When Ruth Hanford spotted a strange woman drinking alcohol in her yard, she rushed to dial 911. She was used to unhoused people wandering near her home in downtown Gainesville, but after being attacked in the past, she didn’t want to take any chances.
By the time Gainesville Police Department officers arrived almost two hours later, 45-year-old Hanford said her fears were realized, and the woman had attacked her.
“She hit me so hard a crown came out of my tooth,” Hanford said.
According to data from the FBI Crime Data Explorer, GPD had two employees per 1,000 Gainesville residents in 2023, which is below both the nationwide and state average of 3.5. The ideal number of law enforcement officers to cover the Gainesville area is around 300. Currently, GPD has about 285 officers.
It wasn’t Hanford’s only encounter with police in the past year, and her experiences with officers have varied greatly. While it took officers almost a full two hours to reach her in May, she said assistance was much faster when a man broke into her home a few months before, even though the 911 operator hung up on her and she had to call again.
“Ultimately, the cops that showed up for that did show up in a timely like manner,” she said. “I want to say that those were three of the best cops I've ever dealt with in the Gainesville Police Department, and they were able to solve it.”
Hanford called her street a “Bermuda Triangle” of crime, where she’s seen alleged drug dealings and prostitution outside her window. While it’s improved in the past few months, she said there’s always an ebb and flow.
“I don’t feel like I can walk around in my own neighborhood safely,” she said. “I don't have any faith that if something were to happen and I were to call, that they [GPD] would show up in any sort of meaningful sort of way. I have no faith that 911 can do their job.”
Some GPD officers have been wonderful, Hanford said, but others gave her a very different impression. Her neighborhood has requested extra patrols in response to the high crime, but it only happens intermittently, she said.
“The song and dance I get from every Gainesville Police Department [officer] [is], ‘Oh, well, there's only eight or 10 of us,’ so they've been very clear that they're very short-staffed,” she said.
GPD has more sworn officers this year than it has the past several years, with only 16 vacancies, Sgt. Shelly Postal said.
Since the recent improvement in staff levels, Postal said GPD has seen improvements in response time to reported crimes. Despite the vacancies, all zones in Gainesville are covered with at least one officer, she said.
“If we were 100% staffed, some of those zones… may be staffed with two or three officers rather than just one,” she said.
The number of law enforcement officers at GPD has dropped steadily from 2020 to 2023, with a 16% decrease in personnel over the four-year period, according to data from the FBI Crime Data Explorer.
Civilian employees, which include full-time agency personnel like clerks, radio dispatchers, meter attendants, stenographers, jailers, correctional officers and mechanics, dropped more slowly at a 13% decrease, bringing GPD’s total employees from 367 to 311 from 2020 to 2023.
GPD has also seen a decrease in employees due to officer retention, which is often due to officers retiring after spending a full 25 years on the force, Postal said — 2024 was the first year GPD had more new hires than retirements.
While GPD does deal with vacancies, it doesn’t affect the IT staff and 911 operators sorting through calls, Postal said. Operators organize calls based on priority for officer response.
“Some people can become a little bit upset about that depending on what the situation is,” she said. “But anything that's high-priority, we're going to obviously go to immediately.”
Higher-priority reports include medical emergencies, armed disturbances and anyone in immediate distress, she said.
However, 38-year-old Brittany, who requested to keep her last name omitted in fear of retaliation from GPD, said her experiences with the agency in emergency situations has been wildly different.
Brittany, who works as a nurse at UF Health Shands Hospital, said she’s dealt with violent patients attacking hospital staff over her years working in healthcare. In an incident about four years ago, a patient caused significant damage to another person, she said, but GPD officers refused to arrest him.
The dismissiveness she’s received from GPD about incidents scares her, Brittany said, especially when threats from violent patients aren’t uncommon.
“They’ll look you dead in the eye and say, ‘If I ever see you outside of here, I’m going to kill you,’” she said.
Brittany has also had encounters with GPD in her personal life, which left her unsatisfied, she said. Her former partner ran over her foot with his truck about four years ago, and despite his criminal history, she said nothing ever came of the report.
The officer who assisted her said her foot looked fine and drove off without getting details about the incident from her, she said. The officers did nothing to help her, even when she called to follow up on the incident, she said.
The lack of responsiveness is also common when healthcare workers are attacked, she said. Nothing usually comes of the reports she and her coworkers make to the police.
She understands the department is short-staffed, and said low staffing is also a frequent problem in hospitals. However, Brittany said it doesn’t excuse the dismissiveness she’s seen on many occasions.
“We need to have law and order to keep things going,” she said. “That's not the feeling anybody gets from GPD, at times.”
Contact Kaysheri Haffner at khaffner@alligator.org. Follow her on X @kaysheri_h.
Kaysheri Haffner is a second-year journalism major and the Criminal Justice reporter for the Alligator. When she's not on the clock, she can be found reading a book or working on a creative writing project.
