The FWC is Missing the Boat.

Where Mission, Strategy, and Tactics Collide

My feelings about law enforcement fall into two categories: the men and women who serve and the agencies themselves. I totally support the people and have a general disdain for the agencies. My characters generally feel the same.

Political agendas aside, each agency has their own mission which is deployed through their strategy and tactics. It is up to the people to do this. From anecdotal experience, my own and others, the 80:20 rule applies to the men and women who serve. Eighty percent are good; twenty percent not so much. In my books I have the good guys, like Kurt Hunter, who is a Special Agent for the National Parks Service and the main character in my Backwater books. Others have been bad guys. Wood’s Trial will showcase several of these characters from my recent experience sitting on a jury in Key West.

This all brings me to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission or FWC. As their name suggests they were originally game wardens. Through the merger of several other agencies including the Florida Marine Patrol, they have assumed powers much greater than protecting our resources. Their vehicles and vessels boldly display their unstated mission: STATE LAW ENFORCEMENT.

Florida is not an easy state to patrol. With 1,350 miles of coastline and 4,500 islands, managing the marine resources is a monumental task. Add to that the almost 6 million acres of public hunting land and you have challenges.

This is where the mission, strategy, and tactics come into play.

I’ll get into conservation in a separate post. What I’d like to cover here is policing. I’ll be the first to admit that having a dual mandate of wildlife conservation and law enforcement is an impossible task. Committing resources to one, will starve the second.

Life safety should be the priority of law enforcement. The FWC (not the only agency guilty here) choses to do so in what I think of as a passive way, mainly with random checks. I’ve been pulled over and boarded several times by officers—without cause. The officers will sit at inlets, boat ramps, and bridges, randomly pulling over boaters. When they are finished with one, the next one that passes gets pulled over.

They are thorough, checking licenses, boat registration, safety gear and then searching coolers and fish boxes. I understand that the threat keeps people honest. What it doesn’t do is catch the real offenders.

Sitting in front of the inlet to my small neighborhood in Big Pine Key and pulling over residents is not going to clean up anything and in my view is harassment. It is the same as placing a road block on your street.

Meanwhile, there have been several accidents, a few fatal in the last few weeks here. The two day Sportsmen’s Season, and then the official opening of lobster season are two of the peak tourist weeks and a crazy time here.

With hundreds of boats and divers in the water there is a high risk of injury or death. In this regard, I believe the standard FWC tactic of random checks does a disservice to the community it is intended to serve. Yes, some people don’t follow the rules—most do.

My specific issue is the dive flags which are intended to protect people in the water. They are misused and misunderstood, and should be a major point of emphasis for the FWC, not stopping boats coming into my neighborhood.

Displaying the red flag with white diagonal stripe from the highest point of the vessel, is intended to proved a barrier, three hundred feet in open water, and one hundred feet in inlets, channels and restricted areas. Divers, through the boats flag, or a buoy with a flag, are required to stay within that distance and boaters are required to respect it.

Education in an important tactic in enforcement. Most everyone knows that the legal recreational limit is six lobsters per person. The size limit is also well know. So why not the simple safety measure that protects the divers.

It had become commonplace to see dive flags displayed when boats are running and even docked. Some people never take them down. I’m sure, at some point, everyone has forgotten to remove the flag when the divers are out of the water. I am certainly guilty of that, but the incidence of misuse is so rampant that I believe it is ignorance rather than a mistake.

As the flags are ignored and misused, they become less of a safety measure and boaters start to ignore them altogether.

This is a problem the FWC can and should address. Instead of no-cause boardings, why not target people that are actually doing something wrong, and solve a potential life safety issue in the process.