Editor’s Note: On Monday, Oct. 23, Editor Ken Fine and Photography Director Casey Mozingo rode along with two members of the Goldsboro Police Department. Portions of this story reflect what they heard and witnessed during the ride-along.
It’s 3:02 p.m. and a call comes over the radio.
It isn’t the first time today that Goldsboro Police Cpl. Justin Whitfield is forced to decide whether to get involved.
Not even close.
He’s been on this particular shift since 6 a.m. and it seems like the calls just keep coming.
But this scenario piques his interest.
Officers have located 32-year-old Daniel Darden, a city resident with active warrants, and when they attempt to take him into custody, he flees in his vehicle.
The pursuit is on.
“Hang on,” Whitfield says. “Let’s see if we can get him.”
A few minutes later, an officer tells those on the receiving end of his play-by-play that he has lost sight of the suspect.
Whitfield and the others on his shift patrol the last-known location of the vehicle Darden was driving and call off the search.
There are still citizens waiting on responses to their concerns and the drastically understaffed GPD only has a handful of officers on the beat.
Whitfield begins to make his way to an address on Wilmington Avenue where a group of children are suspected of repeatedly prank calling 911.
But just then, another officer requests backup.
He has spotted Darden.
Whitfield, a five-year veteran of the GPD, flips on his blue lights and sirens and heads toward the area where the suspect is actively eluding arrest.
And then, it happens.
“He’s ramming us,” an officer is heard saying over the radio.
Sensing the danger, Whitfield increases his speed — allowing the voice coming over the speakers to guide him.
“North on Sycamore.”
“East on Olivia.”
“He just ran into a house.”
Moments later, Whitfield and several other officers are out of the cars with guns drawn — some out front, others ensuring Darden doesn’t escape out the back door.
The suspect has barricaded himself inside.
There’s just one problem.
With every member of the day shift at the scene near the corner of Olivia Lane and Annabelle Street, the rest of the city is left uncovered.
And as for the pending calls from residents who have called 911?
In short, they will have to wait.
•
Several hours earlier, Whitfield is driving toward an incident on Grantham Street.
A woman was driving the wrong way down the road and was stopped, but now her vehicle won’t start and until it is moved, other drivers are in jeopardy.
“We’ll give her a quick jump and head back toward downtown,” Whitfield says.
While he is giving the jump box to another officer, GPD Chaplain Father David Wyly talked about the staffing woes at the department — and the failure of members of the Goldsboro City Council to approve a salary increase Police Chief Mike West recommended to ensure he could compete with neighboring departments and stop an exodus that has thinned out his ranks to a level he believes puts city residents in danger.
“They just put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” Wyly said.
How?
West presented two potential salary increase plans to the council earlier this year.
The chief said Plan A, which would have given officers scaled increases up to 21 percent to take care of current employees and improve the city’s starting pay for new officers, would have made the city competitive, which is key to filling vacancies.
“Plan A is better,” he told the board.
The second plan, Plan B, was only created because West was ordered to do so by City Manager Tim Salmon, who ultimately endorsed the less favorable option — arguing that while the costs to implement Plan A could be covered for this fiscal year, the city, which already had to take $1 million from its fund balance to meet its budget needs, would be obligated to come up with even more the in the 2024-25 fiscal year.
That future cost, he told council members, would add a $1.5 million obligation “that you are going to have to come up with next budget cycle.”
Several council members said they were “uncomfortable” approving a plan that would obligate the next council — the men and women elected in the coming weeks — to an expenditure that would require serious decisions, like tax increases or cuts in other departments.
Council member Charles Gaylor, who is running for mayor, said the decision to opt for the more expensive plan should be left to those who will take office in January, but acknowledged addressing the police issue was important.
“We need to do something that says, ‘We hear you,’” Gaylor said. “We are definitely going to do something.”
But opting for the more expensive Plan A is a decision he feels should be made by those who will also have to decide how to pay for it.
“That is a monumental shift to the budget that will handicap the incoming council,” he said, adding that should he be elected mayor, he would “be ready to take on” that decision.
Council member Bill Broadway, who is not running for re-election, said he was against Plan A because of potential tax implications.
“We are looking at higher taxes for property owners. We are talking 5 or 6 percent,” Broadway said. “We are handcuffing the next council.”
But Mayor Pro-tem Brandi Matthews, who is currently campaigning for another term on the board, said that when she was first elected, she was forced to make tough choices as a result of decisions made by previous board members — that those are the breaks and responsibilities of being an elected official.
So, she wasn’t satisfied with a rush to adopt a plan West said was not enough to prevent the exodus from his ranks to continue — and asked if Salmon could come up with another plan that came in somewhere between Plan A and Plan B.
“I see no medium,” she said.
Mayor David Ham disagreed, arguing that to ask Salmon and city officials to come back with a third option would delay getting the funds to Goldsboro first responders.
“I don’t want to keep waiting,” Matthews replied. “But if we can do better, let’s see if we can do better.”
In the end, the council would vote to adopt Plan B.
Since they made that decision, two more officers have left GPD.
Fully staffed, the department would have 106 officers. Currently, they boast only 71.
And the shortage has impacts beyond the number of men and women in uniform.
The department’s VICE unit is not at full staff.
The Selective Housing Unit, Special Enforcement Unit, and Gang Suppression Unit currently have only one member apiece.
That means that essentially every officer is now working patrol.
“When I started, there were 13 people on my shift. Now, we have 7. When I started, it was wide open. We could go do whatever we wanted to do — traffic stops, proactive policing, getting guns and drugs off the street, you name it,” Whitfield said. “When you first become a cop, that’s all you want to do. You want to go catch the bad guys. All we do now is take reports.”
And with such a limited number of officers on the beat at any given moment, “it’s exhausting,” he added.
“Everybody is burned out. Burnout is our biggest problem right now. Statistically speaking, back in the day, the burnout stage was five to six years. Now, it’s like a year or two because we’re so short,” Whitfield said. “By the end of the day, you’ll see everybody is just done.”
But the stress of seemingly constantly jumping from call to call is not the only problem.
The criminals know they are less likely to see police on patrol because numbers are so low.
That means more crime and more danger to the community.
“They know. They’re not stupid. That’s why crime is on the uptick,” Whitfield said. “When you used to see a cop ride by your house every five minutes and now you see them ride by every hour, it’s like, ‘There’s a lot less of them.’ When you have a shooting and five cops show up and 10 cops used to show up, they know.”
And they know that when they congregate in front of a gas station selling drugs, they are unlikely to get arrested because officers like Whitfield who witness their activity don’t have readily available backup to assist in making arrests.
“They stand up here and sell drugs all day, pretty much. You saw how many people were out here. What am I gonna do?” Whitfield said. “Me by myself, I can’t jump out on 10 guys standing at the gas station selling drugs because with drugs comes guns more than likely. So, I’m not risking my life to go get some dope off the corner by myself. And they know that.”
That’s not all.
City residents are less safe because there are so few officers to respond to 911 calls.
Whitfield talked about a recent shift during which two officers responded to a domestic disturbance and four were called to the scene of a person inside someone else’s home.
“That’s a whole shift on two calls. Dispatch is calling and it’s like, ‘We’ve got to hold it. We’ll get there when we can,’” Whitfield said. “My concern for the citizens is when you’re calling because you need help and help’s not coming because help is busy on another call.”
And in the event a major call comes in — one involving danger for officers and the community — even if every able lawman or woman is called in, nobody is available to cover the rest of Goldsboro.
The proof?
That exact scenario played out Oct. 23 when Darden barricaded himself in that house on Olivia Lane.
Did he have weapons inside?
Was he about to burst out the front door and start spraying bullets at the police and the residents who had gathered outside to see what all the commotion was about?
GPD wasn’t going to take any chances.
That’s why off-duty officers began rushing toward the scene — some, getting out of their cars in street clothes with badges hanging around their necks.
“So, in that scenario of a shooting at a city school or something like that, in the beginning, it’s just going to be us. More will come eventually, but for those critical first few minutes in a situation like that, we only have who we have,” Whitfield said. “And if something happens in the afternoon, like what went down (on Olivia Lane), there are other people who can become available. But night shift, at 2 in the morning if something happens? You’re it.”
•
It’s 5:19 p.m. — more than two hours after that call came over the radio — and Whitfield is wearing a gas mask and tactical gear.
Despite their repeated efforts to talk Darden out of the house, the time has come for GPD to make its move.
They fire tear gas cannisters into the doorway they cleared with a battering ram some 40 minutes earlier.
Moments later, the suspect was in custody, charged now with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon on law enforcement, assault with a deadly weapon, careless and reckless driving, hit and run, felony flee to elude, breaking and entering, and resisting arrest.
It is likely that the “action” was a morale boost to officers who have grown tired of feeling as though they are no longer able to do the real work — the proactive work — they feel is what truly gets the bad guys off the streets and makes their community a safer place to live.
A similar pick-me-up happened a few days earlier when officers were offered time-and-a-half pay to perform more aggressive patrolling in an overtime scenario of sorts.
“It was great. We got four guns. We got a stolen car. We arrested like four people. We really got to do the work and it was a great morale boost,” Whitfield said. “But, that used to be stuff you did every day. We would come into work and we’d get together and say, ‘Let’s go on wolfpack,’ which is when you ride three or four in an area and you get to do what we did Friday night. That’s not the norm anymore because we’re so short. What we do now is strictly reactive policing. All you’re doing is responding to all these calls. So, we respond to crimes, but that’s not the same thing as stopping crimes.”
And with every day that passes without a fully staffed GPD, more people armed with guns feel emboldened to use them.
“People in Goldsboro don’t know how lucky they are. If these people who are always shooting at each other actually knew how to aim a gun and shoot, we’d be picking up bodies every day,” Whitfield said. “Every single day.”
But because they don’t, it makes everyone less safe — as was the case when a 15-year-old girl was shot to death at a Spring Break pool party earlier this year.
“That’s not who they were shooting at, but she’s the one who ended up getting killed,” Whitfield said. “That happens all the time. And the scary thing is, it could happen anywhere. It doesn’t matter what neighborhood you live in, if you can hear those gunshots, at some point, that bullet could find you.”
It is unclear if and when this City Council — or the council that will soon be elected — will readdress GPD salaries.
But Whitfield and his fellow officers, while grateful for the raise they received when the board approved Plan B, are not surprised that not going with West’s plan is resulting in more members of the force leaving for greener pastures — and a lack of interest among newly-minted cops in joining Goldsboro’s ranks.
“As a 21-year-old officer fresh out of BLET, you’re gonna pay me 48 and they’re gonna pay me 60?” Whitfield said. “I’m gonna take that 60.”
