Law enforcement must overcome numerous obstacles to succeed in their mission.
Democrats constantly find ways to make their jobs harder.
And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was fuming when a Florida sheriff won this hard-fought fight.
Florida sheriff succeeds in lowering Jacksonville’s murder rate
Jacksonville, Florida had the reputation for being the most crime-ridden city in the state for decades.
The city was the “murder capital of Florida.”
Murders seemed to hit a new high every year on the mean streets of Jacksonville.
Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters has overseen a drop in crime since he was first elected to the position in 2022.
Waters credited his city’s turnaround to the increase in funding the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office received.
Jacksonville went in the opposite direction when many cities around the country were defunding their police departments.
Waters spent more than 30 years in the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office before he was elected sheriff.
“We’ve long had the poor reputation of being the murder capital, which I resent,” Waters said. “Don’t like it at all because our city’s a lot more than that.”
Jacksonville had 134 murders in 2022, but that number dropped to 59 in 2024.
That was the fewest number of murders in the city since 1995.
Giving the police proper funding pays off
Jacksonville, like the rest of Florida, has undergone a population boom in recent decades.
“Jacksonville is a huge city, and our population when I started was about 700,000. We’re over a million now,” Waters explained. “But we’ve been able to go backward when it comes to violence, instead of increasing, because the city funds us – our city council is amazing.”
The city commissioners increased the funding for the sheriff’s office as the city’s population continued to grow.
“They fund us and make sure that we have what we need to be able to function as an agency and as a city grows,” Waters stated.
He set a simple but important goal for law enforcement to achieve in the city.
Waters wanted Jacksonville residents to be able to get help quickly when they called the police.
“If we don’t do that, we lose control and our city, our city becomes ungovernable, and we won’t be able to function,” Waters said. “So a lot [of our success] is the result of not defunding us. I don’t think people really realize that.”
Waters slammed the way the Left and the “Defund the Police” movement treated law enforcement.
“For a while, especially around 2019-2020 when everything got really heated around the country, it was hard to get people to want to come and work because they were being demonized and vilified the way it should never be done,” Waters said. “These are regular people who have families, they have wives, sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews. They should never be vilified for doing a job that’s very difficult and one that many people neither want to do or can do.”
Jacksonville was able to recruit law enforcement from around the country while other departments were defunding the police.
“And now we have people coming from Seattle, Washington. We’ve had people come from New York, we’ve had people come from Savannah, Georgia,” Waters explained. “This is no disrespect to any of my counterparts across the state or the country, but I think we have the very best agency in the United States of America. And I think it’s because of the men and women. It’s not because of me, it’s because of them and the hard work they do every day.”
The Left threw common sense out the window in its crusade against law enforcement after George Floyd’s death.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this story.