Jail booking log analysis for 2025

ANALYSIS

BY LEN CABRERA

Alachua Chronicle publishes daily jail booking logs as a snapshot of the events our local law enforcement officers deal with on a daily basis. As we compose the log, we try to only capture new arrests/charges, so we exclude inmates who are in transit, returning from another facility (“on loan”), or being transported from another facility in response to a court order.

“Turned over to ICE”

This year, we included inmates in our Jail Booking Log if they were listed as an “ICE DETAINER” or “ICE DETAINEE” (most of these were not new arrests but were described as “in transit” in the log provided by the jail). In 2025, 60 individuals were booked into the Alachua County Jail for ICE-related reasons, and 114 individuals were listed as “turned over to ICE” in the jail’s “Booking Out” log. While these individuals appeared in our daily booking logs, they are not included in our analysis of the logs.

As we construct the log each day, we track the number of individuals booked, the number and types of charges, the demographics, the type of arrest (warrant, mittimus, etc.), and the agency that made the arrests. We’ve used the same process since 2023 to enable year-to-year comparisons. Caveats about the data and information about the limitations of our analysis can be found at the end of the article.

Total bookings were up 0.7% over 2024

In 2025, there were 6,806 entries in the booking log for the Alachua County Jail (an entry is one person booked on one day); the number was 6,759 in 2024, so there were 0.7% more entries in 2025 (after being down 1.4% from 2023 to 2024). These numbers do not count the total number of charges, as a single individual can have multiple charges or appear multiple times in the log in a single day. Of the 6,806 bookings, about 41% (2,786) had multiple charges, roughly the same percentage as in 2024 and 2023.

These figures do not necessarily reflect new local crimes because some are for charges coming from another county or another state. Also, some are more administrative in nature, such as failure to appear for a hearing (FTA) or violations of probation (VOP). If only the new local bookings are counted, there were 4,876 in 2025, 2.8% more than the 4,744 in 2024.

Total charges were down, but tracked charges were up

There were 13,800 individual charges, 1.7% less than the 14,037 individual charges in 2024 (excluding a single individual charged with 2,043 counts of fake ID). Four individuals in 2025 had over 50 charges in a single booking, compared to 11 in 2024. Three of the four were child pornography cases. In 2024, the bookings for 50+ charges were for people who were violating domestic violence injunctions or whose charges involved some type of credit card, bank, or ID fraud. (There were also 11 people in 2025 with exactly 40 counts of pre-trial release violations for domestic violence. These are usually people currently in the jail, using the phones to violate no-contact orders. These inmates usually make more than 40 calls, but the cases are often capped at 40 charges.)

As we did in 2023 and 2024, we classified charges into 37 broad categories. These were only tallied for new local arrests. When considering only these 37 categories, there were 2.8% more bookings (4,876 vs. 4,744) and 4.6% more charges (10,157 vs. 9,711).

Of the 6,806 bookings, 10.9% (741) were additional charges or warrants for people already in the jail (i.e., they had “IN HOUSE” written somewhere in the jail booking log), considerably less than the 12.3% (834) in 2024 and roughly the same as 2023. Probation violators (i.e., VOP, MVOP, or FVOP) made up 14.1% (962) of jail bookings in 2025 and 14.7% (996) in 2024. People who had been sentenced to serve time at the county jail rather than a state correctional facility (sentences of 364 days or less) made up 3.4% (231) of bookings in 2025 and 3.0% (206) in 2024; these are individuals who were released after their initial arrests and booked back into the jail to serve their sentences.

Other than the people who were sentenced or were transported from another facility, the individuals booked into the jail were only accused of a crime and had not been tried or convicted when they were booked.

Demographics of individuals booked into the jail

The number of individuals booked by day varied from 4 to 36, with an average of 18.6 and median of 19. The overall distribution has been about the same in every year since 2022. The chart below shows the distribution of bookings by day.

In 2025, 5,174 different individuals were booked in Alachua County, 2.8% more than the 5,035 individuals in 2024 (which was 1.3% more than 2023). Individuals are counted multiple times in the 6,806 bookings; we identify them by identical names and dates of birth. Of the 5,174 individuals, over 20% (1,166) were booked more than once, 322 (6.2%) were booked three or more times, and 1,139 (22.0%) were also booked the previous year. There were more repeat offenders booked in 2024: 24%, 7.3%, and 24.1%, respectively. There were 28 people booked five or more times in 2025, compared to 32 in 2024. 2025 had more people booked with three or more charges: 1,643 (31.8%), compared to 1,578 (31.3%) in 2024. The most an individual was booked in 2025 was 11 times; it was only seven times in 2024.

The daily booking logs are created by Alachua County Jail staff in an Excel spreadsheet that has dropdown menus for various fields. (We usually receive it as a PDF document.) The choices for race include Asian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and White. However, all but 57 of the 6,806 entries listed either “Black” or “White,” even when the name and/or picture of the accused clearly suggested otherwise. For example, the logs only recorded 43 individuals as “Hispanic,” but we estimate it was closer to 522. As entered, the logs show that 56.7% of those arrested were black and 41.7% were white, about the same as the 57.7% and 41.3% breakdown in 2024.

The sex field should have fewer errors since there are only two options: male and female. If the entry doesn’t match the picture, we correct it. (Female inmates are given blue uniforms, and males have white/green striped uniforms.) Of the 6,806 bookings, 74.2% were male and 25.8% were female, compared to 75.1% and 24.9%, respectively, in 2024.

2025 was the first year with a noticeably different age distribution since we started analyzing booking logs in 2020. It’s subtle, but there is a shift to older inmates. In 2025, less than half the people booked (48.7%) were under 35 years old; that figure was 52.5% in 2024, 54.2% in 2023, 55.8% in 2022, and 57.4% in 2021. The percentage over age 55 was nearly one quarter (24.4%), a figure that was closer to one in five for the previous five years. The chart below shows the distribution by age.

Types of arrests

The table below shows how each booking was classified by type. The vast majority of all bookings (91.8%) were either a mittimus (“on view”) or warrant. A mittimus booking typically means that a law enforcement officer makes an arrest during or shortly after the crime is committed and then files an arrest report that documents the incident. (Most of the crime articles at Alachua Chronicle are written from mittimus reports, although we also chase down sworn complaints for individuals arrested on a warrant.) A warrant is an arrest made by order of a judge, either for administrative violations (like failure to appear for a hearing or violation of pre-trial release conditions) or after sufficient evidence of a crime has been presented by law enforcement officers, usually by filing a sworn complaint after the crime was committed because the suspect was not apprehended at the time of the incident.

If there are multiple bookings for a single individual on the same day, they are consolidated into the same entry. If there is a mittimus line with some other charge in another line (warrant, VOP, etc.), we default to mittimus. There were 282 mittimus bookings that also had a warrant, VOP, FTA, or out-of-county charge (299 in 2024).

Agencies

Almost all warrant arrests (96.9%) in the booking log were made by the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office (ASO). The table and chart below show the breakdown of the mittimus bookings by law enforcement agency.

Information and caveats about the data and this analysis

2025 was the fifth full year that Alachua Chronicle published daily booking logs. You can read about our editorial decision to publish the booking logs here. Last year’s booking summary is available here, with an additional article comparing crime data for 2023 and 2024 here.

The booking logs are not necessarily an accurate picture of crime in Alachua County for several reasons. Not every crime results in an arrest, and some of the people booked in 2025 were charged for crimes from previous years. Also, some of the people booked were arrested for out-of-county or out-of-state warrants and may not have committed any local crimes. When making comparisons to figures from other years, there is no way to know if the differences are caused by a change in crime rates or changes in enforcement policies.

The summaries we provide are based on “dirty” data. We copy and paste directly from the logs as we receive them, with only minor corrections to keep the format consistent on a given day (not necessarily from day to day). We fix obvious typos or errors when we see them. Errors with names and dates of birth are fixed using court records when possible.

Click here for an analysis of 2025 crime data by category with a comparison to 2024’s data.