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Police advisory town hall tonight

   Published Date: February 4, 2021  1 Comment on Police advisory town hall tonight

The Citizens Police Advisory Committee is seeking community input on various topics involving relationships between the community and the Pensacola Police Department. The CPAC members will host two town hall meetings to provide an opportunity for Pensacola residents to share their thoughts:

  • Thursday, Feb. 4 at 6 p.m., Fricker Community Center, 900 N. F St. 
  • Thursday, Feb. 18 at 6 p.m., Bayview Community Center, 2001 E. Lloyd St.
Members of the public may attend the meeting in person; however, there will be limited seating capacity. Consistent with CDC guidelines, attendees will be required to sit at least 6 feet apart and to wear face coverings that cover their nose and mouth.

The public is encouraged to participate in these meetings and let their voices be heard while engaging with their Citizens Police Advisory Committee.

Due to capacity limitations related to COVID-19, in person attendees are asked to RSVP using the online form. Please do not email RSVP responses.

The public will also have the option to participate in the meeting virtually via Facebook live on Mayor Grover Robinson’s page.

The public is also invited to submit comments and questions using the online form provided on the City of Pensacola website. Please do not submit comments via email.

1 thought on “Police advisory town hall tonight”

  1. Policing in the city is mostly a mystery both to the public and to the city council. Since 2016, the City Council has refused to allow the public and media to hear the police chief’s monthly crime report. Councilman Wu up for reelection that year and who insisted that the public not be allowed to hear the report any longer said that letting the public know about crime in the city was “like taking dirty laundry and hanging it up.” Only Councilwoman Myers disagreed. At tonight’s meeting, the PPD should set the stage by describing some basics. For example, how many funded sworn law enforcement officers are there in the PPD? How many are currently filled, as of today. When officers quit the PPD, where do they take new jobs? How many officers are assigned to the Uniform Patrol Division and how many are assigned to each patrol shift? Are there still as few as 8 or 9 officers working a patrol shift as once was the case when that is what Dispatch and officers would tell me? What is the demographic breakdown of the PPD’s officers? If it does not at least reasonably mirror the city’s population, why not? Do city residents get preference in the PPD hiring process? If not, why not? How many PPD officers are city residents and in which council districts do they live? In 2016, Police Chief David Alexander (a city resident himself and why he was more effective than other police chiefs in recent memory) told the city council that “less than ten percent” of his officers lived in the city. I would not be surprised if it were only a handful. Where do non-city PPD offices live broken out by zip code? How many live in Santa Rosa County, Okaloosa County, Alabama? How many PPD officers have their own full-time city vehicle? How much money would the city save each year if full-time city vehicles were limited to full-time city resident PPD officers? Why has the city’s “per capita” Uniform Crime Report (UCR) rate (a partial snapshot of crime in a community that only counts 7 of 33 felonies in a very peculiar way requested by Congress but at least one that is reported uniformly by all law enforcement agencies) always been “above” the state average since 2002? It was +56.2% above the state average in 2019, up from +54% in 2018. [In 2012, a year that Mayor Ashton Hayward celebrated as a low crime year, the city’s per capita UCR crime rate (6,737.5) was +77% above the Florida per capita UCR crime rate (3,806.1).] Why does each PPD police chief continue to tell the public that the city has a low crime rate and that the city is a safe place to live? That definitely is “fake news.” High crime in Pensacola does help explain the real estate building boom in Santa Rosa County. Is it true, as Mayor Grover Robinson has claimed, and he does make a lot of fact-less claims, that most of the people who commit crimes in the city do not live in the city but, supposedly, dash-in from their homes in the county (Mayfair, Warrington, Ferry Pass, Perdido Key., Cantonment, etc.) to commit their crimes and then dash back home? During 2019, what percentage of all reported felony crimes in the city (all 33 categories of felonies and not just those reported in the UCR system) resulted in a “conviction”? An interesting question related to the police chief search is if the next chief should report to the Mayor rather than the City Administrator?

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