City commission votes to look at options for reducing the use of sworn officers and reallocating part of GPD’s budget

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

At the end of a 7.5-hour meeting that included about 3 hours of presentations from the Gainesville Police Department (GPD) and about 3 hours of public comment, the Gainesville City Commission voted to do the following:

  • Have staff come back with options for a deflection/diversion program, civil citations, and city prosecution for city violations. This is to include information on what a city violation is, which crimes should result in civil citations, and deflection/diversion programs.
  • Have the City Manager come back with a budget item to repurpose open sworn officer positions for the 2021 budget.
  • Have the City Manager come back with a budget item to have increased GPD mental health team coverage for the 2021 budget.
  • Have the City Manager bring back other budget areas in GPD that would be eligible for reallocation to a different part of the City’s budget or within GPD for the 2021 budget.
  • Have staff bring back information on the breakdown of calls to law enforcement and who responds to them.
  • Have a discussion within the next 60 days about how the City can respond to 911 calls with non-armed individuals.
  • Have the Mayor and City Manager work on crafting a Memorandum of Understanding with community partners to fund a central receiving facility for mental health calls.
  • How are they going to enforce their mask ordinance if they defund the police? I pray for the reincarnation of my deceased good friend, Common Sense. We have one of the best police departments in the country, and it’s foolish to meddle with their operations for the sake of fashionable virtue signaling.

  • Those commissioners should be the ones to respond to those one-armed 911 calls. When it goes south they’ll run north and scream for an armed officer.

  • It must be really painful to observe how the sausage is made at city hall these days…
    7 hours…
    Wow.
    Can we just choose whether we want police protection (I opted for police protection✔️,) or virtue signaling ??

  • In the last FBI report Sept. 2019…
    Gainesville crime rates are 81% higher than the national average
    Violent crimes in Gainesville are 95% higher than the national average
    In Gainesville you have a 1 in 22 chance of becoming a victim of crime
    Gainesville is safer than 6% of the cities in the United States
    Year over year crime in Gainesville has increased by 6%
    Defunding our police will only worsen our current situation which is very poor.

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