Demings: Private firm to patrol 2 dicey areas

Orange plans pilot program in Azalea Park, Holden Heights

Myra Hancock’s 83-year-old mother mows her own lawn and changes her oil by herself, but she won’t take the garbage out after dark.

Hancock, a retired health-care executive, said her mother has lived in Azalea Park for 42 years but now is afraid of what it has become.

“It’s been lost to crime and the fear of crime,” Hancock said.

Her mother’s neighborhood, however, is about to become part of a pilot program that would pay a private-security company to help fight crime — and the fear of crime — in Azalea Park and another troubled Orange County neighborhood, Holden Heights.

Orange Sheriff Jerry Demings won approval Tuesday from county commissioners to try the program, slated to start Dec. 1.

“What we are doing has not been done anywhere else in the state of Florida,” Demings said.

The armed security officers will not replace patrolling deputies but will enlarge the department’s presence in both neighborhoods by in-

creasing law-enforcement visibility around crime hot spots, keeping an eye on older, more vulnerable residents and monitoring abandoned and vacant properties.

“We believe by doing so, we will be able to better address the fear of crime that some people have as well as real crime itself,” he said.

The pilot program is a unique, innovative and perhaps a cost-effective way to quickly address crime and the perception of crime in the neighborhoods, said Nanette Schimpf, a spokeswoman for the Florida Sheriffs Association, which hopes to monitor the program’s results.

Demings thinks if the program could be expanded if it succeeds.

Orange sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Stonebreaker said the private-security partners will perform duties that deputies can’t always do.

“We go to where the needs are greatest,” said Stonebreaker, who supervises an area that includes Holden Heights. “I would love to be able to get out and check on every abandoned house, to check on every elderly person that may be in need. ... But I have to be honest, [we can’t].”

The pilot program, expected to run about 90 days, will cost $150,000.

The money will be drawn from the Law Enforcement Trust Fund, where the Sheriff’s Office deposits cash seized from drug dealers and other criminals and the revenue generated from the auctions of real estate, vehicles and other property confiscated during investigations.

Graduate students in criminal justice from the University of Central Florida will help the Sheriff’s Office measure the program’s success, surveying residents before the partnership starts and again after it ends. The data will help the sheriff decide whether the program has reduced fear or crime.

Sharon Wiley, who works closely with residents of Holden Heights, was skeptical when she first heard the plan.

“A guard in the community,” she said, expressing doubt. “I think it can be part of the puzzle, part of the solution here.”

Demings said he opted to try the program rather than ask commissioners to pay for more deputies because recruiting, hiring and training would take 18 to 24 months.

More than 100,000 security guards patrol Florida neighborhoods and businesses — serving as sentries in gated communities, at banks, hotels and some supermarkets, according to the state Department of Agriculture’s Division of Licensing, which oversees the security industry.

Each year, the state agency revokes licenses from 300 security guards for various reasons, including firing a gun without justification. Several such incidents were reported last year in Orange County.

State law only permits security guards to fire their guns to protect themselves or others.