Supporters, activists set expectations for Osceola’s first Hispanic sheriff
With Marco López set to make history as the new leader of the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office, many in the majority-Latino community are looking to him to set a blueprint for future Hispanic leadership at the agency.
The first Hispanic to be elected to run the county’s largest law enforcement agency, the former deputy sergeant will replace Russ Gibson after running on a platform of reforming the agency’s accountability measures and reimagining how it engages with the community.
That includes plans to further diversify the Sheriff’s Office’s ranks— a move many welcome as long overdue. Currently, about a third of deputies identify as Hispanic, compared to 55% of the county’s population.
“It ’s great that we finally have a Latino running the Sheriff’s Office, but you have to look at the other side of the coin,” said Valentín Ramos, a longtime resident and community figure in Poinciana. “How he does at his job will either help us move forward or backward.”
López, who declined to be in
terviewed for this story because he’s on a post-election vacation, has said he plans to provide additional language and cultural sensitivity training to non-Hispanic deputies in an effort to avoid misunderstandings during stops.
He also plans to reform the agency’s disciplinary matrix and create its first citizen’s review board to advise on internal disciplinary matters, along with a budget committee made up of community leaders.
In the general election, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 173, which represents more than 200 of the Sheriff’s Office’s roughly 450 sworn deputies, endorsed López’s opponent, fellow former deputy Tony Fernández, who had a similar platform but was able to garner broader support fromlocal lawenforcement.
In a statement released on Tuesday, lodge President Jorge Covas congratulated the sheriffelect on his historic win, saying he had “changed the landscape of lawenforcement for good.”
“We must move forward in a positive and forward thinking manner,” Covas said in the statement. “… For it is my belief, if we work togetherwe can be successful and by not working together, we will feel effects of being divided even more.”
López, while acknowledging that either he or Fernández would make history if elected, during the campaign argued that elections come down to policy, not a candidate’s background.
“We’ve seen a lot of Hispanics run for sheriff that didn’t come out of these primaries and didn’t get a majority Latino vote,” he told the Orlando Sentinel in August. “You have to really work hard and talk to people and let them know what your ideas are.”
Despite that, some residents, including some of López’s supporters, thought he catered mostly to Hispanics while campaigning on being “the people’s sheriff.”
“When I saw that he was waving the Puerto Rican flag [after his victory] instead of the Osceola County flag, I was offended,” said Dinah Oliver of Kenansville, who comes from a law enforcement family and voted for López in the general election. “I’m all for diversity and bilingualism. We need that here, and I’m not against that. But he has to represent Osceola County; he’s not the sheriff of Puerto Rico.”
López pushed for reform and diversity in his first run for office in 2016, when he was defeated by the current sheriff, Russ Gibson. But this year, the platform better aligned with the moment, amid nationwide uprisings against systemic racism and police brutality that put law enforcement agencies and their practices under greater scrutiny. López defeated Gibson in August’s Democratic primary before taking on Fernández, a non-party affiliated candidate.
In June, López joined a march alongside protesters and county leaders in Kissimmee following the outbreak of national protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by now-former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.
Jada Murray, an activist who attended the march led by the Kissimmee and St. Cloud police departments, said she was impressed by López’s platform but didn’t vote in the sheriff’s race because she didn’t feel any candidate adequately addressed concerns about the relationship between law enforcement and the Black community.
“As a Black person in Osceola County, I can’t say there’s a bad relationship between thecommunity and the Sheriff’s Office, but it’s also not all peaches and daisies,” Murray said. “Yes, he’s taking steps in the right direction … but it would be disingenuous to create the [citizen review board] and not say anything about the Black Lives Matter movement.”
While she’s optimistic about López’s incoming administration, she said implementing new programs without keeping Black residents in mind “runs the risk of recreating the problems the programs are trying to address.”
But R. Lewayne Johnson, an attorney and the founder of the Florida Coalition to Prevent Veterans Homelessness, who endorsed López, said he was impressed during López’s meetings with the county’s Black leaders by his emphasis on diversity and programs for the county’s most vulnerable communities.
López has said he’d like to create a pilot program to embed socialworkers with deputies on certain nonviolent calls, particularly when dealing with veterans and the homeless. Similar programs have been proposed and implemented around the country.
“He focuses on people and on the job of community inclusion,” Johnson said. “He’s confident, and I’m looking forward to working with him.”