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The Tributary's Latest

Florida was going to be a beacon of criminal justice transparency. Instead, it’s almost 3 years behind schedule.

By Andrew Pantazi

August 24, 2021

More than three years after Florida passed a criminal-justice data transparency law that earned national headlines and rave reviews for the state’s politicians, the state agency tasked with actually publishing the data has continued to miss deadlines with no explanation.

Now, the ACLU of Florida has filed suit against the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in the hopes that a judge will force the agency, along with all the other agencies involved, to finally comply with the 2018 law.

“When it comes to the CJDT [criminal-justice data transparency] Law, legal mandates, aspirations, and expectations have become divorced from reality,” the lawsuit said. […]

Continue reading…

Speeding up the Jacksonville redistricting timeline

By Andrew Pantazi

August 24, 2021

After last week’s City Council meeting where the Jacksonville Office of General Counsel reported it didn’t think the city could complete redistricting in time for new School Board districts to take effect in 2022, the redistricting special committee has begun to move to a more frequent meeting schedule.

Originally, they scheduled the next meeting for later next month. Now they will meet today at 2 p.m. and then, according to the draft agenda, meet again Sept. 9.

Continue reading…

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Steal our stories. We intend for as many people to read our reporting as possible.

The Tributary is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom that investigates Jacksonville’s entrenched problems and proposed solutions through collaboration with existing local media.

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The Tributary's Latest

Duval elections office asks city for millions to replace decade-old machines

By Hannah Lee

August 19, 2021

To prepare for redistricting and back-to-back elections in the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, Duval’s county elections office is asking the City Council to boost its budget from $6.9 million to $9.4 million, a 35 percent increase.

The new budget will allow the Duval County Supervisor of Elections office to replace what it says are outdated equipment, bring on a new employee, cut down on voting lines, notify residents of their new districts and begin purchasing mail-ballot envelopes.

Despite the significant request, the office’s budget will continue to be lower than it was in peak years a decade ago, when adjusted for inflation.

Continue reading…

Redistricting woes: Jacksonville won't select School Board maps in time for 2022, says city lawyer

By Andrew Pantazi

August 19, 2021

Jacksonville's City Council is not likely to draw new Duval County School Board seats soon enough to apply for the 2022 August elections, according to lawyers for the city.

At the City Council's first redistricting committee meeting since Census data was released, Assistant General Counsel Peggy Sidman testified that the city's redistricting plan wouldn't go into effect for School Board races until 2024.

Under city law, redistricting plans must be approved at least nine months before an election. But it's not clear why City Council couldn't change the ordinance to allow them to approve redistricting plans later.

Continue reading…

Four finalists selected for Jacksonville judicial seat

By Hannah Lee

August 17, 2021

A Northeast Florida nominating commission forwarded four finalists to Gov. Ron DeSantis to replace Circuit Judge Karen K. Cole, who is retiring Oct. 1.

Cole currently hears family law cases and has previously heard serious lawsuits.

Circuit judges handle the most serious state cases, including felonies, major lawsuits, juvenile delinquency and custody battles. Judicial nominating commissions forward finalists to the governor who must pick from the list of finalists.

In this case, the nominating commission selected three former prosecutors and a former guardian ad litem.

All four have previously applied for judicial appointments.

Continue reading…

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ICYMI

• The Tributary kicked off its new redistricting-focused newsletter last week. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can click here to do so.

• Jacksonville won't have new School Board maps in place in time for 2022, says city lawyer.

• Marsy’s Law was supposed to help victims. In Jacksonville, it shields police officers.

• Melissa Nelson said police shooting videos would be released quicker. So why is the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office still taking months?

We want to hear from you!

If you haven't already, we want to hear from you. It would really help us prepare for the next few months if you would click here and take 5-10 minutes to fill out this survey.

Steal our stories. We intend for as many people to read our reporting as possible, so please copy and share and cite The Tributary.

This is a preview of Changing Florida, a Tributary newsletter keeping you up to date on redistricting, demographics and the fight for political power in the Sunshine State.

To make sure you don't miss out on an issue, click here to subscribe now and play a part in ensuring fair districts for all of Florida. Click here to read our archives.

We can't do this work without support from readers like you. Click here to donate to The Tributary.

If you have questions about redistricting or the Census, you can send them to us by clicking here.

Yesterday, the U.S. Census Bureau released its months-delayed count of every person in America.

Jacksonville grew quite a bit. The city added 127,827 people. That's enough that it actually shows a separate Census’ survey that came out last year was inaccurate when it said Fort Worth had grown larger than Jacksonville.

Jacksonville went from being the nation's 11th most populous city in 2010 to the 12th, due to Austin overtaking the city a few years ago.

Jacksonville and Duval County both became more diverse, and both are no longer majority white.

Duval also surpassed Pinellas, becoming Florida’s sixth-most populous county.

Meanwhile, our wealthy neighbors to the south in St. Johns County saw a population boom with 44 percent growth in the last decade. And Osceola County, home to Walt Disney World, saw 45 percent growth.

In fact, pretty much all of the area around Orlando grew at incredible rates, and they’re likely going to benefit from it with an extra congressional representative next year.

Every 10 years, after the results are announced, elected leaders begin the process of redrawing lines for elected offices, everything from city councils, county commissions and school boards to the Florida Legislature and U.S. House of Representatives.

In Jacksonville, it’s possible to draw a City Council where 11 out of 14 seats vote for Democrats exclusively. It’s also possible to draw a City Council where 12 out of 14 seats vote for Republicans. You can change who gets elected without ever having to change how someone votes.

For the last year, The Tributary has been preparing for how to cover redistricting, and we’re happy to announce Changing Florida, our newsletter specifically focused on democracy, redistricting and demographics in Jacksonville and Florida as a whole.

We plan to use that newsletter more frequently to break news, help you stay on top of public redistricting hearings and read more in-depth analysis about proposed plans.

Subscribe for the newsletter by clicking here. If you want to see more of this work, please donate so we can build out our team with dedicated reporters focused on redistricting.

We'll have more stories soon diving deeper into the data.

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On the calendar

The Jacksonville City Council Special Committee on Redistricting meets next Wednesday at 9 a.m. at City Hall.
This is the first time the committee is meeting under its new leadership. Councilmen Aaron Bowman and Danny Becton are the chair and vice-chair respectively.

Quick hits from the Census

What you need to know about Florida’s congressional seats

Next year, Florida will have one more congressional district, and the new ideal population for congressional seats — taking the population of Florida and dividing it by 28 seats — is 769,221.

It’s clear looking at the map that the most logical place to draw the new district is in Central Florida, where every seat near the Orlando area has too many people and the geographic size of those seats will need to shrink.

In Jacksonville, the Fifth Congressional District, currently held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, has 20,000 too few people, while Republican U.S. Rep. John Rutherford’s seat, the Fourth Congressional District, has 103,000 too many people.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into how these population changes will affect Florida’s seats. So far, neither the Florida Senate nor the Florida House has scheduled any redistricting commission meetings.

Duval vs. all y’all

Thursday’s Census results came with some good news for Duval.

It grew faster than other parts of the state, which means it shouldn’t lose political representation in the state Legislature or in Congress. It also notched the symbolic victory of finally surpassing Pinellas County’s population. Pinellas, the state’s densest county, has seen sluggish growth the past decade.

But not everything was good news.

Jacksonville’s housing stock is not keeping up with its growing population

The city added one home for every 2.8 person who moved to Jacksonville, a slower rate than almost every major city, including New York City, Los Angeles and Seattle, cities that have been failing to build enough new housing to ensure everyone has a home.

Fortunately, Jacksonville already had a larger housing stock than most other major cities, so it isn’t experiencing the same crises as more expensive cities. But the Census data indicates the city shouldn’t become complacent.

The diversifying big cities

Among the nation’s most populous cities, some like Denver are becoming whiter, while others are staying about the same. Jacksonville and a few others are rapidly diversifying as their population grows mostly from more Hispanic and Asian residents.

While Jacksonville is becoming more diverse, that doesn’t mean segregation is going away.

The Census data showed that the city is still starkly divided on racial lines, with neighborhoods that are 0.1 percent of the population who are Black and other neighborhoods that are 93 percent Black.

In the news

The Village People: Why a Retirement Community in Florida Was the Fastest-Growing Metro Area, from The New York Times. 

Growing in the Sunshine: Florida defies decline in population growth as nation becomes more diverse, from The Miami Herald.

The Best Swamp City:  Jacksonville added 100,000+ residents in last 10 years, from WJXT.

If you enjoyed today’s post and you want to keep reading Changing Florida, remember to click here to subscribe. If you're a regular subscriber of The Tributary, the newsletter will return to its normal news stories on Monday.

Thank you again for your donations that make this journalism possible.

Support The Tributary

Police released the names and ages of those injured and killed, and police announced that those men had fired first. Yet Jacksonville police never released the names of the officers, leaving the public in the dark about which officers fired their weapons.

Earlier this year, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office started withholding the names of police officers who have shot people after January 2019, scrubbing any previous mention of officers’ names from the office’s documents.

The office also began removing bodycam videos of past police shootings from their transparency website last week. It has not yet answered questions about when it plans to republish the videos.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office has posted video from only one shooting, while the office now says 23 other shooting videos are “pending” further redaction. Those pending cases stretch as far back as three years.

Read: JSO's slow release of body-cam

Of the 100 times Jacksonville officers have shot at a person since July 2015, the Sheriff's Office website identifies 36 by name. The remaining 64 names have been kept hidden from the public. 

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams’ office, like others across Florida, has cited a new court ruling that said police officers who fear harm are victims and qualify to have their names kept confidential, even if they shoot or kill someone, under Marsy’s Law, a constitutional amendment approved by the state’s voters in 2018.

The Sheriff's Office has treated every single police officer who has shot someone since January 2019 — 59 in total — as a victim and kept their names secret.

Marsy's Law is meant to keep private the names and other personal information of crime victims. And since 2008, a total of 14 states’ voters have approved the law by a ballot initiative. (Two states’ supreme courts ruled their states’ initiatives unconstitutional, and a third state amended its law after its passage led to unforeseen consequences.)

Christina Kittle, an organizer with the advocacy group Jacksonville Community Action Committee, said police are using the law to avoid accountability.

“It’s just frustrating knowing that a law created to protect crime victims is being used to take away accountability from police. That’s the opposite of transparency. It’s a step backward,” she said. “We hear from their side all the time that not all cops are bad. So, at what point do we get to have the tools to distinguish that.” 

In some cases, like the two in May, police said they shot suspects who had pulled a weapon. But in some cases, the Sheriff’s Office made no such claim, saying the suspects shot by officers were unarmed or even running away when officers shot at them.

In four cases, the Sheriff’s Office said those they shot had no weapons or just “hands/fist/feet/teeth/etc.” In a fifth case, the alleged weapon was a police Taser.

Even where officers were found to violate office policy in two cases, those officers’ names weren’t released. Those cases involved officers who shot but didn’t hit suspects, in a shooting in July of 2019 and a shooting in July of 2020, and both shootings were referred to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office internal affairs.

The office is still not releasing the names of those officers, but a Tributary database compiled before the Sheriff’s Office scrubbed their names revealed they were Clifford Sames and Bryce Mrakovich respectively.

The Tributary is releasing its database, which names Jacksonville officers who have shot someone from 2007 through 2020, at https://tinyurl.com/JSOshootings.

The Trib: JSO Police-Shooting Database

The Sheriff’s Office extended these Marsy’s Law protections, retroactively making officers’ names secret, regardless of whether the officer was actually a victim, so that the office could review each case before re-releasing the names.

“We had to immediately do it. We have to remove their names,” said spokesman Officer Christian Hancock who said he’s been tasked with reviewing each shooting and asking officers if they feel they were victims. “Is it important to get that done? Yes. Is it at the top of my list every single day? No.”

Going forward, he said, police must document how they were victims through an incident or arrest report. “I can’t just say Andrew was not a nice guy and pushed me. I have to be listed as a victim of a crime.”

If an officer is considered a victim, then his or her name will also be redacted from internal-affairs and administrative reviews of a shooting, Hancock said.

Hancock didn’t give an estimate of how long it will take to finish reviewing past shootings.

Marsy’s Law's proponents sold it to Floridians, like in other states, as a way to protect the privacy of crime victims. Still, lawyers warned that the law could harm transparency efforts and that police departments would use it to limit the release of information.

Law-enforcement officials say that if an officer needs to use their weapons, they should be considered victims too. But transparency advocates and some criminal justice experts say police departments are misusing the law to hide information from the public. 

“It’s another way of keeping officers above the law,” said Kami Chavis, a law professor at Wake Forest University and former assistant U.S. attorney. “If it were anyone else taking a life their pictures and names are in the evening news.”

Last summer, prompted by the murder of George Floyd, people demonstrated across the country, demanding that police stop killing people and that they be held accountable when they do.

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In response, some police departments took steps toward implementing policies to be transparent in deadly force cases. Yet, in Florida a different debate started: Should police officers who kill people on duty be thought of as victims and have their names kept secret from the public? 

The largest police union in the state says yes. Police reform and transparency advocates say no. Regardless, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office will comply with the law as they interpret it, which is to shield the names of officers in police shooting cases.

In effect, due in large part to Marsy's Law, Jacksonville police shootings are less transparent than ever.

“Not releasing the identities of crime victims, citizens and police officers alike, has nothing to do with transparency,” Hancock said. “It is a constitutional amendment that is afforded to all victims of crime.”

Not all police officers however support the interpretation of the law.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri wrote in court documents that Marsy’s Law should not hide the name of police officers who have killed someone.

“That a use of force is justified does not shield the identity of the person using it from public view,” he wrote in a court filing in May. “Here, the appeals court misconstrued the plain test of Marsy’s Law by expanding it to suppress the identity of a police officer who shot and killed another person.”

Virginia Hamrick, a staff attorney with the First Amendment Foundation of Florida, said the state’s public records laws and victim-protection laws can co-exist.

“There can be privacy protections for victims of crime, and I think there can also be accountability for officers who use deadly force.” 

The law also had other unintended consequences, said Hamrick, the lawyer for the First Amendment Foundation. She said that police have also used Marsy’s Law to withhold information of where a crime has occurred because officers have considered buildings as victims.

“The way the amendment was marketed, it didn’t discuss this at all. So I don’t know where this came from,” she said. “This was not the point of the law at all when the amendment was up for a vote.”

The amendment had support across party lines and one of its biggest proponents was state Sen. Lauren Book, a Democrat from Broward County. But she introduced legislation that would have clarified the constitutional provision so that police departments could not use the constitutional amendment to shield officers' names. Her bill failed.

Book’s office said she will continue to push for new legislation re-interpreting the amendment.

“After seeing news about misapplications of the law, Senator Book has again put legislation into drafting to prevent public employees who carry weapons from using Marsy’s Law in cases where their state-issued or approved weapon is discharged in the line of duty,” her office said in a statement.

Hamrick’s organization is arguing in favor of publicly releasing the names of two officers in a lawsuit between the city of Tallahassee and the Florida Police Benevolent Association, the state’s largest police union. 

In two separate incidents two officers fatally shot two men, Tony McDade, a Black trans man, and Wilbon Cleveland Woodard, another Black man. The officers say they felt threatened, making them victims, the Florida Police Benevolent Association argued in a lawsuit against the city of Tallahassee, which had said the officers’ names were exempt from Marsy’s law.

The Second Judicial Circuit Court agreed with the city, ruling the law “was not intended to apply to law enforcement officers when acting in their official capacity.”

The union appealed, and in April, a three-judge panel in the First District Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s ruling. “That the officer acts in self-defense to that threat does not defeat the officer’s status as a crime victim,” wrote Judge Lori Rowe.

The First Amendment Foundation and news organizations have appealed the latest ruling to the state Supreme Court.

Officials with the Florida Police Benevolent Association didn’t respond to a request for comment and the lawyer representing the union in court declined to comment. But, the union’s president told WLRN he hopes the Florida Supreme Court does not hear the case.

As it stands now, the only time police will release the name of an officer who has shot someone but claims to be a victim is if prosecutors criminally charge the officer for unjustifiably killing or injuring someone.

Frank D. LoMonte, professor and director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at University of Florida, said another way the names of officers could become public is if someone files a civil rights lawsuit against an officer who injured or killed a person.

“It's pretty routine to file a Defendant John Doe lawsuit and then make the opponent disclose the information to you under subpoena,” he said. “This happens all the time when people are victimized by government employees whose names they don't know, like a person who's shot with a rubber bullet or tear-gassed. So ultimately the name will end up becoming public anyway if there's a lawsuit.”

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ICYMI…

Melissa Nelson said police shooting videos would be released quicker. So why is the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office still taking months?

Around the web

• ‘That light did turn out to be a train’: UF Health Jacksonville staff face surge in COVID [Katherine Lewin & Beth Reese Cravey / The Florida Times-Union]

• Where’s funding for the new Landing plans? [Editorial / The Jaxson Magazine]

• COVID-19 hospitalizations set new peak Sunday, continue to rise [Jenese Harris / News4Jax]

• JSO employee arrested for reportedly discussing investigations with inmate [First Coast News Staff]

• Throwback from last summer: 59 Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office employees have been arrested since Sheriff Williams took office. Two were sentenced to jail.
  [Andrew Pantazi / Florida Times-Union]

Tributary notes

Andrew Pantazi | I want to thank Uriel J. García, who helped The Tributary the last few months with reporting on the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Uriel recently took a job at The Texas Tribune, covering immigration. Be sure to follow him on Twitter.

Putting together databases like our police-shooting database takes time and money, and we appreciate all of you who are already sustaining members of The Tributary. If you have any questions, about how you can support our newsroom, feel free to reach out to me at Andrew.Pantazi@jaxtrib.org.

Thank you to everyone who has already filled out our audience survey. If you haven’t yet, you can still fill it out here.

WJCT is also preparing to launch a survey, and you can help them out by completing their survey here.

Lakesha Burton, a 22-year veteran of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, is the first candidate to announce a run to replace current Sheriff Mike Williams. If elected, Burton, a Democrat and current assistant chief at the sheriff’s office, would be the first Black woman to lead the office.

Across the country, there are few Black police chiefs or sheriffs and even fewer Black women leading law-enforcement agencies.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, police departments have come under scrutiny by the public for police shootings and officers’ use of force. Burton has said the mass protests against police brutality led to her decision to run for sheriff.

She has said that being Black and a police officer could help bridge a relationship between Black people and police officers.

“I want to challenge the perception that it’s us against them,” Burton said in a statement emailed to The Tributary. “I know most people want justice and public safety. The idea that we have to choose between these is a false choice. I will prove that as Jacksonville’s next sheriff.”

The election isn’t until 2023 when Williams will have to step down because of term limits.

In her two-decade career, Burton rose through the ranks. Here are five biographical points in her life based on some public statements she’s made and her personnel file released by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office through a public records request:

• She began her career as a patrol officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in 1999. Known then as Lakesha Anderson, she married her husband Gregory Burton, also a JSO officer, in 2008. He retired as a chief in 2020, and the couple has five children. In her 22-year career, she has worked in patrol, community affairs and recruiting divisions, as well as the field training unit. 

• She is a sexual abuse survivor. At 15 years old, she said, she got pregnant so that her stepfather would stop raping her. During her high-school years, she began to use drugs and alcohol to alleviate the depression she suffered. 

• As a teenage mom, she was shoplifting diapers and baby food for her son when an officer apprehended her. The officer, instead of booking her into jail, took her to the Police Athletic League of Jacksonville, a nonprofit afterschool program led by the Sheriff’s Office that helps youth focus on sports and extracurricular activities. In 2015, Burton became executive director for the nonprofit.

• According to her personnel file, her bosses were happy with how she ran the nonprofit, saying she promoted its services to news organizations and maintained a high student attendance. The personnel file also included letters from crime victims who thanked Burton and some of her colleagues for responding to their calls.

• Her employee reviews were mostly positive. Her bosses would say she met or exceeded standards during her career. But according to a October 2019 evaluation Burton and a supervisor “discussed a formal investigation involving multiple officers under her command that was managed improperly.” 
  
  The evaluation doesn’t give any other details regarding this incident. But Burton responded in the evaluation saying: “The alleged mismanagement stemmed from me not being aware of additional information added to the investigative packet and the Lieutenant intentionally and deceitfully withholding information and submitting an official document of the findings to (internal affairs) without my knowledge, consent or signature.”

Contact Uriel J. García at urieljgarcia@gmail.com.

This story is published through a partnership between WJCT News and The Tributary.

The Tributary, as part of its role watchdogging the coming 2023 local elections, intends to request personnel files for all candidates for Jacksonville Sheriff. We paid $222 to receive the personnel file for Lakesha Burton, the first declared candidate. The following is not intended to be a fully comprehensive profile, but some of the first insights gleaned from Burton’s personnel file. You can view the complete file here: https://tinyurl.com/LakeshaBurton

The Tributary can now accept tax-deductible donations

Andrew Pantazi |The last few weeks have been busy for us at The Tributary.

We officially filed our paperwork to incorporate, we submitted our request for tax-exempt status with the IRS, and we opened our Vystar Credit Union account.

This means we’re able to begin accepting donations. We’ll soon move off of Substack where subscriptions are not tax-deductible. We’re working to get our website and donation page launched in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

If you just absolutely can’t wait to be the first donor, then you can make a check to The Tributary.

Mail to:

The Tributary

Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

112 West Adams Street 4th Floor

Jacksonville, Florida 32202

I wanted to thank all of you who’ve helped us get to this place by subscribing on Substack. We will fully launch as an organization later this summer, debuting our first investigations on our coming website.

In the meantime, one of the best ways you can support The Tributary is by taking a few minutes and fill out this survey. This will help us understand what news we need to cover as we staff up in the coming months.

The Tributary and WJCT’s partnership

Andrew Pantazi | We always planned for The Tributary to work in close collaboration with existing media in Jacksonville, and we’re excited to announce that we were able to work on today’s insights from Burton’s personnel file with WJCT, the only other nonprofit news source in Jacksonville.

As we hire staff and prepare to launch, we intend to develop even deeper ties with WJCT and other media partners. Local news is in a crisis, but through collaboration, The Tributary and other local media have a chance to preserve the journalism that serves as a cornerstone of democracy.

If you aren’t already, consider becoming a WJCT sustainer.

The Times-Union’s recent hires

Andrew Pantazi | If you haven’t seen, The Florida Times-Union made two recent hires, opinion and engagement editor Marcia Pledger and justice reporter Katherine Lewin.

Give both of them a welcome, and if you’re on Twitter, follow their accounts as they bring more life to the Times-Union.

Since Gannett purchased the Times-Union in 2017, only one other journalist had been hired at the paper, while 40 staffers had departed, so it’s heartening to hear the Times-Union is now looking to hire four more journalists: a photographer, a growth and development reporter, a high school sports reporter and a government accountability reporter.

This is great news for Jacksonville, and I’m looking forward to seeing their work.

The Tributary, as part of its role watchdogging the coming 2023 local elections, intends to request personnel files for all candidates for Jacksonville Sheriff. We paid $222 to receive the personnel file for Lakesha Burton, the first declared candidate. The following is not intended to be a fully comprehensive profile, but some of the first insights gleaned from Burton’s personnel file. You can view the complete file here: https://tinyurl.com/LakeshaBurton

Lakesha Burton, a 22-year veteran of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, is the first candidate to announce a run to replace current Sheriff Mike Williams. If elected, Burton, a Democrat and current assistant chief at the sheriff’s office, would be the first Black woman to lead the office.

Across the country, there are few Black police chiefs or sheriffs and even fewer Black women leading law-enforcement agencies.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, police departments have come under scrutiny by the public for police shootings and officers’ use of force. Burton has said the mass protests against police brutality led to her decision to run for sheriff.

She has said that being Black and a police officer could help bridge a relationship between Black people and police officers.

“I want to challenge the perception that it’s us against them,” Burton said in a statement emailed to The Tributary. “I know most people want justice and public safety. The idea that we have to choose between these is a false choice. I will prove that as Jacksonville’s next sheriff.”

The election isn’t until 2023 when Williams will have to step down because of term limits.

In her two-decade career, Burton rose through the ranks. Here are five biographical points in her life based on some public statements she’s made and her personnel file released by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office through a public records request:

• She began her career as a patrol officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in 1999. Known then as Lakesha Anderson, she married her husband Gregory Burton, also a JSO officer, in 2008. He retired as a chief in 2020, and the couple has five children. In her 22-year career, she has worked in patrol, community affairs and recruiting divisions, as well as the field training unit. 

• She is a sexual abuse survivor. At 15 years old, she said, she got pregnant so that her stepfather would stop raping her. During her high-school years, she began to use drugs and alcohol to alleviate the depression she suffered. 

• As a teenage mom, she was shoplifting diapers and baby food for her son when an officer apprehended her. The officer, instead of booking her into jail, took her to the Police Athletic League of Jacksonville, a nonprofit afterschool program led by the Sheriff’s Office that helps youth focus on sports and extracurricular activities. In 2015, Burton became executive director for the nonprofit.

• According to her personnel file, her bosses were happy with how she ran the nonprofit, saying she promoted its services to news organizations and maintained a high student attendance. The personnel file also included letters from crime victims who thanked Burton and some of her colleagues for responding to their calls.

• Her employee reviews were mostly positive. Her bosses would say she met or exceeded standards during her career. But according to a October 2019 evaluation Burton and a supervisor “discussed a formal investigation involving multiple officers under her command that was managed improperly.” 
  
  The evaluation doesn’t give any other details regarding this incident. But Burton responded in the evaluation saying: “The alleged mismanagement stemmed from me not being aware of additional information added to the investigative packet and the Lieutenant intentionally and deceitfully withholding information and submitting an official document of the findings to (internal affairs) without my knowledge, consent or signature.”

Contact Uriel J. García at urieljgarcia@gmail.com.

This story is published through a partnership between WJCT News and The Tributary.

The Tributary can now accept tax-deductible donations

Andrew Pantazi | The last few weeks have been busy for us at The Tributary.

We officially filed our paperwork to incorporate, we submitted our request for tax-exempt status with the IRS, and we opened our Vystar Credit Union account.

This means we’re able to begin accepting donations. We’ll soon move off of Substack where subscriptions are not tax-deductible. We’re working to get our website and donation page launched in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

If you just absolutely can’t wait to be the first donor, then you can make a check to The Tributary.

Mail to:

The Tributary

Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

112 West Adams Street 4th Floor

Jacksonville, Florida 32202

I wanted to thank all of you who’ve helped us get to this place by subscribing on Substack. We will fully launch as an organization later this summer, debuting our first investigations on our coming website.

In the meantime, one of the best ways you can support The Tributary is by taking a few minutes and fill out this survey. This will help us understand what news we need to cover as we staff up in the coming months.

The Tributary and WJCT’s partnership

Andrew Pantazi | We always planned for The Tributary to work in close collaboration with existing media in Jacksonville, and we’re excited to announce that we were able to work on today’s insights from Burton’s personnel file with WJCT, the only other nonprofit news source in Jacksonville.

As we hire staff and prepare to launch, we intend to develop even deeper ties with WJCT and other media partners. Local news is in a crisis, but through collaboration, The Tributary and other local media have a chance to preserve the journalism that serves as a cornerstone of democracy.

If you aren’t already, consider becoming a WJCT sustainer.

The Times-Union’s recent hires

Andrew Pantazi | If you haven’t seen, The Florida Times-Union made two recent hires, opinion and engagement editor Marcia Pledger and justice reporter Katherine Lewin.

Give both of them a welcome, and if you’re on Twitter, follow their accounts as they bring more life to the Times-Union.

Since Gannett purchased the Times-Union in 2017, only one other journalist had been hired at the paper, while 40 staffers had departed, so it’s heartening to hear the Times-Union is now looking to hire four more journalists: a photographer, a growth and development reporter, a high school sports reporter and a government accountability reporter.

This is great news for Jacksonville, and I’m looking forward to seeing their work.

Originally, Duval County’s three jails — the Pre-Trial Detention Facility, the Montgomery Correctional Center and the Community Transition Center — had a combined capacity of 3,077, and on March 2 there were 3,772 inmates, according to the Sheriff’s Office and the data. But instead of releasing non-violent pretrial inmates to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, as advocates have demanded, the sheriff’s office said this week it added extra bunks into cells to increase the capacity to 4,025.

For the past year, advocates have demanded that Sheriff Michael Williams release non-violent offenders and that police cite and release people instead of jailing them in order to mitigate the risk of the spread of COVID-19 among inmates and jail staff. 

“People want to go back to normal,” said Michael Sampson, an organizer with the advocacy group Jacksonville Community Action Committee. “And what’s normal for the Sheriff’s Office is to have overpopulated jails.”

With the latest increase of bunks in cells, it could raise the risk of inmates contracting COVID-19. Health experts have warned that people socially distance in order to avoid spreading the coronavirus.

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“For a number of reasons, incarcerated people are also disproportionately likely to have underlying health conditions, putting them at greater risk of complications from COVID-19 than the general population,” according to UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project. “The most humane response to the pandemic is therefore to release as many people from custody as possible and push for better health and safety practices for those who remain incarcerated.”

The overpopulation comes a year after the State Attorney’s Office had issued a memo calling for the reduction of the Duval County jail population by releasing people serving sentences on misdemeanors, releasing some people without bail and those awaiting trial.

David Chapman, a spokesman for the State Attorney’s Office, said in a statement that the prosecutor’s office efforts have led to a reduction in the non-violent jail population in the past year and it will continue to work with the courts and the public defender’s office “to review appropriate cases.”

“For violent offenders, or those offenders who represent a danger to the community or a flight risk, we will continue to seek their detention,” he said. “While the jail population has increased due to retention of violent offenders and those defendants who did not fall under our review guidelines, we anticipate with the resumption of jury trials that there will be an increased resolution of these cases.”

The sheriff’s office said it is taking the pandemic seriously but as far as releasing inmates to reduce the spread of the virus, a spokesperson said it is up to the courts to decide that. He added that inmates are being tested, masked and vaccinated, too.

“Keeping the virus at bay and the safety of the inmates has been a concern and a priority since the onset of COVID-19,” said police officer Christian Hancock, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

Advocates however say the sheriff and prosecutor’s office is not doing enough.

“Their plan is not working,” said Ben Frazier, a leader with the advocacy group Northside Coalition. “That, or their plan is faulty or their commitment is faulty.”

Frazier echoed Sampson’s comments, saying that people should scrutinize the Sheriff’s Office about the overcapacity because of the risk of spreading COVID-19.

“It’s a definite health risk,” he said.

He added that the general public should be concerned about this because it is also affecting people who are not in jail, such as jail staff and their family members.

Frazier said the sheriff, the state attorney and the courts need to work together to release non-violent inmates, people who have fewer than 90 days left in their sentences and people who are behind bars only because they can’t afford bail. 

He added that probation officers need to stop recommending people to jail over “technical violations” such as failing to pay a fine, loss of employment or missed curfew.

“It is wrong to subject people who have not been adjudicated as guilty to this kind of liability,” he said. “They are doing a very poor job.”

Contact Uriel J. García at urieljgarcia@gmail.com.

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Tributary Updates

Today’s story was written by Uriel J. García, who until recently covered police in Phoenix at the Arizona Republic. Uriel is freelancing for us thanks to funding we’ve gotten from the Local Media Foundation.

We’re also excited to share that we’ve faxed our paperwork to file for nonprofit status with the state of Florida, and next week we’ll file with the IRS for our 501c3 exemption.

I continue to be blown away by the support we’re getting across the community, and I’m looking forward to having a full launch later this year so we can hire full-time staff and provide regular investigative reporting about undercovered issues in our community.

Your funding continues to help us prepare for our launch, and it’s helped pay for public records that will be vital in holding institutions accountable.

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The surge in viruses is entirely coming from those 55 and younger, particularly those 0-18 and 26-35.

Until Monday, both groups were restricted from getting a coronavirus vaccine in Florida unless they qualified because of their job or a health condition. Now, all Floridians who are 16 or older can get the vaccine. It has not yet been approved for younger children.

On the first day of eligibility, more than 1 percent of those 64 and younger, both in Duval and statewide, were vaccinated, the first time that happened so far.

Duval is one of the youngest counties in the state, so it’s especially important here to monitor this week and see how much progress we make in getting our younger population vaccinated, particularly among groups like white evangelicals and Black residents who have expressed a greater sense of vaccine hesitancy in public polling.

Obviously, the vaccines are effective. That’s what data have consistently shown. Still, it’s kind of shocking to see the effect vaccines have had on reducing the number of cases for those who are 65 or older in Florida.

The virus has also gotten less deadly. While there’s usually about a month delay between new COVID cases and COVID deaths, we see that as of a month ago, about 1 in 430 people infected were dying, compared to one in 70 in December and January.

Duval is lagging the state as a whole in the total percent of the population vaccinated, but that’s still largely attributable to how young our population is. In fact, if you account for how young we are, we are more vaccinated than you’d expect.

Tributary Updates

The Tributary is continuing to meet with potential funders, and we’re working with Newspack to build our website.

The goal is to launch later this year in August/September with a staff of reporters. Your donations through Substack are helping us keep going while we build out the business.

The donations continue to help us pay for public records as we prepare for some of our investigative stories that will launch later this year.

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In case you missed it …

Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Assistant Chief Lakesha Burton, whose campaign has been whispered and gossiped about for months now, officially launched her 2023 campaign for sheriff.

Burton, a Democrat, is the first to announce her campaign for sheriff in what is bound to be a competitive race to succeed term-limited Sheriff Mike Williams. Burton is seeking to be the first woman elected as Jacksonville’s sheriff. She currently serves s the head of the Police Athletic League and a zone commander, and she has been the face of the Sheriff’s Office’s community-engagement initiatives in recent years. Her husband was also an assistant chief before he retired.

In 2015, she supported the police union-endorsed candidate, Jimmy Holderfield.

So far, she has not announced any policy platforms or explain how she would operate the office differently from Williams or Sheriff Rutherford before him.

LMA’s CEO, Nancy Lane, said she believes The Tributary’s business model — a nonprofit news organization designed to collaborate with existing local media — can serve as an example for other communities.

The Tributary is about to begin the process of getting its own 501c3 status approved by the IRS, but in the meantime, LMA, through its foundation arm, has set up a way for people to start giving tax-deductible donations at givebutter.com/tributary. You can also send checks to the Local Media Foundation, with “The Tributary” on the memo line to P.O. Box 85015, Chicago, IL 60689-5015.

I’m excited to partner with LMA and share the lessons I’m learning as we build a healthy news organization in Jacksonville. This month, I’ve talked to people across the community, including potential media partners and funders, about the need for a nonprofit news organization focused on investigating Jacksonville’s problems with poverty, injustices and the imbalances of power.

Our goal is to raise enough money to begin hiring reporters by May with an official launch in August. We’re going to rely heavily on member donations and local philanthropy for our first year, and after our launch, we’ll have the opportunity to grow the newsroom with advertising revenue.

If you want to learn more about how to support us, you can send me a line at andrew.pantazi@jaxtrib.com.

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Jacksonville continues to reduce its vaccine disparities

Duval County still faces disparities between Black and white vaccine uptake, but those disparities continue to shrink, with the area seeing the smallest disparities among the state’s largest counties.

A few months into the vaccination campaign, some highlights for Duval:

• 73% of those 65+ are vaccinated

• 15% of those 64-and-younger are vaccinated

• 21% of total population are vaccinated

• 20% of white population is vaccinated v. 12% of Black population

Duval's weekly vaccination rate (3% of pop in last week) is slower than Florida's (3.4%). We’re also seeing less growth as more and more of the vaccine becomes available than the state as a whole.

If you aren’t already, you need to be following WJXT’s investigative reporter Kelly Wiley on Twitter. Each day she’s tracking how many vaccines are going unused in Duval because of a lack of demand. Vaccine sites are reporting no lines throughout the day.

Early on, Gov. Ron DeSantis limited who could get the vaccine primarily by age, allowing those 65 and older to get the vaccine. At the time, it made sense to try to make the administration of a limited amount of vaccine as easy as possible, and checking someone’s age can be easier for vaccine administrators than checking if someone qualifies because of a job or medical condition. But now we have a *surplus* of vaccines and not enough demand, so the state must figure out what steps it takes to get more people taking the shot in Jacksonville.

We have a younger population than much of the rest of the state, so hopefully, demand will increase as the age restrictions continue to fall in Florida.

About 86 percent of Duval’s population is younger than 65, which is tied with Alachua for the fifth-highest in the state. Our total vaccination rate heavily depends on reducing the age limits and getting younger people vaccinated.

In Miami, 17% of those 64 & younger have been vaccinated, the highest after Alachua (Gainesville) & St. Johns (St. Augustine). Duval is the sixth-highest, with 15% of younger people vaccinated.

Florida overall has 14% of younger people vaccinated.

About 14% of Duval's vaccinations don't have a recorded race for those vaccinated versus 15% for Florida as a whole. Palm Beach continues to do very poorly at recording the race of those receiving the vaccine, with one in five doses going to someone with an unknown race.

Among the very young — which I’ll count as those 34 and younger — Alachua continues to be the only county with double-digit percentages vaccinated. I have to make an assumption that’s partly because their population of people who qualify based on professions or health conditions is younger than elsewhere, due to the University of Florida.

You can see more graphics here.

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In other news …

Last month, I detailed the many foibles of former Public Defender Matt Shirk. Since then, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously rejected a plea deal that would’ve suspended his license for six months.

Rejecting the deal could mean the high court wants to see a harsher punishment, including disbarment.

Supporting The Times-Union

The past few weeks, my former colleagues at The Florida Times-Union have been pushing their parent company to fill positions that have gone vacant.

Since the beginning of 2018, the Times-Union has lost two-thirds of its newsroom staff, and today it has just one journalist who is not white left. The newsroom union, which I used to be a part of, has asked readers to send letters in support of its demands for more staff.

Jacksonville needs more journalists. I hope Gannett recognizes that The Florida Times-Union does great work and needs more support. The stronger the Times-Union is the more other news organizations, including The Tributary, benefit as well.

All four of the living ex-mayors of Jacksonville signed their own letter showing support for journalism in Jacksonville.

To recap Shirk’s background:

He’d never defended a homicide case and had little experience when he ran for office in 2008 on an anti-Obama Republican message that included a promise to never question the integrity of police officers and a vow to force poor defendants to pay the office back. Both promises were things he wasn’t constitutionally capable of accomplishing.

Before taking office, he fired some of the best criminal defense attorneys in the state, misspelling names in his firing memo.

Once in office, he decided to personally handle the high-profile case of a 12-year-old charged as an adult with murder. He violated the child’s attorney-client privilege in order to court attention from documentarians. A judge had to issue a gag order against Shirk, and eventually, the case was handled to an all-star team that included now-State Attorney Melissa Nelson.

He used public funds to install a shower in his private office without approval, and then he allegedly sent texts inviting female employees to shower with him.

He hired women based purely on physical appearance — ordering his chief investigator to track down one woman and hire her after he was attracted to a photo he saw of her on social media, and hiring the other two from a nightclub — and then sent solicitous sexual messages to them. He then drank with them on the job, and then his wife fired them.

In one email, he told a woman, “I think if we had sex there would be very minimal awkwardness afterwards.”

He used employees to staff his personal nonprofit. He had the office pay his personal fuel costs and costs associated with damaging another car.

In his final days in office, public records went missing. He gave away nine office guns to a motorcycle club. He spent thousands of dollars on travel to law conferences, including one immigration-law conference. State public defenders don’t handle immigration cases, but Shirk, after leaving office, began practicing federal immigration law.

In the days after he lost reelection, Shirk gave substantial pay raises to 14 employees who were political allies in the office. In some cases, he more than doubled their salaries. Nine of those resigned on Shirk’s last day, and a 10th was fired the next day.

He gave $90,000 to a lobbying firm, hiring them without a competitive bid and with no staff input. The lobbying firm, in turn, made Shirk’s re-election campaign the only state campaign to which it donated.

Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis finally accepted Matt Shirk’s guilty plea to the state ethics commission, ordering Shirk to pay $6,000.

And last week, Shirk entered a conditional plea to the Florida Supreme Court. If it approves the deal, his license to practice law will be suspended for six months.

The Times-Union’s Dan Scanlan wrote more about the Supreme Court’s potential actions here.

If there’s one thing that I think has helped Shirk avoid more serious repercussions over the years, it’s been his willingness to admit some degree of guilt for his scandals. I wrote dozens of stories about Shirk over the years, including this profile during his failed re-election campaign in 2016, which touched on Shirk’s candor.

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ICYMI …

Duval’s vaccinated a higher share of the Black population and a higher share of its older population than Florida has as a whole.

No county has seen Black residents more likely to receive a vaccine than white residents.

Duval, however, has seen its rates fall to 2.2 times, just more than double, still an extraordinary disparity but nowhere near as bad as other counties.

In Palm Beach, for instance, whites were more than six times as likely to be vaccinated as Black residents, and the disparity has shown no sign of falling.

In Pinellas, one of the counties that started out with a relatively low disparity, the rate has increased over time.

Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Stefan Baral told me that the disparity in vaccination rates shouldn’t be attributed primarily to higher rates of vaccine hesitancy among non-white communities. Instead, he said messaging and implementation throughout the country have been geared away from working-class minority communities.

“A lot of the messaging has been oriented toward higher-income folks,” he said.

As an example, Florida partnered with Publix to distribute vaccines at its grocery stores, even though the stores are frequently located primarily in high-income neighborhoods and avoid majority-Black neighborhoods.

The Division of Emergency Management refused to answer questions about its vaccine distribution plan.

“We’ve kind of lost our roots a little bit in public health with community-led programming,” Baral said. He pointed to studies that showed the vaccination effort during the H1N1 swine flu furthered disparities between Black and white health outcomes. “We didn’t consider the needs of shift workers, people with busy households, etc.”

He said that an obsession with data — tracking how many people have gotten vaccinated — can contribute to the problem.

About 9 percent of Floridians have received at least one vaccine dose. But he said it’s relatively easy to vaccinate a large share of people without considering whether you’re reaching people more likely to spread the virus, like those who have a harder time isolating or who can’t work from home or who live in multi-generational houses.

“They’re going to be given targets. You need to vaccinate X number of people, and they’ll vaccinate those people. You’ll be vaccinating the easiest to target people. That’s what happened with H1N1. … It worsened disparities.”

“It’s not that hard to imagine a scenario where you truly vaccinated mostly white, higher-income folks and professions like health care — I’m a frontline healthcare worker — and not have a significant bump in what was happening in multi-generational households and Amazon distribution centers where those folks live in multi-generational households.”

To Jacksonville’s credit (along with some other communities, including Miami), there has been an explicit acknowledgment by leaders, including Mayor Lenny Curry, that more must be done to reach Black residents.

Duval has also vaccinated the second-largest share of the older population of the state’s major counties.

Vaccines have been distributed at Black-majority churches and senior centers in Jacksonville, a key step to relying on trusted partners, Baral said. To really get to the communities with the highest mortality rates, he said, communities need to be willing to not just giving the vaccines to whoever can wait in line all day at a Publix.

Duval’s wealthy suburbs, Nassau to the north and St. Johns to the south, have reached 13 percent and 15 percent vaccination rates.

Even as the state vaccination rate has increased in the last week, Duval’s has slowed to 7,600 people vaccinated in the last week.

About one in three people 65 or older have been vaccinated in Florida, but just 26 percent of older residents in Hillsborough County (Tampa) have been vaccinated, while Duval (Jacksonville) is at 41 percent.

I’ve been processing the data from PDFs put out by the state health department daily. You can track my data on Github, which is free for anyone to use, or see more data visualizations on Tableau.

COVID-19 / Tributary Updates

I spent two weeks isolating in bed as I recovered from the coronavirus. While I avoided some of the worst symptoms and didn’t need hospitalization, it took a month for me to make it through a full week able to work each day. I still find I have less energy than I used to, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to run again without wheezing.

But I am trying to run full steam ahead to catch up on work, setting up the nonprofit and securing funding. I hope to have more news to share next week on that front.

In the meantime, thank you to everyone who has subscribed and made this possible so far. I’m looking forward to our official launch later this year.

Later this week, I’ll have a look back at the downfall of former Public Defender Matt Shirk.

You can see interactive versions of all the below graphics here.

Florida’s COVID vaccine data so far doesn’t track ethnicity, which means Hispanic white and non-Hispanic white people are counted in the same category. It’s possible then that non-Hispanic white people have an even higher rate of vaccines.

About 15 percent of people who’ve gotten vaccines have an “unknown” race, which adds another wrench in efforts to track disparities in the vaccine rollout.

Unlike other states that have put up sharp restrictions on who could get the vaccine — New York’s governor even went so far as to threaten to strip doctors of their licenses and to issue million-dollar fines if they deviated from the state’s strict vaccine guidelines — Florida used a simpler model: healthcare workers and those over the age of 65.

There were perceived upsides and downsides to this model, as the Miami Herald’s Ben Conarck reported. It would be easier to administer and potentially reduce the amount of wasted vaccines. Yet younger people were more likely to transmit the disease. One expert said vaccinating younger essential workers could garner more buy-in from disenfranchised communities by prioritizing them.

“There’s more to it sometimes than just the cold hard numbers,” Natalie Dean of the University of Florida told the Herald. “There’s something to be said for the appearance of the vaccine program.”

We still don’t know if the vaccine prevents people from transmitting the disease to others or if it just prevents people from falling ill.

Florida’s vaccination rates so far, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been better than most states.

Considering the idea of simplifying the vaccine plan was supposed to ensure more vaccines got delivered to people, it’s somewhat surprising Florida’s rate of administering vaccine doses is middling, with just two-fifths of vaccine doses administered, according to the CDC.

But another upshot of Florida’s plan is that it has been effective at vaccinating about one in seven people 65 or older, according to the Department of Health’s daily updates.

Initially, when the first to get vaccinated were mostly frontline medical workers, a large share of those getting the vaccine were younger, but it wasn’t long until it shifted drastically to those most at-risk.

About one in 12 people 65 or older who contracted the virus have died in Florida, compared to one in 317 among those younger than 65.

Among the state’s most populous counties, Duval has the second-highest vaccination rate so far, according to the state health department’s data, with about 5 percent of the population vaccinated.

North Florida, overall, has seen more vaccinations than Central and South Florida.

More than 7 percent of St. Johns, the wealthy suburb to Duval’s southeast, has vaccinated; nearly six percent of Nassau, the northern suburb, has vaccinated; and about four percent of Clay County has vaccinated.

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Personal Updates

Last Saturday, while my wife was getting her second vaccination, I had planned to take my boys for a bike ride.

I woke up exhausted and crippled in pain. It felt like a migraine combined with a sinus infection, an ear infection and a throat infection. I was more tired than I could ever remember.

The next day, while my wife was working at the hospital, I felt even worse and scheduled a COVID test.

Just a week earlier, my wife, my 5-year-old and I had tested negative, a precautionary test before school started back.

This time, my rapid and PCR tests both came back positive.

Since then, I’ve barely left my bed.

Thankfully, my wife and kids have continued to test negative. While in isolation, I’ve been increasing the ventilation rate in my room by opening the door from our bedroom to the outside, by replacing our A/C filter with a MERV 13 filter, by keeping the fan on and my windows up and by running an air purifier at all times.

USA Today did a good feature about the importance of increasing airflow to prevent aerosols from infecting others. I’m grateful I didn’t get infected during the summer when it would’ve been much harder to keep windows open.

My symptoms have gotten significantly better. I’m mostly just exhausted all the time, and my brain feels fuzzy and unable to focus for long stretches of time. I do find myself short of breath sometimes when I stand, but I think it’s getting easier each day. I’m hoping next week to get re-tested and, fingers crossed, to leave isolation.

Start your week off…

With this look at what happens in downtown Jacksonville after the death of an effort to give hundreds of millions of dollars away for the Jaguars-driven Lot J development.

And with this speech from Jacksonville’s A. Philip Randolph at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Next week

I’m hoping I can get some more work done this week than I have the last week and a half. If all goes well, then I’m planning to share a story next week on segregation and school performance.

I’m also going to finally return emails from potential funders I got this week while I was bed-ridden, and I’m going to reschedule some calls I had to cancel.

Thank you to subscribers

I’ve been able to purchase several batches of public records thanks to the subscriptions I’ve gotten so far.

Without subscribers, it would be harder to get started on some of the projects I’m working on. Your willingness to donate to The Tributary also helps persuade big-dollar funders that this is a project worth supporting.

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• 2020 saw the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office shoot the most people in a decade, with police shooting 14 people, killing nine. Eight of those shot by police were Black, while four were white and two were Hispanic.

  

• Eleven Jacksonville Sheriff's Office employees arrested this year, marking 66 since Sheriff Mike Williams took office in July 2015. Seven of those arrests were for things employees did on duty. As high as that seems, it was even higher in 2017 when 17 employees were arrested. See a spreadsheet of the arrests here.

  

• One-hundred-seventy-five homicides in Jacksonville, the most since 1990. More than half of the homicides were in four Zip codes, the most concentration we’ve seen in at least the last 15 years, with 32209, 32208, 32210 and 32218 all hitting record-high homicides. One-hundred-thirty-nine have been confirmed as murders. Twenty-two were deemed not murders, and another 14 are pending. Luckily, December was much quieter than the rest of the year. Let’s hope that carries over into the new year. You can see more graphics here.

  

• 50.14% of Jacksonville was not white in 2019, according to U.S. Census figures that came out in 2020, marking the first time Jacksonville became a minority-majority city. The margin of error means the non-white population in Jacksonville is somewhere between 49.8% and 50.5%. Until now, Jacksonville has been the largest majority-white city in America. In the last decade, among the top 13 cities in America, Jacksonville has seen its diversity grow the third-most, largely driven by a growth in Asian and Hispanic people in the city.

  

  

• One in 15 Duval residents have been infected with COVID-19, the third-highest rate among Florida’s most populous counties, but thankfully, Duval has had one of the lowest death rates, but still 741 people — one in 1,200 residents — have died.

  

Start your week off …

By catching up on the latest mudslinging between Mayor Lenny Curry and City Councilman Garrett Dennis on Twitter.

On Twitter, a Curry critic posted a sexist comment about Curry’s wife. Curry responded with a threat of violence. Councilman Dennis criticized Curry’s tweet. Police union president Steve Zona posted a tweet accusing Dennis of adultery, which Curry repeated twice.

Curry and Dennis have both used Twitter as a medium to insult their critics.

Keep an eye out today for City Council’s incoming report about JEA. If you’ve missed the saga of some of Jacksonville’s leaders who attempted to sell the municipal utility, sparking a federal investigation in response to the Times-Union’s reporting, you can catch up here.

Also …

Republican U.S. Rep. John Rutherford, the former sheriff of Jacksonville, will oppose certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. A fellow Republican offered an objection to seating representatives from the six states that Rutherford said mishandled their elections, but Rutherford did not agree that they shouldn’t be seated. He provided no evidence or even specific allegations as to why he was objecting to the results. He is in line with many congressional Republicans who want to reverse the results of the election that President Trump lost.

Rutherford’s seat, Congressional District 4, is a solidly Republican district that carries Nassau, much of St. Johns and most of the white neighborhoods in Jacksonville. In 2016, he won election by 42 points. In 2020, he won by 22 points, a strong victory but also a stunning shift toward Democrats in a solidly Republican district.

The district isn’t likely to change in redistricting. Jacksonville has more people than the number that can be in the largest district, which means the city will always have at least two districts, and in all likelihood, due to the city’s racial and political segregation, one district will be solidly Democratic and one will be solidly Republican.

Some readers asked after last week’s post if I’d done any congressional maps, and I have. Florida is likely to gain two congressional districts. It’s impossible to draw a district entirely within Jacksonville that has a majority non-white citizen voting age population, but here are three examples of how to draw districts that try to minimize how often districts split counties. You can see interactive versions of this and all the other maps I drew here.

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Jacksonville’s redistricting in the coming months will shape how the city handles racial equity, poverty, crime and nearly every major lever of public policy in the next decade.

Unlike the state legislature, which is barred from partisan gerrymandering due to constitutional amendments that passed in 2010, the city is not under similar restrictions, which means it’s free to seek partisan advantages in its new maps.

Jacksonville’s consolidated government is represented by 19 City Council members, 14 of whom come from neighborhood districts and five of whom come from countywide at-large seats.

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Jacksonville is a racially and politically segregated city, which makes it even easier to draw maps that favor one side over another. But even among people who want to see fairer maps, it’s not clear what “fairer” actually means. Whatever a map drawer prioritizes comes with other downsides.

Donald Trump barely beat Hillary Clinton here in 2016 and he lost the county in 2020, while Democrats Andrew Gillum, Bill Nelson and Nikki Fried all won the county in 2018. Yet Jacksonville has just six Democrats on the 19-member council thanks to a map where Democrats are heavily concentrated in five districts.

After the 2010 Census, the City Council approved maps with wide population disparities — District 14 had 10 percent more people than District 7 — with an emphasis on ensuring particularly high Black population percents for designated minority-access districts and only one district crossing the St. Johns River.

Three of the five council members on the 2021 committee tasked with redistricting are Democrats, but their plan is subject to a vote by a council with a Republican super-majority. In the past, Democrats worried about their own re-elections have advocated for packing in Democrats into a few districts, which overall favors Republicans.

When I was at the Times-Union, we asked 2019 City Council candidates about redistricting. Of the five council members on the redistricting committee, three answered redistricting questions during their campaigns.

Brenda Priestly Jackson said she favored drawing districts that represented actual neighborhoods and didn’t “snip all around” the city. Randy DeFoor said she’d apply the state constitutional principles of not favoring one party over another. Reggie Gaffney said he’d use common sense and fairness in opposing gerrymandering.

I built some maps using the 2018 American Community Survey population estimates to give a preview of how redistricting might look in the months ahead. We’ll get a clearer picture once the 2020 Census data is released. I built these maps in Dave’s Redistricting App. If you want to build some of your own maps, please email them to me, and I’ll highlight some of them in future newsletters.

You can see interactive versions of the maps I drew below by clicking here.

Each of the maps I drew stayed within one-percent population deviations, except for the partisan maps, which were kept to 10-percent deviations, similar to the maps City Council drew in 2011.

Some people prefer districts that look compact and pretty, but oftentimes neighborhoods themselves aren’t compact or pretty, and even pretty districts can be misleading. This map shows Trump would’ve won nine districts in 2016 with slight margins in five districts, and Gillum would’ve won seven in 2018, with four having margins lower than 10 percentage points.

Some people prefer districts that ensure a more proportional outcome to the county at large, but those districts are less likely to be compact or reflective of neighborhoods. In this map, Trump would’ve won eight of 14 districts in 2016, while winning the county by one percentage point, and Gillum would’ve won eight of 14 districts in 2018, while winning the county by four percentage points.

Some want maps that ensure greater minority representation on City Council, but that can have the effect of packing in Democrats into districts that are likely to be less competitive. After the 2010 Census, the City Council approved maps with four Black majority districts, but there is still debate about whether a district needs to be more than two-thirds Black, as some of the districts currently are, in order to ensure minority-representation on the City Council. If each of those districts were less Black, then there could be five or six minority-access districts.

Others prefer as many competitive districts as possible, but a map like that means either side could win more than 75 percent of districts with just 55 percent of the vote. This is also the map that looks the ugliest and requires

And for many partisans, if they’re being honest, they just want to see maps where their side is favored. Republicans could draw maps where they would’ve won all but two districts in an average of 2016 and 2018 elections, and Democrats could draw maps where they would’ve won all but three districts.

In the GOP map, assuming Republicans and Democrats each got 50 percent of the vote in Duval, Republicans would win all but two districts.

Drawing gerrymanders comes with a risk for partisans. If you get too greedy, you run the risk of drawing a “dummymander”, where you try to win too many districts and end up spreading your voters too thin. In the Democratic map I drew, Clinton and Gillum won all but three districts, but that only happens because Democrats don’t run up the score in any one single district. If Republicans and Democrats split the county 50-50, Democrats would win all but three districts, but in 2016 when Marco Rubio won the county by 16 percentage points, Rubio would’ve won all 14 districts.

Even though City Council doesn’t have to abide by the state’s constitutional amendments prohibiting partisan gerrymandering, it does have to abide by the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial gerrymandering. Usually, the appropriate way to measure racial gerrymandering is to look at how many districts have enough Black or overall non-white citizen voting-age population to elect representatives from underrepresented groups.

Some areas have more racially polarized voting with white voters almost exclusively voting Republican and Black voters almost exclusively voting Democratic. Those areas, which historically have included Jacksonville, require higher percentages of Black residents in order to elect Black lawmakers. The 2020 results, however, saw Black voters more likely to vote Republican than in the past and white voters more likely to vote Democratic.

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Start your week off…

With this infuriating report from WJXT’s Zachery Lashway about a woman facing prosecution after police violently busted out her teeth.

I spoke to Brittany Williams for a story in May, but this is the first time we’re seeing body-worn camera footage. I had requested that footage back in May, and I requested it again earlier this month, but JSO still claims it’s not a public record and the State Attorney’s Office hasn’t responded.

Brittany Williams is a Paxon graduate. Earlier this year, she saw a police car park in her driveway. She asked the officer in the car if she could help him, and he said he was parking there to finish paperwork. She asked him to leave, but he refused. According to him, she flung a spoon into his car and it hit his arm. This, prosecutors argue, constituted a battery on an officer. She called 911 to ask that the officer leave the property. Instead, the police who arrived ran after her, banged her head into the ground and knocked her teeth out.

State Attorney Melissa Nelson, who campaigned as a reformer, is not prosecuting the police but is prosecuting Williams for battery against the officer.

In his incident report, the officer claimed he had to park there because street traffic was so busy, but Williams’ footage, as well as the body-camera footage contradicts that.

He also claimed the spoon went into his car, but footage shows an officer picking up a spoon outside the car.

Officers also claimed she knocked her own teeth out on the door, but footage contradicts that.

Tributary updates

A lot has been happening behind the scenes lately, and I’m hoping to be able to update y’all soon as I work to finalize some deals.

Next week

I’m going to take a deeper dive into some of the year-end data points, including homicides and COVID deaths.

I’ve already written some of the obvious political analyses of the election results. Joe Biden won Duval County, the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Yet every Democrat in a competitive down-ballot race lost. Duval is now a purple county, not a blue one.

Joe Biden won Duval by less than four percentage points, which doesn’t mean the county is now permanently Democratic but that both parties are able to win here. Republicans would be foolish to give up on Duval, and Democrats would be foolish to assume they can easily replicate 2020’s result.

It’s important to see how Biden’s win compares to Hillary Clinton’s Duval loss in 2016 and Andrew Gillum’s Duval win in 2018.

Biden did worse in Black neighborhoods and Democratic strongholds on the Northside, but he did better in white neighborhoods and Republican areas on the Southside.

Biden’s margin shrank in 34 out of 42 Black-majority precincts, while it grew in 123 out of 131 white-majority precincts.

Jacksonville became less politically segregated than it has been in the past, but that also means voters’ loyalties have grown weaker on both sides. Traditional Democratic voters were less likely to vote Democratic, and traditional Republican voters were less likely to vote Republican.

Going into redistricting, that means fair maps could create more competitive races for City Council or the State House, but it also means that politicians might become more surgical in their drawing of the maps to ensure polarized races. The state constitution bans gerrymandering for legislative seats but not for City Council seats.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won just five out of 14 City Council seats, even as she ran nearly even with Trump. In 2018, Andrew Gillum, who did even better than Biden in Duval, won six seats. In 2020, Biden, whose support was more spread out, won seven out of 14 seats.

One of the biggest failures for local Democrats — second, perhaps, to the failure to run a candidate against Republican Mayor Lenny Curry — was the party’s inability to attract any candidate to run for District 11, that newly blue district near Baymeadows in the southernmost part of the city. It’s the fastest-growing district, with more than one in seven registered voters identifying as Asian or Hispanic. It’s also never had a competitive election with City Councilman Danny Becton running unopposed twice for the district.

We saw this down-ballot, particularly in the county clerk’s race where Republican Jody Phillips ran ahead of Donald Trump’s numbers as voters split their ticket.

Jacksonville is on the verge of becoming a minority-majority city, and the suburban neighborhoods in the city are diversifying quickly with new Asian and Hispanic residents. Those tasked with drawing political maps can use the 2020 results and the city’s racial data to weaken the voting power of Jacksonville residents.

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A note on Jacksonville’s violent weekend

This weekend, two men died to gun violence in Jacksonville. One man was shot on the road outside my house, just hours before I rode the same area on a bicycle with my son.

Jacksonville has now had 173 homicides this year, more than any year since The Florida Times-Union started tracking in 2006, and only three away from the 1990 record of 176 reported by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

One note about that record: There were likely more homicides in 1990 because the Sheriff’s Office’s reported homicides are consistently lower than the violent killings the Times-Union reports. See the chart below:

We can use a mathematical formula to estimate there were actually 219 homicides in 1990, but even with that formula, this year outpaces 1991 and every year after that.

There have been only two weeks this year without a killing: the first week in July and the first week in October. And as I said last time, December is usually the most violent month of the year, so it’s possible things can continue getting worse. May God have mercy on our city.

Start your week off…

with this look at a statewide grand jury report lambasting the Duval County Public Schools police from Emily Bloch. Is the report calling for more transparency, or is it actually calling for a tougher school-to-prison pipeline, courtesy of the school police?

Tributary Updates

I’m continuing to meet with potential fiscal sponsors, and I’m hoping to have a decision made before Christmas so we can start accepting tax-deductible donations.

As I said last week, I’m weighing starting as a fiscally sponsored project of another nonprofit, which would give the project more independence and the option of growing into its own 501c3, or potentially merging with an existing nonprofit where that nonprofit would have complete ownership of the Tributary, but it would also allow us to worry less about the business side of things and get to the journalism more quickly.

In the meantime, your Substack subscriptions have been critical as I’ve started purchasing public records and paying for other reporting expenses.

If you have any thoughts on stories or issues you’d like me to cover, feel free to let me know!

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Next week

Next week, I’ll have a look at gerrymandering and redistricting in Duval.

I’m also hoping The Times-Union will publish in the coming days an interactive map I produced before I left the newspaper.

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One of the biggest stories in Jacksonville, one that deserves more scrutiny and investigation, is why the city is failing to keep its residents safe. This is my first post for The Tributary. I’m going to include some updates on how things are going on forming the nonprofit below, but I wanted to share some insights about where the city is at as we enter what are typically the most violent weeks of the year.

Since 2012, we’ve seen the rate of homicides increasing, but what we’ve seen over the course of the last year is unlike anything we’ve seen in decades, and certainly not since a smaller spike in violence in the mid-2000s sparked Mayor John Peyton’s creation of Jax Journey.

We’re now on pace to surpass 1990’s 176 homicides reported by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

Already, we’ve seen 170 homicides, and late December tends to be the most violent period of the year.

For Black men, the homicide rate is even more horrific. About one in 1,250 Black men who were alive in Jacksonville at the beginning of this year have been killed so far.

This year, 110 Black men have been killed so far, even as the number of white people killed has remained stable.

We are the seventh-most populous county in the state, and we have had the second-most homicides in the state every year since 2012.

We have been the murder capital of Florida since at least the 1990s with only one exception, the Pulse nightclub shooting of 2016 — the deadliest modern mass shooting at the time — caused Orange County to just slightly surpass Duval in 2016.

The cost of the violence also changes the way we handle government.

Pinellas County has more people than Duval, yet the county and its 26 city governments spent $216 million on law enforcement in 2018, compared to Duval County’s $422 million, according to data I analyzed from the Office of Economic and Demographic Research.

In Pinellas, where they spend half as much on policing, they’re able to spend four times as much on parks and recreation, three times as much on health, three times as much on economic development. They spend $15 million on housing out of their general fund, while we don’t spend anything in our general fund on housing.

You can find more comparisons in the Excel sheet I put together here.

Jacksonville began using Cure Violence last year, a campaign season promise from Mayor Lenny Curry, but so far just $1.8 million are spent each year on the program. The program treats violence as a contagion and relies on what it calls “credible messengers.” It specifically wants people who have experience with violence and long-standing relationships in a community, rather than outsiders from other neighborhoods, to intervene and stop retaliatory violence before it starts. It also is committed to working outside of the typical criminal legal system, which means when workers intervene, they are not supposed to be working with police.

Meanwhile, the Jacksonville State Attorney’s Office, along with the Sheriff’s Office, is also using a more typical violence-reduction initiative that emphasizes the threat of harsh punishment. For the last four years, I tried to get the State Attorney’s Office to talk to me about this effort, but it refused to make prosecutors or police available for interviews.

I can at least talk about how the program, created by John Jay College’s David Kennedy, typically works. I’ve heard Kennedy speak, and I know how it was implemented in Chattanooga, a city where I interned as a cops reporter for six months in 2011. The program uses call-out meetings with suspected gang members and tells them they will go to prison if they don’t cooperate. It then tries to target uncooperative people with harsh prosecution, even for minor crimes. In Jacksonville, the focus is on gun-possession crimes, whether someone has a gun with a past criminal conviction or is illegally carrying a gun without a concealed weapon permit.

State Attorney Melissa Nelson has stripped her prosecutors of discretion in these types of cases, demanding they seek longer prison sentences. Prosecutors must get approval from a director if they want to depart from Nelson’s mandate.

Some of the recent police killings in Jacksonville come from this effort, where police have pulled over young men in Black-majority neighborhoods for minor traffic stops and then discovered they were illegally carrying weapons. This was the case for Jamee Johnson last year and Devon Gregory last month.

Start your week off…

With this good summary of the Lot J development issues from Chris Hong and David Bauerlein, my former colleagues at The Times-Union.

Tributary Updates

I plan to keep up weekly updates before the Tributary can officially launch. There are a few things I’m working on to get the Tributary set up.

The first step is to get a fiscal sponsorship from another nonprofit, like the Institute for Nonprofit News, where the Tributary would operate as a separate legal entity but essentially borrow another nonprofit’s 501c3 under a memorandum of understanding where it accepts and disburses donations. Or the Tributary could operate as a project of another nonprofit but not exist as a wholly separate legal entity.

The other major step I’m beginning to embark on is getting commitments from financial backers to support the Tributary. Already, about 160 people have bought paid subscriptions to the newsletter; this helps me when I go to larger foundations and convince them that the project is worth investment because it will survive in the long-run with reader support.

I’ve also already been able to put your donations to use, purchasing a domain name and setting up an email server. I also had to return the computer I used from the Times-Union, and your donations, combined with good Black Friday deals, helped me buy a new laptop.

If you have any thoughts on stories or issues you’d like me to cover in the interim, feel free to let me know!

Next week

I’m going to have a deeper look at what changes we’ve seen neighborhood by neighborhood in voting patterns in the 2020 election compared to 2018 and 2016.

On Dec. 2, I’ll start updating this regularly with stories.

In Jacksonville, one in five children live in poverty, Black people are twice as likely to live in poverty, Black men are 11 times more likely to be killed than the rest of the population. This is a city of tremendous inequality, but it has the potential to be a greater place. To move forward, Jaxsons need to know what’s holding our city back.

I’m one of 40 journalists who have been laid off, bought out or pushed out since GateHouse (now Gannett) purchased the Times-Union three years ago. During that time, the newspaper has only replaced one position.

There’s an opportunity to fill a gap in Jacksonville with a nonprofit collective focused on investigating stories of the city’s inequities in collaboration with other media outlets.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.

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In the meantime, tell your friends!