The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) held a grand opening for its new precinct in Hawthorne on Tuesday. Sheriff Emery Gainey said he hopes for the sub-station to help strengthen ACSO’s connection with the Hawthorne community. 

“Having a presence here, I think makes [the community relationship] better,” Gainey said in an interview. “Because it shows that we’re coming to the community that we’re serving, in this case Hawthorne, to have that firsthand presence in addition to the normal patrols that we do, and the school resource officers that we have here.” 

ACSO is Hawthorne’s only law enforcement presence, and Mayor Jacquelyn Randall said this will be the first time the town has had a physical law enforcement location since her mother was mayor. 

“Their presence alone I think is definitely going to change the nature of the safety component that people will feel, knowing that they’re here,” Randall said in an interview. “For me, it makes me feel like they’re right up the street from my home now. And that’s a feeling that I’ve never had, and I’m a lifelong resident here.” 

Randall said she is excited for the sub-station to lead to shorter response times for Hawthorne residents. Gainey said emergency calls are sorted by priority, and the sheriff’s office is still low enough on staff that it will not be able to staff the sub-station full-time, so response times may not be impacted in every case. However, Gainey said his ultimate goal for the sub-station is to have it fully staffed on weekdays. 

The sheriff also encouraged residents at the grand opening Tuesday to keep ACSO updated if they call in a situation, then it changes. If someone makes a call for a low-priority problem, then someone is injured or endangered, he said they should call it in again so ACSO can move it up the priority list. 

“Let the prioritization be ours,” Gainey said. “We’ll determine if we need to respond right away, or we can handle something else. But I can assure you of this: if we don’t know about it, we won’t respond.” 

The new sub-station is located in the Hawthorne City Hall building, and while it is not large, Gainey said it will serve for crime prevention, interviews for victims of crimes, theft reports and most other interactions that would normally require a citizen to travel to the main station in Gainesville. 

The new Hawthorne precinct is one of several locations Gainey hopes to bring to the county. He said he wants to have a sub-station in all the small communities in the county, such as Micanopy, Newberry and Archer. Gainey said ACSO is actively working on getting precincts in all those communities because they each have a unique, close-knit atmosphere that a sub-station helps to penetrate. 

“It gives us the opportunity to provide services to the community, in the community,” Gainey said. 

Randall said that while ACSO has always been supportive and responsive to Hawthorne, the sub-station takes the relationship to the next level. She said Gainey, who took over as Sheriff in October, has already been immediately responsive to her town’s requests and priorities. 

The new sub-station was crowded with ACSO staff, city officials and Hawthorne residents at Tuesday night’s grand opening, and Randall said she hopes citizens left the meeting knowing that ACSO’s partnership and presence is real. 

“[I want people to know] we’re not just setting up a home for them, but that they’re here,” Randall said. “And they’re here in real time, in real life, ready to face real issues that we have in Hawthorne.”