Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons said the Blue Angels Pensacola Beach Airshow ran smoothly with few arrests. He believes his emphasis on technology has helped.
“We had about 16 to 20 extra cameras on Casino Beach and the boardwalk parking lots,” he said. “I like to think that some of that is a deterrence.”
Sheriff Simmons has no plans to bring back the ECSO helicopters. “It’s too expensive and just not practical. But there are drones, and we’re trying to get a drone on every shift, and now I’m trying to get some new drones per SWAT team.”
He also mentioned the Realtime Crime Center, Shot Spotter and the Bearcat. “I’m trying to get all these tools so that the citizens of Escambia County will have everything that we can provide as a service to the community. And we’ve only just begun.”
Sheriff Simmons has invited the Pensacola Police Department to have personnel in the Realtime Crime Center.
“This is probably the first time that I can remember in my history of the sheriff’s office and police department that we actually have employees with the City of Pensacola embedded,” the sheriff said. “We have access to the cameras that are all downtown. And if there’s, say there’s an event downtown, and they’re looking for a certain vehicle, we can put that out throughout the whole county, and they will also have access to every camera that we have access to within the county. I think that it’ll help us all.”
