RECORD SPIN: BLAMES SHERIFF DAVID SHOAR's RECRUITING PROBLEMS ON GOOD ECONOMY, DOES NOT MENTION MICHELLE O'CONNELL CASE! THAT DAWG WON'T HUNT

1. Would you bet your career on working for SHERIFF DAVID SHOAR? Really? Recruiting is "a challenge,” St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR says, blaming the good economy. Really?  That dawg won't hunt.

2.  SHERIFF SHOAR has covered up the September 2, 2010 Michelle O'Connell shooting in the home of Deputy JEREMY BANKS, who is still employed by SHOAR (who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994).

3. S/HOAR said he would bet his law enforcement career on JEREMY BANKS' innocence. No one believes that Michelle O'Connell committed suicide. Lawmen know that guns don't recoil forward.

4. Your sins have found you out, Sheriff. People with options don't want to work for YOU. They won't bet THEIR careers on your BAD judgment.

5. It's about YOU, Sheriff S/HOAR -- we in the "reality based community" know that you Sheriff SHOAR, are an addlepated, arrogant, retaliatory bully with brain boogers, untethered to the truth, devoid of ethics, heartless, petty, barbarous and cruel.  You said a grieving family "molested" Michelle's body by authorizing a competent autopsy, which found her jaw was broken -- facts overlooked by your maladroit Medical Examiner.

6. It's time for Sheriff S/HOAR to go.  To federal prison.

Here's the latest Sheriff S/HOAR spin from the St. Augustine Record:


HELP WANTED: Rebounding economy, low unemployment, high cost of living create struggles for recruiting






By Jared Keever
Posted Jun 10, 2018 at 6:15 AM
Updated at 5:31 AM
St. Augustine Record

Local public officials, particularly in law enforcement agencies, say their recruiting efforts are starting to battle headwinds, and cite St. Johns County’s low unemployment rate among a number of possible contributing factors.

“It’s a challenge,” St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar told The Record on Wednesday.

Shoar has made two appearances in recent days where he mentioned the struggle.

The first came Tuesday when he asked county commissioners for a modest bump of 2.8 percent to his budget for the next fiscal year and told them why he wasn’t asking for as much as he once hinted he might.

“If I was going to tell you what I need to tell you, I’d probably tell you I need more deputies; I need more resources,” Shoar said. “I’m not going to ask for that in my budget presentation this year. ... We have had some challenges this past year in just getting up to where we are already approved in terms of strength in terms of personnel.”

He said much the same thing the next day when he spoke at a joint meeting of commissioners and members of the St. Johns County School Board who had gathered to discuss the possibility of adding 15 more deputies to the force to serve as school resource officers and bring the county into compliance with legislation passed in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland earlier this year that left 17 dead.

In a phone interview after the meeting, Shoar said it was possible that the county’s unemployment rate, which was pegged at 2.7 percent in April and has consistently been among the lowest in the state in recent years, had something to do with the challenges, but also pointed to the growing complexities of a law enforcement officer’s job and the “heat” that he thinks is sometimes unfairly heaped upon the profession as contributing factors as well.

“I am not sure if that doesn’t play a role in this,” he said.

That’s not to say that he isn’t hiring, but he said that because the hiring and training process can take months before a deputy is on the road, it makes filling needs in a growing county, while also keeping up with retirements and attrition, more difficult.


“I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a major emergency,” Shoar said. “But it’s not what it was, that’s for sure.”

The prospect of having to layer in a slew of new deputies to fulfill school needs isn’t expected to make things any easier either, for anyone.

All 67 counties in the state have been looking for ways to fulfill the new law’s requirement of having an armed safety officer of some sort in every school building, and many are opting to hire new sworn officers to do that.

“That kind of draw on the available pool of applicants that’s out there will definitely hurt smaller departments like ours,” St. Augustine Police Chief Barry Fox said on Thursday.

And Fox said he was already struggling to keep his ranks filled after having received the nod from his commissioners last year to hire two more officers to help his department respond to a panhandling problem in the downtown area.

“I’ve never filled those positions, yet,” he said. “I am hoping to fill those this time around.”

While he had managed to hire for several of the open positions he had last year and was able to get the bike mounted officers back downtown that some said they missed, Fox has also lost three officers since.

One went to another agency, one retired and one didn’t make it through the training process, he said.

Fox said he is hopeful he can get all five of those positions filled with the next round of hiring, but noted that, because he is looking for “unique” candidates able adapt to the challenges of policing in a community that relies so heavily on tourism, doing so may be difficult from a pool of qualified candidates that seems to be growing smaller.

Law enforcement agencies aren’t the only ones starting to notice the pinch.

St. Johns County Fire Rescue spokesman Deputy Chief Jeremy Robshaw told The Record that his department just got through filling eight positions and officials noticed a slight drop in applications, though it wasn’t anything particularly alarming.

“We had less applications this round than we had before, but we still had 50 to 60 applicants,” he said.

Robshaw said that typically he would expect to see the number of applicants top 100 for such a period, but pointed out that this recent round of hiring coincided with a recruitment period for Jacksonville Fire and Rescue, and said that might have had something to do with slightly lower numbers.

But a rebounding economy and low unemployment could start cutting into recruitment efforts, and Robshaw noted that they have noticed in the past that application numbers can drop as the economy rebounds out of a tough time.

“We may start to see that but as of now we have enough applicants for the jobs,” he said.

The St. Johns County School District is also facing challenges, though officials pointed less to unemployment numbers and more at low teacher salaries as cause for concern in a story The Record published May 12.

The story pointed out that in St. Johns County average teacher pay is slightly lower than the state average, and Florida, according to a report by the National Education Association, ranks 45th in the nation when it comes to teacher pay.

In that story, officials noted a lack of state funding to help bolster teacher salaries, and Schools Superintendent Tim Forson said that will continue to be a challenge in a rapidly growing county that already struggles with a lack of affordable housing.

“In the end, we’re trying to get the best teachers to come and to stay in the career, and this makes it tough,” he said.

The only agency that spoke with The Record in recent days that hasn’t started feeling the pressure was the the St. Augustine Beach Police Department.

Beach Police Chief Robert Hardwick said Friday that he is at full staff and noted that the relatively small size of his department allows him to be flexible and stay on top of recruiting.


“It’s a small agency and I can pretty much handpick,” he said.

To that end, Hardwick said he maintains a close working relationship with St. Johns River State College, which runs the law enforcement academy in the area, and through that contact is able to attract new recruits willing to come work in an agency like his.

“How do you not want to come work at a beach police department?” he said.


Comments

Edward Adelbert Slavin

1. Would you bet your career on working for SHERIFF DAVID SHOAR? Really? Recruiting is "a challenge,” St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR says, blaming the good economy. Really? That dawg won't hunt. 

2. SHERIFF SHOAR has covered up the September 2, 2010 Michelle O'Connell shooting in the home of Deputy JEREMY BANKS, who is still employed by SHOAR (who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994). 

3. S/HOAR said he would bet his law enforcement career on JEREMY BANKS' innocence. No one believes that Michelle O'Connell committed suicide. Lawmen know that guns don't recoil forward. 

4. Your sins have found you out, Sheriff. People with options don't want to work for YOU. They won't bet THEIR careers on your BAD judgment. 

5. It's about YOU, Sheriff S/HOAR -- we in the "reality based community" know that you Sheriff SHOAR, are an addlepated, arrogant, retaliatory bully with brain boogers, untethered to the truth, devoid of ethics, heartless, petty, barbarous and cruel. You said a grieving family "molested" Michelle's body by authorizing a competent autopsy, which found her jaw was broken -- facts overlooked by your maladroit Medical Examiner. It was homicide, not suicide. 

6. It's time for Sheriff S/HOAR to go. To federal prison.