by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
The St. Augustine area is booming and one man who knows as much as anyone about it is David Shoar. He’s in charge of keeping the peace.
About 85 Realtors and affiliates attended the St. Augustine/St. Johns County Board of Realtors quarterly meeting last month to hear St. Augustine police chief discuss the area.
“We have a tremendous amount of growth and nobody knows that better than you folks,” said Shoar. “We are going through a tremendous metamorphosis in this community and we are going to be experiencing some issues that we haven’t experienced in many years or have never experienced.”
Shoar said one of their biggest challenges is resource constraints.
“We need to do more with less and it’s going to get worse,” he said. “We are looking at our resources and get a little smarter at deploying those resources.”
Some of the other challenges they are facing are the threat of terrorist attacks.
“It’s a tough issue and we can’t turn our back on it,” he said.
Other issues the city is facing is information technology and workforce stability.
“The last challenge is crime,” said Shoar. “We are like any other growing community. We are going to have problems and we do have problems.
“The good news is that in St. Johns County we have had a precipitous drop in violent crimes in the last 10 years. In the City of St. Augustine, we have had an 81 percent drop in violent crimes in the last 10 years.
“The reason we have that is because of the relationship that we have with the community, the fact that we watch out for each other and we are a healthy community.”
Shoar predicted that St. Augustine would eventually have the lowest crime rate in the state — at least, that’s the city’s goal.
Quality of life issues also are present in the St. Augustine.
Shoar said years of building houses, bars, hotel and schools right on top of each other have created an eclectic mix in the neighborhoods and he said it presents a huge challenge.
Shoar talked about several new programs that the police department has initiated that will help with the challenges the city faces.
A marine unit has been started to help police the waters surrounding St. Augustine.
“We have a lot of waterfront property inside the city and there is a tremendous need there for some oversight on the waterways,” he said. “We now have a boat and a part-time marine unit.”
One of the other programs is the career criminal program.
“We learned that a very small percentage of our people commit a disproportionate amount of the crime,” said Shoar. “One of the challenges is when someone is coming out of prison and we know that they are coming back to our community. We try to bring all the resources to help that person stay out of trouble.
“It has been a tremendous benefit. It is an intensive way to approach it and a smart way to look at trying to solve some problems.”
They also have a community issues response team, which polices areas on bicycles and on foot.
“If we have some community issues in a particular neighborhood, we put this team together and they go into that neighborhood, business district or area of a particular business profession,” said Shoar. “They come up with solutions with the people experiencing the problems and they implement them.”
Another program they have really started utilizing is the professional standards unit.
“Every profession has to police itself,” he said. “If you have a bad Realtor out there, it’s not the Realtor that takes the hit, it is the real estate profession and it’s the same with law enforcement.”
The professional standards unit monitors the officers and provides a quality assurance mechanism.
If a complaint has been received on an officer, they look into it and take action if needed.
It’s working — a recent poll indicated that the citizens of St. Augustine are pretty happy with the police department.
Shoar said they have started looking at the police department as a business to make sure they are doing what constituents want them to do and providing quality service.
“They are questions we really never asked of this profession until about five or 10 years ago,” he said. “We are starting to model ourselves after the business model and use words like ‘benchmarking’ and ‘customer satisfaction.’
“We did a citizen survey last year of 1,000 members of the community. We got about a 38 percent response rate. We asked some really great questions and 95 percent said we were doing great, but we also learned some weaknesses that we have to work on. We are all about quality and improving our quality.”
Shoar suggested visiting www.staugustinepd.com for crime statistics and other information about the police departments involvement with the community.