More than 700 people gathered Monday night to call for an end to Jacksonville’s decades-long epidemic of shooting deaths tied to gangs and poverty, but the man with the power to act on their ideas — Sheriff T.K. Waters — was noticeably absent.
For several years, the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment, or ICARE, has demanded that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office pay an out-of-state consultant to reassess one of its key initiatives for gun-violence prevention.
The sheriff has consistently rejected that demand since his election in late 2022. Last week, he escalated his opposition with a letter accusing ICARE of running “a staged display” against him a year ago.
Waters, in his letter, claimed that in his last public engagement with the faith-centric group, “I was systemically booed by the crowd on command by ICARE leaders and not permitted to hold a microphone, seemingly to prevent me from responding beyond one-word replies.”
One issue: A recording of the 2023 event shows almost none of those things happened.
Waters was never booed. In fact, clergy repeatedly instructed the crowd not to boo, and instead, the leaders made the crowd practice responding to things they may disagree with by being silent instead.
“We will not boo or make negative comments when we hear things we do not like,” announced the Rev. Adam Anderson of South Jacksonville Presbyterian Church at the 2023 event. “Instead, our response will be, a protest of silence. So let’s practice that: ‘No.'”
Silence followed. “There’s a pin that I just heard drop,” Anderson said. Other leaders echoed Anderson’s demands that the crowd respond to things they disagree with by remaining silent.
At no point could any booing be heard during the 20 minutes that Waters spent on stage with ICARE at its 2023 Nehemiah Assembly, nor could anyone be seen trying to prompt noise, according to footage reviewed by The Tributary. The only audible crowd responses of any kind were three applauses – two following “yes” answers that Waters gave to ICARE’s first two questions, and a third after his closing comments – and three laughs, each of which the sheriff joined in seemingly lighthearted moments.
The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to not actually booing Waters, the group had sent the sheriff its yes-or-no questions in writing ahead of time and had requested meetings with him repeatedly.
Anderson explained the event may cause discomfort for public officials, but that the group would be respectful. It had sent its questions to the sheriff in writing ahead of time. The group, Anderson said, believed in tough face-to-face conversations, not running to social media to criticize those officials. “This evening may feel uncomfortable. But if we feel this discomfort or tension this evening, let it be a reminder that the need is great, the stakes are high, and we gather here with the privilege to sit in this discomfort as representatives of those who cannot.”
Waters’ letter does accurately reflect that an ICARE member held the microphone for him each time he spoke at the event. That is a ground rule that ICARE has applied to every guest speaker at its annual Nehemiah event for years, the organization said. The group explained the rule to Waters and the audience when his appearance at last year’s Nehemiah began.
“We will ask you a question and give you a moment to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We will hold the microphone, and we do that for all of our officials,” ICARE treasurer Geneva Pittman said from the stage, per the footage. “After we finish asking these questions, you will have three minutes to share any additional thoughts you have on the matter at hand.”
A violence-prevention debate
ICARE responded to the sheriff’s accusations with a letter of its own:
“That statement is inflammatory and inaccurate,” the group wrote in reference to Waters’ claims that he got booed and that ICARE leaders commanded such boos. “You also gave responses that included more than yes and no to the questions we provided. Again, this claim is false.”
The group also wrote that it subjected Waters to its mic-holding rule at an earlier ICARE event in 2022, when he was still running for sheriff, and “you voiced no concern that night.”
“A microphone should not be a reason to end a conversation with the public about community problems,” ICARE wrote.
ICARE invited Waters to be its marquee guest again at this year’s Nehemiah Action Assembly, its 26th iteration of the event. It held the assembly Monday night in Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church. The event drew hundreds of people, including a laundry list of public officials: City Councilmen Rahman Johnson and Jimmy Peluso, Duval County School Board member Warren Jones, Public Defender Charlie Cofer and Mayor Donna Deegan’s director of strategic partnerships, Tracye Polson.
ICARE believes the sheriff’s office has been trying to tackle the problem of gun violence on its own for years with ineffective results. It has asked Waters to take a bigger-tent approach to a program nationally known as group violence intervention, which seeks to proactively engage individuals such as gang members who are potential sources of future gun violence and convince them to change their path before they pull the trigger.
JSO houses its own internal version of this program that’s run by community-outreach manager and pastor Garland Scott. ICARE believes that isn’t working because the killings haven’t slowed down, which it attributes to a lack of civilian voices in the intervention process.
Homicides in Jacksonville haven’t declined for two consecutive years at any point since 2011, when the city marked its fourth year in a row of declines, according to data kept by The Florida Times-Union and the Sheriff’s Office. JSO had logged a total of 125 criminal homicides in 2023 by the end of the year, which was down from 136 it had logged the prior year but up from 113 two years prior, according to data the sheriff’s office regularly released until earlier this year.
ICARE wants the sheriff to contract with the National Network for Safe Communities – a research center at the City University of New York’s John Jay College, where professor David Kennedy is credited with developing the group-violence-intervention concept – to reassess JSO’s program and help reshape it.
The sheriff’s office previously contracted with the group from 2016 to 2019 to initially establish the program that JSO now runs in-house. ICARE members have said giving the research center a new contract for what they want would cost Jacksonville taxpayers somewhere between $30,000 and $80,000.
‘Holding me accountable’
Last year, the group made that demand a cornerstone of its Nehemiah event and its questioning of Waters.
“No, I will not. Not again,” the sheriff replied to the idea of rehiring the NNSC.
Asked to clarify why he wouldn’t, he said, “We’ve had people from all over the country, Brazil, Sweden, come and look at our model.”
Asked to expound on his rejection a second time, Waters said JSO’s program is specifically tailored to Jacksonville. “Every city’s different, and our issues are different in every city, and ours is not like Detroit or Chicago or any of those other places.”
Asked the same question a third time, Waters reiterated his response. “Third answer, I will not. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars for a program that we’re currently working in Jacksonville. I don’t think you guys really understand that, and I’ve said that several times.”
ICARE then asked if he would form a “working group” to involve non-police “service partners” in his in-house program. The sheriff took issue with the suggestion that JSO didn’t already have community involvement, prompting him to ask civilians in the audience who “go out with us weekly to knock on doors of young men and young women that are at risk” to stand up.
The ICARE questioners then took this as a “no” to the idea of “our service partners being part of your working group.” The sheriff jumped back in: “You guys can join up and be part of the working group. Anyone can come. You understand what I’m saying? We have that, is what I’m trying to tell you.”
Later explaining why he also opposes decriminalizing certain misdemeanors for adults, another ICARE goal, Waters said: “You’re asking me questions face-to-face. I’m giving you the answers. You’re holding me accountable. Adults should be held accountable.”
Emails reviewed by The Tributary show that Waters and his community-outreach manager have repeatedly balked at efforts by ICARE to meet with them in public and private settings in the year since Waters’ Nehemiah appearance, either citing work demands and conflicting commitments or simply not responding at all.
Waters’ letter last week stated that the particular night of this year’s Nehemiah conflicted with the Police Memorial Ceremony, a yearly event in which JSO commemorates Jacksonville police officers who’ve given their lives serving the community. ICARE offered to adjust its Nehemiah schedule to ensure Waters could attend both events but didn’t receive a response.
The sheriff’s letter said that even if a schedule conflict didn’t exist, he still wouldn’t come. “I will not attend ICARE assemblies in the future,” Waters vowed.
In 2022, speaking at an ICARE event the day before his election, Waters told the group, “If I’m elected sheriff, I will be there. We may not always agree, but I will speak with you,” according to the group.
‘We got pretty big shoulders’
JSO didn’t respond to a request from The Tributary for further comment. In a statement to First Coast News, a sheriff’s spokesperson said: “Currently, the Sheriff does not have any appointments scheduled with ICARE personnel. He has met them and answered their questions on previous occasions.”
The Nehemiah assembly on Monday made clear that some ICARE members have grown frustrated with Waters’ apathy toward them. Church leaders distributed copies of a group letter that asked Waters to meet twice a year with ICARE representatives. They said they plan to get as many copies of the letter signed by congregations and residents as possible before delivering the signatures to the sheriff this summer.
“I’m a little frustrated that the sheriff just refuses to interact with us,” Alan Mastin of Riverside Avenue Christian Church told The Tributary. “Unfortunately, Sheriff Waters is – he’s a egocentric kind of guy. It’s his way or the highway. He’s not listening to his constituents.”
Yet ICARE’s leaders still said that they don’t want a contentious relationship with Waters and merely seek to ask hard questions in order to address hard problems.
“Our concern is working with the sheriff and other leaders in our community to reduce the murders,” ICARE co-president Keith Oglesby of Christ Episcopal Church told The Tributary. “And I can’t say it enough, we’re not against the sheriff. I think he’s a good man. He’s a professional. I think he wants what’s best, and what we’re trying to do is work with him on what we see as a need. And he can fuss at us as much as he wants, but we got pretty big shoulders.”
Charlie McGee covers poverty and the safety net for The Tributary. He’s also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and worldwide. McGee may be reached at charlie.mcgee@jaxtrib.org. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.