The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is intent on changing the script of American cities plagued by crime by implementing policy changes that have led to violent crime taking a tumble.
Following the defund the police movement, many cities across the nation have struggled with police retention and swelling violent crime. For Jacksonville, Florida, Sheriff T.K. Waters, the issue is personal, with the elected official spending the last 33 years of his career dedicated to decreasing crime in the “murder capital of Florida.”
“We’ve long had the poor reputation of being the murder capital, which I resent,” he told Fox News Digital. “Don’t like it at all because our city’s a lot more than that.”
Jacksonville’s nickname came after the city saw year-after-year of high murder rates – until 2024, when police reported more than a 50% drop from 2023, when murders fell from 122 to 59. That continued a decline from 2022, when the department reported 134 murders. The sheriff’s office said 2024’s total of 59 murders was the lowest since 1995, when there were 86 murders.
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Waters highlighted the importance of having enough funding from the city commissioners to remain on top of Florida’s continued population growth.
“Jacksonville is a huge city, and our population when I started was about 700,000. We’re over a million now,” he said. “But we’ve been able to go backwards when it comes to violence, instead of increasing, because the city funds us – our city council is amazing.”
“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,” he said.
Waters said that, at the heart of the matter, people deserve a prompt law enforcement presence when they call for assistance.
“If we don’t do that, we lose control and our city, our city becomes ungovernable, and we won’t be able to function,” he said. “So a lot [of our success] is the result of not defunding us. I don’t think people really realize that.”
Waters shared what policy shifts his team implemented that saw lifesaving results in 2023. He shared that while the changes began nearly a decade ago, the seeds of the changes are bearing results now.
“In 2016, I had the privilege of starting a program with my predecessor that was working solely on violent crime. And it was a one-man team – that was me,” he said. “And he allowed me to build that goal, that team out, and throughout the years, we built out a very robust team focused on combating violent crime.”
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He shared that the team is laser focused on building relationships with community members and being transparent with their constituents.
“We deliver the message, and it’s that we want to keep you safe, we want to keep you alive, we want to keep you out of prison. But if you decide you want to, we’re going to do what we’re supposed to do as a law enforcement agency and put you in prison,” he said. “And we tell them that flat out.”
Waters also discussed Jacksonville’s robust gang unit, saying, “We have a crime intelligence center, and we have our citywide community problem response team, and they all work in concert and focus very heavily on the people that we know are the shooters in our neighborhoods and our communities.”
While other cities have been stretching their police forces thin, Jacksonville has been bulking up by focusing on what law enforcement forces need to continue doing their jobs to the best of their abilities.
“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.”
Waters said that he realized “very early on” that his team members were being “grossly underpaid.” He shared that the city approved additional funding to increase the pay for law enforcement.
“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,” he said. “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.”
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He shared that he is loyal to his officers and takes accountability for the work they do.
“But the most important thing is to stick with your officers when they’re doing their job correctly. We have to stand by them. We can’t allow politics to have us make a knee-jerk reaction or decision based on how something feels or the pressure that we get,” he said.
“I vowed to our police officers and showed them that we are going to stand up when they do the right thing. When they don’t do the right thing, we hold them accountable, of course,” he continued. “And that’s known publicly and people have noticed that around the country because we’ve been growing by leaps and bounds.”
Overall, Waters said he is committed to continually improving, sharing that he wants the homicide numbers to be at zero.
“My goal is that I want to hear almost universally that our community feels safe,” he said. “Across the board, not just pockets, but I wanted across the board. I wanted people to feel safe when they’re going home, when they’re going to the grocery store and when they’re driving on the roadways.”
“We’re going to go out and do what we need to do to make sure we try to maintain and get better in our city,” he said. “I’d like for the number [of homicides] to be at zero.”
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