Making Jacksonville a safer city

Editor's note:An earlier version of this story misstated the current year. It is 2019, not 2018.

As the longstanding murder capital of Florida, Duval County’s bloodshed shows no sign of letting up.

In the first six weeks of 2019, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has already begun investigating 18 murders, including a 16-year-old and 17-year old gunned down on Jan. 31 and Feb. 5.

The toll of gun violence struck again Thursday evening when gunfire erupted at Powell Park, killing a 24-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy whose deaths aren’t yet included in the 18 murders the Sheriff’s Office has counted.

The relentless violence has left Jacksonville residents like Teena Jones desperate for the city to find a way to bring down the deaths.

“We must change the channel and stop burying them — holding hands, carrying roses, raising doves and balloons — and find solutions which are going to work,” Jones said at a recent meeting of a new city task force on reducing crime.

The challenge of finding those solutions falls on city leadership, and it's at the forefront in races for mayor and sheriff in the March 19 election. City Council member Anna Brosche, who is challenging Mayor Lenny Curry, says making city safer in the long run might justify asking voters to approve a tax dedicated solely to expanding programs that steer young people away from crime.

Curry, a Republican, successfully campaigned four years ago on a clear message: The city had a murder crisis and he had the solution, hiring more police officers and restoring funding cuts to the city’s main violence-prevention program.

Curry says under his watch, the city has invested in new technologies, created 180 additional police officer positions, and added several million dollars for prevention programs while merging the Jacksonville Children’s Commission and the Jacksonville Journey into the Kids Hope Alliance.

“The next four years, there’s going to continue to be a focus on public safety,” Curry said.

But when asked what next steps need to be taken, he was unwilling to commit to specific proposals, saying the city must first assess its options, whether that would be adding more police or starting new prevention programs.

Councilwoman Anna Brosche, a Republican who is Curry’s main challenger, says the city has spent “heavily, heavily in enforcement” and needs to put a “much more concerted effort in the prevention and intervention pieces" to reduce violent crime that is higher than the state and national averages.”

“This is a question the citizens need to answer — do you feel safer today than you did four years ago?” Brosche said.

Brosche, who voted for all of Curry’s proposed budgets, and the mayor split on whether the city should have a dedicated funding source for programs aimed at steering young people away from crime. Duval County voters narrowly rejected a referendum in 1990 to establish a half-mill property tax for youth services.

Curry said he opposes a new tax but would consider proposals to spend more within the city's existing framework if there is a strong argument for using the money. "If someone made the case," he said, "I'm always open to prioritizing spending and securing our future for young people."

Brosche said she would look first at ways to shift money into children's programs by scrutinizing budget priorities, and if that isn't enough, she would be open to going to the public with a voter referendum on establishing a dedicated tax.

"As far as I'm concerned, citizens would have to be involved," she said. "We have had experience in the past where citizens have said yes, we do want some big plan and we're on board with that."

She said the city's programs serve about 37 percent of children in households at or below poverty, and that outreach should be at least 50 percent.

She also wants to use the city's GIS mapping city and Census data to gain a "street-level understanding" of the city's neighborhoods while identifying grass-roots community leaders and business-owners who can act as mentors for young people facing challenges. "They can be the front-line of addressing crime in the city," she said.

Former Atlantic Beach City Councilman Jimmy Hill, running as a Republican, said Jacksonville needs to look at what the national average is for police officers per resident and hire that many officers.

“After that, they’re either doing a good job or not,” Hill said. “Anything that requires more police [than the national average] means they’re doing a bad job.”

He said the city then could “try some exciting things to reach kids at a young age” such as purchasing an ice cream truck the Sheriff’s Office can use to engage with children before they are drawn into gangs.

Omega Allen, an independent running for mayor for the second time in four years, said the Sheriff’s Office doesn’t need more police officers because that isn’t the solution to fighting crime.

“You don’t fight fire with fire,” she said. “Not one firetruck fights a fire with blowtorches. You can’t put it out by adding more police.”

She said the Sheriff’s Office needs a “better policing policy” for administering the money the office already gets from the city.

In the sheriff’s race, both Sheriff Mike Williams and former Patrolman Tony Cummings have been somewhat more specific, and although they emphasize the same things — developing trust with the community — the differences between them are also clear.

Williams, a Republican, touts changes he helped lead, like a new program that helps youth avoid arrest and bringing in academic partners to address gang violence. Sheriff Mike Williams says his office has “made headway” into the problem, but “it’s not magic. You can’t flip the switch one day. It takes time for that to work.”

Cummings’ policy platform includes reducing the number of top-level administrators in the Sheriff’s Office and reducing desk duty so more officers are on the street. Cummings, a Democrat, has also made increasing police accountability through a citizen review board a critical part of his campaign. He said he wants to reduce the number of undercover drug buy-bust operations, and instead assign those officers to the gang unit.

Fighting crime also was a main issue in 2015 when Mayor Alvin Brown lost his bid for re-election.

During Brown’s four years in office, there were 92 murders a year. “We should all be angry, we should all be upset, we should all be mourning,” Curry told a group of business owners before the 2015 election. “Our violent crime has now spiked over the last three years. The murder rate is now back up.”

During Curry’s first three years, the county averaged 108 murders a year.

Jacksonville’s murder problem can seem intractable. It’s not a single-year blip above the statewide average. For more than a decade, Duval has had the highest murder rate among major counties in the state, and no others are even close. The only time another county had a higher rate was when Orlando suffered the Pulse Nightclub massacre.

Curry recently told the Times-Union that things are better now because the murder rate is stable. Brown left office with the murder rate 23 percent higher in his final year compared to his first year; in the last available year of state data, the murder rate under Curry was 11 percent higher than in his first year.

The mayor said the issue keeps him up at night because no matter what policies he enacts “there's no guarantee another kid is not going to be in a hopeless situation and pick up a gun and do something he should not do, and that is frustrating because there is no courageous vote that is going to fix that."

From July 2015, when Curry took office, through June 2018, Duval’s murder rate was nearly 12 murders for every 100,000 people, while statewide it was just five murders. If Duval were an average county instead of an outlier, there would’ve been 176 fewer killings during those three years.

Duval County’s average violent crime rate, which includes aggravated assaults, robberies, rapes and murders, was about the same during Curry’s term as it was during Brown’s.

Measuring a mayor or sheriff by crime statistics can be fraught, though, since there’s not one thing that affects crime. For example, Volkan Topalli, a criminologist at Georgia State University, has theorized that much of the decline in property crime nationwide is a result of people no longer carrying much cash and global free-trade deals making property worthless.

“You have to accept that there are larger sort of social and environmental impacts on things like the crime rate that go beyond what you’re able to control at the municipal or state level,” he said. “You can’t control the national debt. You can’t control the consumer price index. It is the case that the crime goes down nationally, you can’t tell me every police chief in every single county is implementing the same policies with the same resources. Yet they’ll take credit for it.”

Last month, Mayor Curry’s office took part in a policy paper jointly with the State Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Office. That paper outlined a number of different proposals — including the creation of a citywide Office of Violence Prevention, collaboration with trauma hospitals and implementation of gang injunctions.

The plan offered a wide display of possible policy solutions; some have already been implemented, while others are ideas that the three offices have not committed to. When asked what ideas he supported from the plan, Curry didn’t commit to any specific proposals.

The city has already taken part in one initiative with City University of New York’s John Jay College that emphasizes a carrot-and-stick approach, requiring suspected gang members on probation to attend meetings where they’re told they can either face heavy prosecution or a second chance. Police also go to family and friends of those they suspect of being in gangs to urge them to seek help.

The city is also looking at adopting CureViolence, a similar program that instead of relying primarily on police uses “violence interrupters” from the community. The city has agreed to pay $7,500 for a CureViolence assessment, but Curry said he was not ready to commit to it.

“I’m not going to commit to something until I see the assessment,” he said. “I do believe we will likely move forward with something like what they're talking about, but there's a reason we're bringing them."

Williams supports using both the John Jay and the CureViolence approaches, and he said the John Jay initiative has already been successful at reaching some people who might otherwise have participated in violence.

Topalli praised both initiatives, but he said they’re hard to implement. “The problem with it is it only works when the police department has built up a positive image in the neighborhood. The tactic is a fine tactic. The problem is you can’t implement the strategy until you’ve laid the groundwork of building up trust. The other problem is if you have police officers filling that role, more of a social role, what a given officer maybe accomplishes in an afternoon can be undone when another officer comes by in the evening and has a bad interaction with someone. It’s very easy to lose trust with the community. It’s very difficult to regain it.”

In Curry’s interview, he did highlight the need to add programs to the county’s alternative schools, where sometimes the most at-risk students are sent. "You will see lives changed there. Those are the schools of last resort. I mean think about this. I was baffled, and so was the state attorney and so was the sheriff, when we learned that alternative schools do not have these programs."

All registered voters are eligible to vote in the March 19 election. If a candidate doesn’t receive more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff in May.

Andrew Pantazi: apantazi@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4310

David Bauerlein: dbauerlein@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4581