Sheriff in Florida's 'murder capital' reveals how his department slashed homicides
By Laura Parnaby
Daily Mail
Jan 28, 2025
Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters (pictured) has said resisting calls to
'defund the police' and keep officer numbers high have been key to
combating murders in the city
The sheriff overseeing the city notorious for being Florida's 'murder capital' has revealed how his department has slashed homicide rates in recent years.
Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters has said resisting calls to 'defund the police' and keep officer numbers high have been key to combating murders in the city.
The northeast Florida city was given the bleak moniker after murder rates soared in recent years - until 2023, when police started to make a breakthrough.
Some 134 murders were recorded in the city in 2022, a figure which dropped to 122 in 2023, before declining by a whopping 50 percent in just one year to 59 in 2024.
The sheriff said last year's total of 59 murders was the lowest since 1995, when there were 86 homicides in the city which is now home to almost one million people.
'We've long had the poor reputation of being the murder capital of Florida, which I resent,' Waters told Fox News Digital. 'I don't like it at all - our city is a lot more than that.'
Waters said receiving adequate funding for his force in recent years has been the key to their success in cracking down on violent crime.
'As the city grows, this agency has to grow,' he said.
The sheriff overseeing Jacksonville (pictured), the city notorious for being Florida's 'murder capital' has revealed how his department has slashed homicide rates in recent years
'Technologically, we have to grow, and manpower we have to grow, because there will be pockets of this city that won't be covered if we don't get the funding that we need.
'People deserve, when they call the police, for us to show up in a timely fashion.
'If we don't do that we lose control and our city becomes ungovernable, and we won't be able to function. The result of not defunding us, is huge.'
Waters added that amid the fallout from the murder of George Floyd by a cop in Minneapolis, Minnesota, his force like many others had trouble recruiting.
'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,' he told Fox.
'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.'
He added that he started a program with his predecessor in 2016 focusing solely on violent crime.
Neighbors gather as Jacksonville police investigate a fatal triple shooting in the 11200 block of Bridges Road near Dunn Avenue, January 15, 2023
'Throughout the years we've built a very robust way of how we deal with it,' Waters told Fox.
'One has been our community side, our community stakeholders go out and make contact with these young men that we know are involved in violent crime.
'We deliver a message - we want to keep you safe, we want to keep you alive and we want to keep you out of prison.
'But if you decide you don't want to take this offer we're going to put you in prison, and we tell them that flat out.'
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