John Rutherford fires back at Alvin Brown crime claims

The Lenny Curry and Alvin Brown campaigns disagree about a lot of issues, with a central one being public safety and crime. The Curry campaign sent out mailers this week spotlighting the Republican’s public safety plan and reminding Duval voters that Sheriff John Rutherford backs Curry in this month’s election. Before that, though, Fabien Levy of the Brown campaign made claims that left the sheriff incredulous.

“The truth is, under Mayor Alvin Brown’s leadership, overall crime is at a 42-year low and is even 10 percent less than when he entered office. Mayor Brown has increased the sheriff’s budget by $48 million over the last four years, bringing the sheriff’s annual budget to nearly $400 million — close to 40 percent of the city’s overall general fund budget. The current budget has put 3,000 officers on Jacksonville streets, while the mayor has supported additional grants to hire more officers and called on the sheriff’s department to hire more cops with the existing budget,” Levy said, adding that “Mayor Brown is providing the sheriff the necessary resources to fight crime, while also focusing on prevention and intervention to ensure it never happens.”

The impression created by the statements is that the mayor and Rutherford have presented a unified front against crime, especially violent crime, in Jacksonville. Some take issue with that impression, most notably, the sheriff himself.

“I guarantee that I’ve met with the Mayor less than 10 times in three years,” Rutherford said, adding that “we meet with his underlings from time to time.”

The sheriff takes issue with Levy’s assertions on crime in Jacksonville.

“Crime has gone up since 2011,” he said, asserting that violent crime especially has gone up increasingly as the Brown administration has progressed, with an 11.6% increase in 2014 being the direct “result of cuts to this office.”

Rutherford repudiated Levy’s claim that there are “3,000 officers on Jacksonville streets.”

“He’s talking 3,000 officers — there are 3,000 employees, not officers. The highest count that we got to was 1,750,” said Rutherford, and that was in 2011, when the Jacksonville Journey was at peak effectiveness.

“After Brown took office in 2011, JSO lost 147 police and 92 Community Service Office positions,” the sheriff said. “All of those have been lost since Mayor Brown came into office.”

Rutherford likewise disputed the claim that the Brown administration has given him a budget with which he can work.

“Ninety-five percent of the budget increase was related to the unfunded liability” of the pension situation, and the other $4.4 million went to Central Services for building maintenance, the sheriff said, saying that “any claim this mayor makes” otherwise is false.

“They came to me last year. I told them that I need 40 police officers and 40 community service officers. They put it in the budget — borrowed $235 million in one-time money,” he said, then asking rhetorically, “What are you going to do next year?”

“The mayor supports new police but won’t fund them,” Rutherford said of Brown’s budgets. “One had an extraordinary lapse of $29 miliion, and the other two tried to borrow the money.”

In contrast to this fractured relationship with the incumbent, Rutherford said he found John Peyton, the previous mayor, easier to work with.

“We met with John many times,” the sheriff said. He was able to persuade Peyton to provide the resources needed — a process helped along, Rutherford said, by bringing in an outside consultant, which deemed the JSO to be “efficient, effective, [yet] understaffed.”

Those days of the Peyton administration and the Jacksonville Journey are a memory for  Rutherford now, who observed that “our violent crime is not down. It is up significantly.”