Florida cops bought alcohol, cigarettes, lap dances during undercover strip club probe, but made no arrests
(The AEGIS Alliance) – Florida cops spent hundreds of bucks on alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, and even lap dances when they carried out an undercover investigation at a strip club, yet nobody was arrested and they failed to turn up any kind of intelligence information, according to an internal affairs investigation.
Daniel Rhodes, a Tampa police Sergeant got suspended for only one day and was also taken out of the department’s Street Anti-Crime Squad after the internal affairs investigation into officers visiting the Gold Club in January 2020, where an undetermined amount of undercover officers dropped $421 in the course of their visit that lasted a few hours.
“The officers advised they spent the money on the cover charge, drinks for themselves, drinks for the dancers, drinks for the dancer’s friends, shots for the bartender, a pack of cigarettes, cover charge for the ‘lap dance area’ and one lap dance each,” the internal affairs report reads.
The undercover pleasure-seeking police officers, nevertheless, failed to obtain any kind of intelligence information from any of the club’s dancers that possessed alleged connections to a Ybor City Tampa area shooting suspect. The cops additionally produced no apprehensions throughout the “alleged fake operation,” the report discovered.
Rhodes informed detectives his team visited the strip club as a portion of its shooting investigation, and also to make drug-related or even prostitution apprehensions.
Tips had earlier been obtained that dancers had been offering sexual activity at the nightclub from June to December of 2019, resulting in the covert investigation.
“However, all of the officers gave conflicting statements pertaining to the reason and title of the operation, which led to a miss understanding [sic] of the objective,” Tampa authorities internal investigators stated.
An investigation into what happened was promptly started as soon as Tampa cops found out about it.
“Discovering misconduct of any of our officers is always disheartening and unacceptable and the department will not tolerate this behavior,” authorities stated. “Conducting audits ensures officers are following proper procedures and policies and held to a higher standard.”
Specifics about the covert investigation were talked about on Tuesday during a Tampa Police Department Citizens Review Board hearing, which supervises the police department’s internal affairs investigations, according to WTVT.
The board authorized the report’s results, yet one participant asked if Rhodes, that continues to work for the department as a sergeant, was actually disciplined significantly enough.
“The penalty or the violation of a one-day suspension and moving him around does not look like it is enough for what he did,” board member Carolyn Collins pointed out.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
