Saturday morning for bread without being obliged to pose for selfies. You can rarely run Bayshore Boulevard or cruise Home Depot without work-related conversation.

He is learning to balance his favorite part of being a cop — being out there, talking to churches, groups and teenagers he says are less likely to commit crimes if you bother to know them by name. He tells them he's not there to change their lives in an hour, but to talk about their options. "I'm a firm believer in the fact that we can't arrest our way out of crime," he says.

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On the other side of the job is the big desk, the inbox that never empties and emails that stack up.

The other day, he met with the previous chief and was struck. "It looks like you're 10 years younger," he told her. And with a full head of hair, at that.