Miami Isn’t at All Pleased to Get Santa Monica’s ‘Gift’

Miami Police Chief Clarence Dickson was said to be “pretty perturbed” on Thursday.

It wasn’t just that Weston J. Hill, 44, arrested a few days ago on a sex-related charge, had failed to show up for a court hearing. What was really bothering Dickson was how Hill (who was located later in the day) happened to be in the Florida city in the first place.

It all started back in 1982, when a Florida judge could not figure out what to do about Melanie Ann King--arrested dozens of times for prostitution and related counts.

The judge finally solved his problem by buying her a one-way plane ticket to California.

Within weeks, California authorities said, she was at it again--arrested, among other places, in Santa Monica.

So, last March, when Santa Monica Police Chief James Keane couldn’t figure out what to do with Hill--arrested dozens of times in California for sex offenses--Keane bought Hill a one-way ticket to Florida. Within weeks, Florida police said, Hill was at it again, arrested in Miami Beach on suspicion of indecent exposure.

Keane said Thursday that he really had no choice--”that the failure of the state of California’s judicial systems and its mental health institutions to handle the matter left me with no alternative. . . . Hill had to go.”

To Keane, Florida was the logical place to send him.

“He asked to go there, and we provided the transportation,” Keane said. “They’d sent us a prostitute. We figured that if they wanted to play one-upmanship with California, we’d take them on any time.”

“I urgently suggest you order a mental examination of your police chief, James Keane,” Vice Mayor Joe Carollo said in a telegram to Santa Monica City Manager Jan Jalili.

In a statement issued through his press office on Thursday, Dickson said that Keane’s self-described “crime prevention program” was “unprofessional, dangerous . . . embarrassing to the law enforcement community and morally wrong. . . .

“It does not prevent, but transfers, a dangerous problem from one area to another,” the Miami police chief said.

Dickson--described by his press office as “pretty perturbed” about the matter--said Keane mailed him a letter on March 21, describing Hill’s arrest record and advising him that Hill had been flown from Los Angeles to Miami two days earlier.

“There was no mention, however, that the chief had used $249 of his department’s money to buy the ticket,” Dickson said.

The Miami chief said that about three weeks after his arrival in Miami, police officers there saw Hill exposing himself in public.

Hill, arrested on the spot, was being sought on a bench warrant for failure to appear in court in connection with the case.

Hill was located late Tursday at Dodge Memorial Hospital, a Miami psychiatric facility. Miami Beach police spokesman Howard Zeifman said officers who arrested Hill on April 22 “determined he needed to be psychiatrically evaluated and he was taken there to be examined . . .”

Hill was later transferred to the Dade County Jail to await arraignment today.

Keane said Thursday that he was not surprised that Dickson was angry.

“I would be, too, if I were in his shoes,” Keane said.

“I apologize to the citizens of Florida,” he said. “It is embarrassing to the state of California when a chief has to take this kind of action. . . . But it takes this kind of action to change the system. I think it’s worth it in the long run.”

Santa Monica’s problems with Hill date back to 1976, Keane said, when the man was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl.

“He was convicted and found to be insane,” Keane said. “He was out again in ’82. We arrested him again in ‘83, when he tried to get a boy to bring his 6-year-old sister into a restroom. . . .

“He was found incompetent to stand trial . . . committed to Patton State Hospital . . . and re-released in November, ’84. Last Dec. 12, we arrested him again after he went berserk in a restaurant, broke out all the windows. . . . He was committed again, and released again last March. . . .

‘Chiefs Are Stuck’

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Keane said. “Is it the laws? Is it the individual judges? I don’t know. . . . But the system in California is failing. It’s not keeping insane people inside institutions. Police chiefs are stuck with this kind of stuff.”

Keane said that after Hill’s release in March, members of the Santa Monica Police Department held a conference on what to do with him.

”. . . And someone said he wanted to go to Florida,” the chief said. “We bought a ticket . . . and drove him out to the airport the next day. . . .

“Women and children are safer now because Hill’s not in California,” Keane said. “They’ve got to handle things in Florida better than we do. . . . Naturally, the Miami police chief is upset, and I don’t blame him. But my number one responsibility is to protect the children of Santa Monica.”