Escambia County Commissioner Jeff Bergosh discusses his blog post on gun violence and the upcoming roundtable on the issue.
Will Kennedy recaps the UWF Argos’ victory over Shorter and previews the homecoming game against Mississippi College.
A whistleblower has come forward and alleged that former President Trump’s new media company violated securities laws, and that the former president asked executives to give up some shares of the company to his wife Melania. ABC’s Aaron Katersky has been covering this story.
Lakeview has a new parent company, LifeView Group. CEO Allison Hill has the details.
And the interviews in one podcast:
Gun Violence: Bergosh expended more than a thousand words but missed the point. People in Escambia County don’t trust law enforcement. This isn’t a Black, Brown, Yellow, White or single-parent thing. Heck, I don’t trust cops and I worked with them a lot in the Marines on counterdrug operations. My late son-in-law Richard Wynne was once a PPD Officer. I went out with him on patrol when he was a Deputy Sheriff near Atlanta. Here, I’ve had Deputies come to my door and accuse me of some unspecified crime because I was taking pictures of the street repaving being done in front of my own house. Some Ferry Pass student waiting for a bus must have said that I was talking pictures of kids. I got a stern talking to by two school resource officers. A neighbor sent PPD to my house saying that I was trespassing on her property (NO), harassing her (NO) and had called code enforcement on her (not a crime and I found out who did it but NO). The PPD Officer told me that “I” had to learn to get along with my neighbor. I told him to get right back in his police car and go over and tell the doped-up, foul-mouthed, crazy lazy that it was a crime to file a false police report. I told him that if he didn’t, I’d call Chief Simmons. He did. PPD once came to my house because a guy reported that I was stalking him because I walked my dog on his street past his house. I was accused of stalking him and running all of the Vietnamese families out of Scenic Heights. NO and NO. I’ve had PPD Officers tell me that they don’t like the city or its residents and would never want to live in our city. Last year, a PPD Officer told a neighbor that he could arrest him for “stalking” because he had followed two suspects in his car as he talked to PPD dispatch until PPD caught up with them and let them go because they said they’d not been trying to break into cars on our street. My neighbor was told that unless he had video proof of them breaking into cars, he had better not call PPD again. Oh, sorry for the inconvenience. Once, someone fired off a clip of 9mm rounds. The responding officer wouldn’t do anything saying that it was not illegal to fire a weapon in the city. The cops are not inherently bad but they act like an occupying force in our city. Few if any actually live in our city. Even before being hired, Chief Randall told Councilwoman Myers that he was not going to live in our city. Randall said that housing was too expensive. [He hadn’t lived in Newport News his last job when he worked there either.] In January, Randall bought a “McMansion” in Cantonment for $499,000. I’ve seen him driving south towards the city in his taxpayer-funded PPD SUV with unlimited gas as I was heading north. Imagine instead how it used to be when all PPD Officers lived in our city and we’d see them in our parks, the grocery store, church, the library, etc. Politicians claim to be “data-driven.” Here’s some data. The last time the city’s crime rate was below the state average was in 2001. The city’s crime rate is 3.5 times the Santa Rosa County rate. In 2000, Escambia County ranked #35 in crime in Florida. In 2020, it was #3. Why?