LIVE: US Attorney General Todd Blanche Announces Jacksonville as Winner of Model Cities Initiative

All right. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. So I am thrilled to be here in Jacksonville, Florida, to announce one of the winners of our Model Cities Initiative. Now, the Model Cities Initiative is just one of the many steps that The Trump administration has taken, along with the Department of Justice, to restore safety, bring down violent crime, and help America's cities from the challenges that they've faced over the past several years. And today, I am pleased to announce that the Department of Justice is investing over $73 million through the... This is all being done through the Model Cities Initiative, and it's an investment in Jacksonville, an investment in the commitment that your leaders, the people standing behind me, and the people seated here today have made to restoring and continuing on the right path of restoring law and order and making this community safer. This figure represents, from the Department of Justice side, the commitment we're ready to make to work with Jacksonville and law enforcement officials. To continue along, making Jacksonville one of the safest cities in Florida. Now the plan is to distribute this money over the course of the next three years. What you'll see over the next two or three months is the ultimate planning and coming together and working with the city officials on how to spend the money. And then starting early next year, you will see, I expect, immediate results. From the funding to this city, I want to recognize the people standing behind me today for their tireless work in bringing this to pass. Your great Florida Attorney General James Uthmeyer, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, Congressman John Rutherford, who spent four decades in this city working the streets as a sheriff and now is able to be here today watching the continued success of the city that he's lived in his entire life. And that he now represents in Washington, D.C. The Florida 4th Judicial Circuit State Attorney, Melissa Nelson, and with me from the Department of Justice overseeing this project, our Associate Attorney General, Stanley Woodward. So this came about in June of this year. The department announced the Model City Initiative. And what the plan was and what we've done is we are planning on investing nearly $300 million. $1,000,000. In just a few cities in this country who were willing to make a commitment to to work with the federal government, but really a commitment in their own city to continue to make it safe. And at the end of the day, assuming there's a will, helping there be a way. comes from funding. And so what we decided that we would do with the Department of Justice is we would find cities where there was the will and the commitment and we would help provide the way with the funding and that's exactly what we've done here in Jacksonville. So after we announced this we had 47 municipalities around the country actually apply. We whittled that down to 21 semi-finalists. Semi-finalists. And then we interviewed 11 cities, including Jacksonville, ultimately selecting four cities to receive this $300 million. And like I said, $74 million is going to go to the great city of Jacksonville. I want to talk about, just for one minute, why we selected Jacksonville. It's because of their compelling, whole-of-government approach and vision for targeting violent crime and enhancing public safety across jurisdictional and ideological lines, and because of our belief in their ability to deliver results and follow through on that vision. Now, in Jacksonville, as many people here know, and as the men and women of law enforcement standing back there are all too acutely aware of, for nearly 20 years, Jacksonville was the murder capital of Florida. Now, in 2024, Jacksonville proudly lost that nickname. And in 2025, the city achieved the lowest crime rate in nearly 30 years. From 2023 to 2025, you saw murder rates go down by 38%, robberies go down by 14%, aggravated assaults go down by 21%. But at the same time, as much progress as has been made over the past several years in this city, the residents of Jacksonville are enduring a murder rate that is about three times the national average. So we are here today to support the great strides that have been made under Attorney General Utmeyer, Sheriff Waters, and the folks standing behind me over the past several years, and to lend support to those efforts. which has led to the steady increase in violent crime that I just mentioned. So I want to thank them for their leadership and I hope the message is coming through to criminals in this city that violent behavior will not be tolerated, it won't be tolerated by the men and women standing behind me and at the back here, and it won't be just to be tolerated by the Department of Justice in Washington D.C. So congratulations. Thank you for the hard work, for everybody that worked hard to make this happen in Jacksonville. This is one of the few times in my job as Attorney General that I only come bearing good news. And so it's a great honor and privilege to be here today. And with that, I would like to invite your great Attorney General to say a few words. Thank you. Thank you, Attorney General. This $74 million is going to be a great help to a city that very much believes in public safety rule of law and making sure that criminals are held accountable. I don't need to tell the law enforcement officers from this region how big the improvements have been. And a lot of that is thanks to the great sheriff behind me who's done an outstanding job. A city that was known as dangerous, that had a lot of problems, to see the murder rate drop about 40%, just a few years, is absolutely incredible. But it's not rocket science. Sheriff Waters, our other law enforcement, they understand that they've got to catch bad guys. Our prosecutors, our statewide prosecutors, our state attorneys here in the great state of Florida, they understand that we've got to prosecute cases. We don't believe in early release. We don't believe in overly lenient sentences. You don't see people out again and again and again, as we've seen in other cities across the country, where ultimately you end up with some of the most barbaric, heinous crimes. We're not doing that here in the free state of Florida. Jacksonville did not get lucky with this grant. Jacksonville earned it. Earned it by working hard to keep people safe. As with any big city there's going to continue to be hurdles and challenges but with this grant and with the commitment to public safety and the great law enforcement officers we've got we will continue to move in the right direction and we will save lives. So thank you General Blanche and the entire Department of Justice for trusting us with this pilot program. We're going to continue to drive record low crime and hopefully keep getting some federal dollars for this. There's a lot of issues, a lot of policy discussions. Many things out there for debate, many improvements to be made, but if you don't keep our families safe, the rest of it doesn't matter. That always has to be number one. I'm here in Florida. We've proven that time again. My office is statewide prosecution. We've doubled our prosecution levels here in just a little over a year and a half. 55% more convictions, three times the number of takedowns of dangerous drug traffickers, four times the penalties handed out to child predators in just a little over a year. That's not going to change. We believe in rule of law. We prosecute to the fullest. We put bad guys away. So thanks for letting us be here. Thank you for the grant. We will not let you down. So esteemed guests, valued partners, colleagues, and friends, thank you all for helping us celebrate this monumental win for the people of our great city. The U.S. Department of Justice's selection for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office as one of four agencies for its Model Cities Initiative after nationwide consideration marks a very pivotal moment for our agency and our city. Over the past few years Jacksonville has enjoyed historic declines in crime far surpassing the national statistics. In 2024 our murder numbers dropped to the lowest in modern recorded history. This year we are on track to mark yet again a historic low. This decline didn't happen by chance. Proactive policing, doubling down on our violence reduction strategies, a focus on engaging with our community, and transparent communication are improving public safety here in Jacksonville. Now, people across the country are getting to see that something very special is happening here in Jacksonville, a model for other cities to replicate. This selection stands as a powerful example of what local, state, and federal partners can achieve when working together for a common mission. And through this opportunity, we'll do great, great work together. I'm confident of that. Through this investment, we'll expand our training techniques and equipment so that our officers have advanced education consistent with best practices. We'll build upon existing drone and counter-drone programs, ensuring that we have technological tools for quick response and intelligence gathering in the largest landmass city in the contiguous United States of America. We'll create 40 new sworn officer positions so that we can have a larger law enforcement footprint in a city that is growing in population year over year. We will augment our real-time crime center. So the law enforcement makes informed, tactical, and investigative decisions based on most current data and information to best serve Jacksonville citizens. We are deeply grateful to President Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and the Department of Justice for this generational investment in our community's safety. It's an investment that will allow us to build on our success, strengthen our investigative capabilities, and innovate our technological assets. Through the Model Cities Initiative, we will, together, make strides to keep our children, our grandchildren, and every member of this city safe many years into the future. Jacksonville will maintain a data-driven approach to strategies and resources under this initiative. Look around us. You can see construction and expansion around Jacksonville. Jacksonville is growing into a business, a hub of business, industry, and culture. The safety of our city and our citizens must be woven into the fabric of this growth. My agency will continue to work shoulder-to-shoulder with our partners to ensure Jacksonville is the safest city in America. Our agency is deeply honored and ready to show the return of this investment. To our partners, we cannot achieve our important goals without your support. To the men and women of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, thank you. Your tireless, grassroots work to protect and serve have ensured our recognition as a model city. And I thank you all for being here. I'm very, very grateful, and I'm very grateful to you, A.G. Blanch. Attorney General Uthmeyer, and now I'd like to introduce one of my mentors, congressman, but most of all, Sheriff John Rutherford. Good morning, everyone. It is truly an honor to be here and celebrate this momentous day, and I want to start by first recognizing you, Sheriff Waters, and all the men and women of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office here, and the incredible work that you are continuing to do. We've seen historic reductions in crime and those reductions represent saved lives, families protected, and safer neighborhoods. And that's a credit to Sheriff Waters' leadership and the officers who put that uniform on every day. Sheriff Waters understands that fighting crime takes more than just making arrests. How many times have we said you can't arrest your way out And so he understands that it takes strong partnerships and a proactive approach to policing and partnerships like we have here with General Blanch. We appreciate you, sir. And whether it's working with North Florida Haida and federal partners to get dangerous drugs off the street or partnering with First Coast Crime Stoppers and the community to help solve crimes, JSO is bringing people together to get results. And this funding will help build on that success. The challenges facing law enforcement, I can tell you, are constantly changing. Criminals are finding new ways to use technology, and our officers need the tools to stay one step ahead of them. That's why investments in advanced technologies and investigative capabilities are so vitally important. Jacksonville is demonstrating To the rest of our country, what strong leadership, good police work, and federal partnerships can accomplish. Having served as a sheriff myself, I know how important it is to have the resources and funding that you need to get the job done. And I'll mention one other thing that I think is unique about Jacksonville, General Blanche, and that is we are a consolidated government. Our sheriff is not appointed by the mayor, he doesn't work for the mayor, he doesn't work for the city council. He works for the men and women of this city. He works for the citizens and he works to keep them safe. And so our sheriffs know their communities and they know what it takes to keep them safe and our job is to make sure that they have the resources to get it done. And I'm pleased to see President Trump and Attorney General Blanch's commitment to supporting the great work being done here in Jacksonville, and I share that commitment to making sure our law enforcement agencies have the resources that they need. I look forward to continuing that work along Sheriff Waters and our next speaker who I'm very proud to introduce, Melissa Nelson, our state attorney. Thank you Congressman Rutherford. Today is a great day for our city. Credit to Sheriff Waters. And his team who competed for and won this very important and significant award, an award that recognizes the good work being done here in our city and the potential for an even safer Jacksonville. Here in this city, we take our commitment to public safety seriously. Nearly 10 years ago, we restructured our state attorney's office around one of our most important responsibilities, and that is to fight violent crime. We designed a specialized unit and staffed it with prosecutors whose mission was, and remains today, to incapacitate our city's most violent offenders. This unit was aptly named for what it does, targeted prosecution. JSO's application for the Model Cities Grant expressly recognized the success and value Of this specialized unit and that recognition underscores something all of us up here know to be true. The very best police work that you all can do standing alone is not enough to guarantee enduring public safety. Law enforcement can identify a violent criminal. They can arrest that criminal, but that arrest is not the finish line. As Attorney General Todd Blanch well understands from his own prosecutorial experience, a successful prosecution is required to ensure that that dangerous criminal is removed from our streets. Prosecutors are, and there's many here today, a necessary component of the public safety equation. And Sheriff Waters also knows this to be true. Under his leadership, we're celebrating today a remarkable decline in violent crime. And behind these declining crime statistics is something far more important. Fewer families devastated by violence. And as this trend becomes hopefully our city's new reality, it also means more people who live here and move here can live their lives in safety. This progress did not happen by accident and it did not happen overnight. It is the result of both proactive policing coupled with aggressive prosecution and our shared commitment to making sure that both work together. This strategy actually looks past just an arrest or just a conviction. It's about disrupting cycles of violence and delivering lasting safety that our city and our citizens deserve. Every American deserves to feel and to be safe. Thank you to President Trump, thank you to Attorney General Blanch and the Department of Justice for recognizing that public safety should be and deserves to be a national priority and for making the decision to invest in our city. Thank you to all of you, the men and women in law enforcement who wake up every day and come to work to make our city safer and to protect us. And thank you to our prosecutors here today who do the same. With this federal partnership, we intend to continue to lead the state of Florida in driving violent crime down. With that, I'd like to introduce Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward to close out our remarks today. Well, thank you all. I echo what everyone said. Public safety is not controversial. Public safety is something that we should expect from our communities. And President Trump has directed The Department of Justice to ensure that public safety is achieved. And we've achieved that in these almost first two years. We spent some time talking about how the murder rate in our country is the lowest level that it's been in over 100 years. But now, after President Trump's first year and his second term, we know that not just murder rates are down. Crime is down in every category that the Department of Justice measures. And that's because of a fairly simple phenomenon. When we bring federal law enforcement partners, like the FBI, to towns and communities across the country to work with state and local law enforcement, like here in Jacksonville, it turns out that public safety isn't controversial. And it turns out that the sheriffs across this country welcome the opportunity to partner with federal law enforcement to make our communities safer. And I'll say another thing about that because one of the most sobering parts Of being the number three ranking official at the Department of Justice has been learning that the work that I personally do really doesn't directly help with the thing that is most important to me in my life, my children. You see, I have four young children, 11, 9, 7, and 4. And I have come to learn that the people who keep them safe are those men and women out there behind you. They're the ones that are ensuring my children's school are safe. They're the ones ensuring that on their walk to school in the morning, they're safe. That when they're at the mall or the movie, they're safe. And so under the leadership of Attorney General Blanche, we set out to make sure that we would get the resources that every community needs in order to achieve public safety. And your sheriff, ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate what Attorney General Blanche said. Your sheriff did earn this award. He was in my office within days of us announcing that we were going to give this award. He was in my office asking, what could this city do? To get this award and he has worked with us over the last few months to do it and now it is my distinct pleasure to present the sheriff with a check. It won't bounce for over 73 million dollars. Look, Jacksonville has great responsibility because we want to do this in every city in this country. But we don't have the resources to write a check in every city in the country. And so when you succeed, when we're back here a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, to highlight the successes of this city, we will show the country and the world that public safety is not controversial. Thank you. All right. Thanks, everybody. And congratulations again to everybody here, the law enforcement folks that are here in the back, the prosecutors that are here, and the other members of government that are here on a great day for Jacksonville. I'm happy to take some questions either to me or other people if anybody has any questions. Yes, so the question is how the funds will be used, and it depends. So the whole point of this partnership was for folks like Stanley and me to not make the decisions on how... Jacksonville needs to spend money so long as we're partnering together and so yes so technology so look budgets matter budgets are very important and so when when the sheriff has to decide whether to hire two more two more officers or to invest in technology and he knows that those officers need help he knows those officers are working doubles and working thanksgiving and and He has to make a tough decision. And so what we are trying to do with these grants is not make that decision tough. It's say, okay, well, we can pay for the technology. We can pay for the upgrades in whether it's technology in the vehicles, whether it's technology to help communicate better with other law enforcement agencies around the state and around the country and even around the world. That's what the point is of this money. It's an infusion of cash over three years to be used in wherever Jacksonville needs it to further the goals that... That Jacksonville has of bringing the crime rates down and so you heard this is going to result in more men and women supporting these guys on the streets. So it's there's a practical reality of budgets that that need an infusion of cash to keep up with the criminals and to keep up with technology. And that's what the goal of this program is. Just to speak up a little bit, please, thanks. Tariq Mayer, Channel 4. You mentioned that Jacksonville will see immediate results next year. What do those results look like for people who live here? Well, so if you, and we talked about this a lot, but one of the reasons why we picked Jacksonville and why this partnership we know will work is because we're not coming in and saying, this is a disaster, we're here to clean up. This city's been doing a great job for several years. Your sheriff... Your prosecutors have been, we've been watching a very historic violent crime rate come sliding down. And so if you are a citizen in this city and you're demanding results from the money, what I would expect if I were a citizen is to see those results continue to go down. And so if every community, the high crime areas of Jacksonville, where there's a lot of focus from law enforcement, those communities should continue to see crime rates, fewer murders this year. than there were last year and next year than this year. And so that's the immediate effect. I do think practically you're going to see. The sheriff being able to spend money that he doesn't have in ways that he couldn't spend it today. And this money is here, right? So we say it's over three years, but we're spending the next couple of weeks finalizing where the money should go. And then the money's going. So when we talk about immediacy, this isn't a promise that we will pay you later. It's a, where are we going to spend our money now? And how are you going to use it? And so that's what I mean when I say say, immediate results, that's what we're talking about. You can play with this. If you're asking whether I support law enforcement reading license plates, yes, as every single citizen in this country should. I mean, if you've ever been a victim of a crime and somebody who committed the crime drove away, I promise you, you would love for any law enforcement officer to say, you're in luck. We have a license plate reader and we found that vehicle. So there's a lot of misinformation around about Flock, but make no mistake. Privacy is extraordinarily important as Americans, and so I am not suggesting that privacy doesn't matter to the contrary, but what I am suggesting is that the technology around license plate readers does not affect the privacy of American citizens. It may someday, and if the technology advances to where we need to take a look at it and figure out a way to address and draw it back, we should do that. But when it comes to just to public safety, the ability for those men and women. To be able to have a technology that allows them to see the type of vehicle and the vehicle that just left a rape or a murder or a robbery is something that there is not a citizen in this country that doesn't want to have happen, especially if it happens to them. So yes, I very much support that technology and I think that every city that has used it has seen its success over and over and over again. I was wondering if you were wanting to see a specific milestone or a specific numerical kind of reduction by the end of this meeting. So there's not milestones where I'm now I'm not here to grade your sheriff. He knows what he's doing. OK, so when we talk about what we expect. It's not what we, what Stanley Woodward, Todd Blanche expects. It's what Jacksonville expects. And so when we talk about coming back here, which we will come back here, I fully expect it will be to celebrate the work that's been happening over the year, 18 months, two years, since we put this project into place. So we are not standing over Jacksonville with a ruler grading them. We are working together. It's a partnership. It really is a partnership, and that's the goal of this. It's not the Department of Justice saying you have to do A, B, and C. It's the Department of Justice working with your leadership in the best way that we can work together. Again, there's a lot of ways to spend money when it comes to law enforcement, and so different cities will have different priorities, and those priorities are not something that we want to decide. We want the sheriff, we want your prosecutors to be the ones that decide that. All right, thank you guys very much and thanks again to the folks behind me. Thank you all for standing out in the heat. I appreciate you guys back there. Thank you very much and have a great day.