The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) opened a substation in the Butler Shopping Center District, located at Butler Town Center on the west side of Gainesville.
“[ACSO] can serve this county better now,” Deborah Butler, owner and president of Butler Enterprises, said in an interview.
Sheriff Emery Gainey said the Butler Plaza substation is special because it is a public-private partnership: Butler donated the space, so other taxpayers do not have to foot the bill for this location.
“Deputies can provide services here to citizens,” Gainey said in an interview, “restore property and evidence that again, keeps them from having to drive all the way across town and restore that, and by the time they get back they’ve lost an hour or an hour and a half out of their zone.”
Gainey said he and Butler have known each other for 40 years, and Butler expressed admiration for what Gainey has done in the community, both for his 25 years of work with ACSO before he served in the Attorney General’s Office and Marion County Sheriff’s Office, and for what he is doing now.
Alachua County Commissioner Mary Alford and Eric Godet, president and CEO of the Greater Gainesville Chamber of Commerce, both attended the ribbon cutting.
Like the new precinct ACSO recently opened in Hawthorne, Gainey said this substation will not initially be fully staffed with regular hours. It has a small garage and office, and deputies can use it to meet with citizens, write up reports and shorten their response and turnaround times.
Gainey said he plans to have fully-staffed precincts throughout the county with regular 8 a.m.-5 p.m. business hours when staffing allows. The sheriff’s office had 248 open positions when Gainey came on in September. Since then, he has hired 104 new employees, but not all stayed, so the net gain is 66.
“A lot of the counties our size or larger have had precincts for years,” Gainey said. “And our ultimate goal is to have larger, independent single-station precincts. But for now, this is a good interim way to do it.”
Having the Butler Town Center location is another step, getting more ACSO presence on the west side of town where most of Gainesville’s population lives.
Butler also said she has felt that many felons and vagrants try to take advantage of her property, which is why she has her own security force and part of why she maintains a strong relationship with local law enforcement.
Read Hayes, a research scientist and criminologist at the University of Florida’s College of Engineering, said he has helped work on an interactive dashboard displaying crime clusters in communities. He said though the Butler Shopping District is not particularly unsafe, people choose a place to commit a crime for specific reasons and the Butler Shopping District is one of the highest-traffic shopping centers in the state.
“It’s pretty safe,” Hayes said in an interview, “but we can make it safer.”