 Today, a conversation with Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, then Good Is Everywhere returns to the first coast. But first, Sheriff T.K. Waters was sworn into office in November last year after winning a special election against opponent LaKeisha Burton. His four-year term officially began this March after he ran unopposed. Now, Sheriff, I have known you since you were a homicide sergeant. And when you decided to run, we sat in San Marcos Square and we talked. And we'll try to shorten this a bit here, but you became an officer. Why? There was there was something in your life that made you decide. Yeah. So I am the son of a military man. And my plan was to join the military after my father. It was a I thought it was a noble career. I love the fact that he he served. I got a chance to see it. And that's what I wanted to do. But in 1990, I lost my first cousin to a murder and offer Ramona Boulevard and that changed my plans. What are some of the high points? I mean, like I said, I first met you as a homicide sergeant. And actually, there's one case we'll talk about later that I remember vividly to gruesome for family audiences out here. But what are some of the high points? And then I want to talk about that gang program you did. Well, actually, you met me in traffic and we rode together. You're doing some car stuff. And then we talked more frequently in homicide. The high points, just the opportunity. And this is not a cliche. It may sound like that. Just the opportunity to serve this community. I mean, when I say I love Jacksonville, I really do. I've been around this country. I lived in another country and I just love Jacksonville. I think it's a it's a wonderful place full of wonderful people. And I wanted to serve and probably the most important job up until now that I had was working as a homicide supervisor and getting answers for families that lost loved ones. You can't really get closure. I don't I don't believe that's that's the case when you lose a loved one that shouldn't be lost. But you can try to do the very best that you can to be a voice for that victim and that family in those times of loss. And obviously there was a gang program that you were involved with where you actually went out with other people of other specialties to try to talk to families with gang members to give them messages. And you have touted that even here in this hallway during many of the debates just very briefly. What was that in? Is it still going on? Yes, it's called our violence reduction strategy. And the goal is to make to make contact with young men, usually mostly young men that are involved in whether it be, you know, past or currently but not wanted by police and to make contact with them and offer them some other services to help them make a connection and become, you know, just productive members of our community so they don't find themselves in prison or dead. That's a big goal of mine to try to save lives. I spent many years, excuse me, I spent many years looking and watching and standing over crime scenes. Well now I want to do what I can to try to try to change that trend. Back in the 80s I was also an overnight cop reporter at a TV station here and we were much closer to the scenes. And I still have memories, unfortunately, of those and sort of glad I don't see those anymore, but I know your gang does. Yeah, we do. And rather not, you know, of course, we'd rather have a city where that does not happen. We're working hard to try to stop that. Yeah, look at overnight on Edgewood two people found in a burning car shot to death. A woman found last week in a car with bullet holes in it after someone noticed the bullet holes. We'll talk about that in a minute. But let's go. You and I did one of their polls and some interesting talk about how people feel about the stadium rebuild, but the North Florida University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab indicates that you are the most popular politician on the first coast with a 64% approval rating across party lines with 15% of those surveyed showing disapproval. So any thoughts? I appreciate the I appreciate that very much. I think once you get past the politics of it all, once you get past having to run for office, you know, as a sheriff, my job is to make sure that the people of this community feel safe and know that they're being served. Listen, I'm not born in Jacksonville, but my parents are both born and raised in Jackson. My dad's from the South side. I have a large family on the South side. I have a large family on the West side. My mother's from Sweetwater. And I actually care about this community so much. And I have some core beliefs and those core beliefs don't affect how I feel about people in general and people are the most important thing that we have in this community. And I want to make sure that I'm serving each and every one of them. Don't forget gang out there that you can give us a call at 5492937. You can tweet us at FCC on air. You can email us at firstcoastconnectedwjct.org or message us on the First Coast Connect Facebook page. All right, you had a very bizarre tenure as sheriff. You were interim. Yeah, you had to run. You had to run again. So, and suffice to say it's been a very unusual first tenure as sheriff. We've had some tragic cases where you've had to step up front. How do you, what do you think about these first few months wearing the five gold stars? You know, the job is, it's a pleasure. So, I've always been very busy and I like being busy. I like working. The job's been very busy. It's been challenging at times. But I have a really strong team of individuals. You can't accomplish this by yourself. You can't accomplish this without the support of our community. And we have some very strong leaders in our agency and they're helping me to do the things that are necessary to do. I made a promise to this community that the sheriff's office is going to look different. So, we're doing that. The sheriff's office is going to be transparent. And I hope people are realizing that I want to show you everything that I can show you as long as it doesn't violate any laws or any investigations that we have going on currently. If there's something that happened, like unfortunately what happened a few weeks ago, and I know the reason that it happened, I will tell you the reason that it happened. If I say that I don't know, it's because I don't. And I'm hoping that people really understand and know that I'm willing to be forward and up front. And I wanted to make sure that folks know that this agency is their agency and I'm their sheriff. It doesn't matter where you are, what party you're a member of. I'm your sheriff and I'm going to do the very best that I can every single day for everyone in this community. Well, as you ran, obviously you did not support our current mayor. But yet you've, again, because of circumstances, been working very closely with her and some tragic cases. So how do you, now after these first few months, what's the relationship with Mayor Deegan and her administration? I think the relationship is really good. And we're still growing. You know, it takes time. You have to build a relationship, you know, because I didn't know Mayor Deegan at all. I knew some of the things that I'd heard on the campaign trail. But once it's all over, she and I talked and I told her, listen, I want to work together. If we don't work together and she expressed the same sentiment. If we don't work together, we're not doing this. It is in this community what we should be doing. And my responsibility was to reach out and I did and told her why I felt what the way I felt. She said, I get it and we've moved forward and we've, you know, we talk on the phone when times when things come up, we we discuss things and it's very important for us to do that and we're going to continue to do that. And I think the relationship is going to continue to grow. And what about with LaKeisha Burton? You guys had a very tense battle there. She used to be somebody who was right up the street from you at the Arlington zone. Public Safety Director, I don't know what her title is right now, but obviously you'll have to work with your former opponent. So Director of Community Initiatives, I believe, is what her title is. And she has connections inside the agency to liaison for me. You know, but the discussions that I have are usually with our mayor and with Karen Boling. We don't have very many discussions, but we've always known each other. As a matter of fact, there was a bike ride in one of our communities and we were there and it was just like meeting up old times. You know, politics are, it's a strange thing and it was my first time being involved in it. It's a strange thing, but when it's all said and done, it's time to get to work. You know, we got to put everything, all that stuff aside and work. It is interesting that I have known you for years. I've known those people you just mentioned for years and many of your top staff. I've worked with Ben on a crime scene line interviewing over the years. So the folks in Jacksonville should know that these are not newcomers, that most of your administrative staff has been out there on the front lines working. In fact, you're under sheriff. I saw him undercover one day posing as a fisherman because there was some tension in the community and they were just observing and I walked up and said, what are you supposed to be? And he said, and so now I call him the fisherman every time I see him, even though he's the under sheriff. You know, there has been an uptick in deaths over the past few weeks. I know he had a hundred homicides officially at one point, but there's been some brutals. There's been some drive-bys. There's been the triple shooting down the street from Edward Borges University, which was definitely, as you said, racially motivated. You even said the word that you said you'd never say again. What are your thoughts? Is there some more violence out there? Is there an undercurrent or is this just the time of the year or just the time of the season where people are dissing each other and their answers aren't words. It's guns. There's this culture of, I remember when I was young, if we had words with someone, we'd just fight it out. No police were involved. We just fight it out and it was over. Now they use guns and there's been some violence that has taken place in this city, that continues to take place in this city, but now I don't want to mock anyone, but actually our murder numbers, our homicide numbers are down this year. And when I look at Jacksonville, one murder is too much. I'd say that every single time and I mean it, one murder is too much. That's one family that's affected for the rest of their lives, for the rest of their existence. They have to deal with that thought and that process. So we're working hard to deal with that. It's a culture change. I don't know whether it's the music. I don't know whether there's something else driving it, but I know there's a bit of a change in the way people do things. At the same time, we're seeing some decreases and I'm not going to say it's a tribute to just us. I think it's our community that they deal with us a little closer and talking to us a little closer about different things. And we're going to continue to work hard in March and knock on doors and talk to people and utilize technology to continue to work to try to solve these issues. And obviously some new technology has been instituted in the past few months and talked about it. What's the latest tech out there? So this is not super popular, but there's going to be some LPRs coming online. There's going to be some license plate readers. There's going to be some more cameras in some of our areas in our community. Of course we utilize ShotSpotter and we utilize Niven, which is our integrated ballistics database. Well Niven got you the San Marco. Absolutely. I know you wouldn't talk about it, but it's obvious if you can read the fingerprint off of a cartridge and it matches with Nashville, then if you have the record of the weapon owner, you've got a suspect. So there you go. And what Niven has done for us over the last few years has been amazing. So we can connect cases before that would take, I don't know, maybe a year or so to connect. Now we connect them in a few days because we have our own firearms lab. We have our own firearms examiners. We have those folks in office, in house, to be able to look at those things for us and help us to connect those cases. And then when you solve one of them, it can give you leads to the others. Now you've talked about transparency and of course part of the discussion along the campaign trail was the desire to be more transparent and folks like the late Ben Fraser and others were really pushing for civilian review boards. The city once did actually have, you'll actually once did allow citizens in to look at officer involved shooting review boards. What about the push or again, the civil citations that people have wanted? For adults. For adults, not for kids because the state attorney's in favor and that's already done for kids. The logic of the adult civil citation is to cut the backlog in the jail, try to give some people a chance to civilly handle a minor case and not have a record that dogs them as they're employed. That's what certainly I care and others have pushed for it. But you and your predecessor really have said pretty much no, although you have discussed this. And I still don't agree with it. I think that adults that do adult things deserve adult prices. So when you decide that you want to do something that you should not do, see that we have an NTA process that knows to appear and that's basically a way for an individual, say for shoplifting in a store you get caught. You have an identification. You have no failure to appears on your record. You get a ticket. And oftentimes you get that ticket. And that ticket, you go to court and the judge will withhold. It depends on the judge. But it's a way to handle minor arrests. So there's no need to re-duplicate that effort and give an adult a civil citation. Juveniles is a different story. But adults, I don't agree. Okay. And also there has been a push for a civilian review board. Period. And there had been some, I seem to remember that that was possibly not allowed in the state of Florida. A civilian review board. There are some laws that prohibit that, yes. But yet you did once allow, the Sheriff's Office did once allow civilians and journalists to be in in what we now see as a videotape that you issue on your transparency side. You could sit in and listen to officer-involved shootings and the review and was this by the book according to JSO. Will that ever return again? Probably not as it stands. And that is only because, and I'm not so much, I was a part of those processes before. And that's the administrative process. But we were taken to court and the court said that it's an administrative process and it's not open to the public, which is why it was closed. Not because the sheriff or anyone else wanted to close it. Civilian review boards are a different story. I don't believe that, first of all, I was elected and hired by the citizens of Jacksonville to oversee the day-to-day operations of the agency. And I report to the citizens of Jacksonville. And there's really no, it's not necessary to bring in an outside group to look at our practices when, one, they're open. Two, you can request anything that you want to request. And if a community and organization want to form their own board, they could do that. Just request all the information, they'd get it. And then I'm sure, I'm almost 100% sure that if they come to a conclusion and they call the press conference, they would show up and listen to them. But my job is to make sure that we pay very close attention to what's going on, act on facts, not emotionalism, not feelings, but it has to be a factual, fact-driven investigation. And I've seen too much across the country where emotions get involved. And we actually have a process when officers get disciplined, we actually have a process where there is a board, a civil service board. And oftentimes, that civil service board convenes with no policeman on it. And they will listen to a case. The undershare has to testify in that case as to why we're firing someone and they will let them have their job back. Gotcha. Well, we've got some phone calls here. So let's go to Tom on the website. And Tom has a question about civil citations. Tom, welcome. Ah, yes. Good morning. Just wanted to say that I just do not believe that city can afford to build a new jail while at the same time are innovating the stadium. So I believe the Sheriff could help us out by using these civil citations to reduce the jail population, to reduce jail cost, and just extend the life of the jail so that the city can afford to renovate the stadium and move forward with the budget that's basically responsible. All right. Thank you, Sheriff. Any response? Yeah. So you're talking about misdemeanors who don't spend any time in jail. So most of our jail is filled with individuals that are in there for pretty serious crimes. Those that are involved in smaller cases either have an NTA process or they either get released the next day. So it's not misdemeanors don't stay in jail for very long at all if they even end up being there. The jail process or the building of a new jail is a process that's much longer than, I think, the negotiations for a new stadium. We are not in any way trying to... And the jail is not about just overcrowding. There's a lot more involved in the process with the jail. There's a lot more going on at the jail and the cost of maintenance is extremely high because of the age of the jail. The jail is built up like a skyscraper, not a skyscraper, but about 12 stories when you consider the mezzanines and the middle floors and that is not conducive or not a good jail environment because of flooding problems and a lot of issues that take place inside that facility. And finally, it's over 30 years old. Our corrections officers deserve, doesn't have to be a beautiful place, doesn't have to be the best place, but our officers deserve a good place to work where they feel proud to come to work every single day. And it would allow us to probably work with a lesser staff if we build something to standards in this current standard. Well, City Council President Ron Selam is in favor of moving the jail and obviously there's been some discussion to the P Farm up on Lenny Road and others are saying next to the existing courthouse where there is some possible land. So there's possibilities there, but that's a big move of a big facility and then there's even talk of making the current jail a condo I heard somewhere, which... I haven't heard that one. Let's go to Susan in Mandarin. Susan, you've got a question here. You there, Susan? Yes, yes, thank you, sorry. My question was why can't, if someone's arrested, why can't they take their medications from their home? Why doesn't the police officer let them take their medications from home? I became aware of this when that transplant patient died and it just would have been an easy solution to take his medications from home. You know, I keep reading the tributary and other people that this has happened to. Why can't you make that change? Thank you. Thank you. It would be great to be able to do that, but the problem is you don't know what you're taking and introducing it inside the jail. Oftentimes you can find a pill bottle, medicine bottles that say one thing and it'd be something different and the risk of introducing something like that into the jail facility, it is very, very problematic. So there are policies against doing that. In most cases, in most cases, all the medication that's necessary is inside that jail. But in that situation, that medication is very difficult to get a hold of and it takes a while. So we ordered quite immediately and the judge actually worked closely to make sure that that individual was let out of jail so that he can get home and take his medication. So the problem with that is is introducing foreign substances inside the jail without our control. That's the issue. And certainly having a relative or girlfriend or boyfriend bring it in later, you also don't know what's there. The sad part was, though, that this man with the medication for the transplant apparently needed it on a regular daily basis and by the time he got out, even if it was only an overnight or two, it was too late for him, apparently. And I know you probably can't talk about that. That's apparently. That's all I can say. And obviously, there have been issues. There have been investigations by some media regarding the uptick in deaths. In fact, there was a period about a month or so ago where I think we had three in a row of incustody deaths, including this one man, that caused you to dump your existing contract with one care company and now you have NAF care coming in, which has its own issues. So any comments about your response to that question, and I think I was there when it was asked, your response was, we are aware of some of this and we're going to be right on top of it. So what can be done to make sure that NAF care sticks to the rules and hopefully we see an improvement in an aging facility of health care? So what I found, and it wasn't, there were some things going on with the other provider, what I took off. So I started looking at that very early on. And I wanted to make sure that we had the very best that we could find inside the jail. And quite frankly, that's a tough business model. Well, you did it yourself. You had to sit, J.S. actually did it yourself. And I've been told by someone who used to be there that it was really tough to do. Yeah, so we looked at that. We changed an auditor. We have an internal auditor that was there that there are some shortcomings. We changed the auditor and we have a new auditor. We have a new, and they're raving about them right now. And then we checked with some other groups that utilized them like Hillsborough was a big influence for us. Because they're close, they're in Florida and we want to know how they were really performing. So we went with them and we've been seeing a lot of success. Jail deaths, a lot of those, the uptick in jail deaths during COVID, I think we saw deaths in a lot of different places. And that's not to minimize it at all. I think we saw deaths rise. And then you have situations where drugs sometimes get introduced into your facility and do everything that you can to try to detect it. And sometimes we have overdose deaths. We have just deaths from people that are in poor health. And your department, your department has, your predecessor, I believe, actually fired one person within recent memory because drugs came into the jail. Again, it could be a few years ago. Nassau County also had some issues with some jail coming in, drugs coming into their jail. So it's not unknown. Interesting, Lanelle from Facebook, can you invite the community to come tour the jail and get a tour of the facility so they can see the situation that people, how people are existing, whether it's a JSO staff or a person. Now I actually went in there, gosh, probably 10 or 15 years ago, into the juvenile facility and it was, and I'm a reporter, I've seen this stuff. I was in the old jail too. It was an eye opener. The then PIO brought me in just on an early evening, just for like a 10 minute visit in the juvenile in the felony homicide corner. I'm looking at kids arrested for homicide. It is an eye opener and at that time there had been some questions about the chairs that are there that you... The restraint chairs. And there had been a death in the restraint chair so I was eyeballing this and seeing how visible it was. And so learn some things. Are you comfortable now that the next few years are going to be better when it comes to healthcare for inmates? I am comfortable. Until I'm not. There are some things that shouldn't happen. But I'm comfortable. This company was very forward with us with whatever issues they were having someplace else. And that's what you look for. You look for honesty. You look for them to tell you the things you need. Let's go back to the question about visits to the jail. You don't let a large group in. You can't. But yeah, people have visited the jail and done tours of the jail on different occasions. Trying to find a way we can make that happen so some of our media can come in and see. I don't know if we can bring cameras in or not. We're looking into that. But some of our media can come in and see. I don't want to listen. I'm all for Jacksonville. I'm all for our Jaguars. I'm all for all that. I'm all for the taxpayer. And I want to make sure that whatever we try to do is going to be over a longer period of time. It's not something that you snap your finger and it happens tomorrow. I'm all for Jacksonville Sheriff. Real quickly, I think it's instructive that we're already starting to parse city services with whether it's a good idea to spend a billion dollars on a stadium and we haven't even agreed about the stadium. But anyway, my question was a lot of other police departments seem to have a lot of trouble hiring new recruits to go through the police academy and reports of all kind of shortages and the way with that is that it seems like the best police officer recruit is somebody who's a little older and a little more educated and has a college degree. And I know the JSO has done that in the past. I don't know if they're doing that now. So what does it take to be a police officer now and go through the police academy? Thank you, sir. Sheriff? So the best way to see, there are so many different things. There's so many different qualifications you can have right? But we have military people that spend four, five, ten years in the military. We don't want to exclude those guys because they have real life experience in real life. And JSO is a very professional organization. The process is very long. But we're not having problems on our police side. We're having problems in corrections. We're having problems in our courthouse. Those are the biggest issues. When I took office, we had 46 vacancies in our 911 call center. We're down to single digits now. So we've improved there. We've improved with our community service officers. So our police qualifications are strong, I believe. And we are a very professional organization. I'm a little prejudiced. I guess you'd say we're well run. And we're going to continue to do that. And we attract talent because of the agency itself, in the city itself. So we're going to continue to do that. We have college degrees. If you have two years of college and four years of constant work experience, there are different things that we have in place. But there has to be some experience or college. And you want more officers. You are down X percent. I remember saying right here during the debate, you need, you say you need more officers. You've put more money in the budget. You've gotten some pushback on that. We don't need more officers. We need a better way to deploy. What are your thoughts about more officers versus smarter ways to get them into a community? So we've done the smart things. We've done the things that are necessary to get them closer into the community. We changed our districts over that hadn't been changed in almost 30 years. We went back. We looked at it and we utilized our calls for service to determine where the manpower needed to be. And you had before it was so uneven, you had 152,000 calls on our west side of town. And then in our central core, which was zoned one of the time, 72,000. So we moved that manpower and we changed those district boundaries to make sure that every zone has the same number of, every district has the same number of calls for service per year, which is about 115,000 to 118,000 calls and the same number of officers you need to sit in each district and draw them closer to where the calls for service are happening, which is closer to where our populated areas, to get closer to our community, which is very, very important. You build trust by building relationships. And that was the big news at your town hall meeting, which some people criticized as being a little too glitzy. We saw the unveiling of the new police car livery. You had 14 or 15 community questions. Some were a little softball. Some you even commented that you liked that kind of question. Well, you do that again and maybe just make it straight Q&A with the community and not lights and spotlights and unveilings. So the I like to keep my anything I do like to keep a very, you know, at least an hour and in that case, there was a lot to unfold a lot to tell the community about. And if I do it again, I should tell the community about these things. And then we ask questions. The questions were completely random. I had a feeling that I was going to get those questions because I know the questions I get when I go everywhere. So when I say I was expecting that this because it's those are questions that I receive. So we'll we're hoping to be able to do that again and will unveil some more some more information and answer as many questions as we can. I don't mind answering questions. It's perfectly fine. We've got some interesting ones here. We've got Nicole from Twitter she says the NCC accreditation review that resulted in the Duval Gel being placed on probation noted delays in providing timely medical care and delay in verifying prescriptions and delay in ordering those has that been fixed which is why I change providers. That's my answer. Okay and let's go to Phillip on line too because Phillip's got an interesting question. Phillip go for it. I guess we lost Phillip thanks to whatever provider he's using. His question was his daughter's about to get her license but unfortunately he's seeing officers breaking the law and I can tell you the members of my family have commented on police officers running reds. You're not supposed to look at your laptop while you're driving but they do tell pick up the phone and tell us I mean they have car numbers for a reason so and I'm not being smart when I tell you this I mean if there's an issue with a police officer doing something he shouldn't do pick up the phone and let us know and we'll investigate and try to try to catch it I think that's that's a very easy answer tell us a car number and we'll look into it because a police officer once pulled me over because my stereo was too loud and the light turned green and here was a rescue unit coming and I didn't hear it and he chastised me and said I'm going to tell people you know because I was a reporter I'm going to tell people you know and you're going to get embarrassed and then he said get out of here so I understood I've done many stories and even been in a rescue unit where people have pulled in front of me so I understand the dangers there and a rescue unit is like driving a loaded truck I'm sure your explorers while good are not like a Ferrari they don't handle and stop as well you've got to be careful let's go to Charlie and Jack speak Charlie what's your question Hello Sheriff you said something on I understood you the other day you said something and you kind of went into some details and if I got what you said correctly I was very impressed and very thankful you talked about our community and people were asking you about racism etc and if I remember correctly you commented and you said that our community is really tied together that you grew up here and you considered the people in Jacksonville to kind of look at each other that we kind of look at each other as brothers and sisters and we don't really have racial issues in our city we're more of a team and if you could follow up on that did I understand you correctly yeah you understood me correctly so all right thank you in my experiences around this city you know you'll there are racist issues of course there are but you know I think you find yourself in a situation where you're looking at what everyone's saying from the outside right you're listening to all the reports you know this it's almost trendy to talk about racism well I was elected in this town by majority white population right and I don't mean that in any way other than if racism was an issue like they say why would people elect a black guy to be your to be your sheriff to be the chief law enforcement officer in this county so when I look around this city and I go places in this city I see people getting along take a Jaguar game for example real racism says we're going to divide and we're going to sit in different spots but you go to a Jaguar game and you see the real reflection of what this city looks like united around one central theme the Jaguars now there was a time in our society where people could not do that I don't care what it was there was a time in our society where we couldn't we wouldn't be able to go and sit in that stadium but now people sit together they cheer together we fight together we stand together in times of trouble and I refuse to listen to those people out there that say that racism is such a bad thing in this town because it's not and I don't like when people present our city at some sort of back woods country KKK land because it's not and the people of the city are not that way there may be people in the city like that but they're overwhelmingly outnumbered by the good people in this community but yet we have seen some technically interesting and very sad ways to bring that up the banner first of all which I was freaking I was actually waiting on Sunday with the first home season game waiting for someone to pull the banner again and then we've had the projections on the side of buildings we have a state law we have a local law regarding now because that's not graffiti it doesn't deface a building but it's still there you went to Israel you learn some things and you were ready apparently on Sunday if that banner or anything else showed up so think about this how many people does it take to hang a banner two? it's a guy on a plane and you hook it up and it's done or you hang it off of the bridge it takes two two people there's a million people in Jacksonville do you think that represents everyone or just two ignorant people that want to do something stupid in our city I look at that and I say the people that were in Orlando just recently but there was a hundred if there was a hundred I don't know how many there were those hundred people don't represent the populace of that city or Jacksonville and when I see these people doing these things they're trying to one garner attention the only way they can spread their messages if our news media continues to say racism racism racism and people hate each other when in fact me and you are sitting across from each other we're different races and this is this takes place all over this community all the time it's only one difference between you and me you're a lot taller I am a lot taller and I have more gray hair right for now mind's changing but two people were arrested in Orlando under the state statute because of what they hung and and I've seen the sadness in the city in in meetings and responses to what's been done here so while only one or two may be involved hundreds thousands see it feel it and the big concern is what if ESPN or somebody shows it during a football game and the world sees it which is why we address the issue and I'm thankful that our legislatures and listen you can hang whatever you want to hang you just have to have permission for it you have to have the owner give you permission to do it so it's not a first amendment issue it's you get permission to hang it you can hang it if you don't it's criminal mischief and what about the trip to Israel you said you learned some things there here's what I learned I learned you learn about the holocaust and you see you hear the stories you read the stories but I went to Yad Vashem which is the holocaust museum and I got a chance to really listen to the stories and how impactful and how Adolf Hitler and forgive me for saying that name and how he utilized his platform to turn a group of people just by talking and communication turn a group of people into less than humans and I learned the sensitivities you know being a member being a member of the black community I know the sensitivities behind the racial names I know now I learned the sensitivities behind why our Jewish community feels the way that they feel and so it provides you with and I also learned technology and how they utilize technology to keep that keep everything together because that's a it could be really really tough but they do a really good job of it we got less than a minute just your closing thoughts what are we going to see in the next few months so you're going to see us continue to focus heavily on violent crime making community connections being transparent with our community I'm going to do that until the day that I'm no longer in office whether that be four or eight years but my plan is to make sure that everyone knows where I stand on issues I'm not afraid to stand up and talk to people about what it is we're trying to do but most of all what I want to leave here with is this I'm going to say this every single time I sit down and talk to someone Jacksonville is not a racist community there is racism but Jacksonville is not a racist community the people in Jacksonville are really good people I believe that down to my soul because I've met members of every segment of this community every segment and people just want to get along and be happy and want to see our city grow so we're going to work really hard to make sure that I do my part to make sure our city continues to grow share our TK Waters thank you very much for being here I look forward to our future conversations hopefully we can balance some of the nasty with something interesting or technological or fun or recent elephant or something and we can have a lot of fun with that