JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville city council member Garrett Dennis attacked mayor Lenny Curry’s record on crime in a radio ad released Tuesday. Dennis is running for re-election District 9.
The ad claims Jacksonville saw 21 murders “in February alone.”
First Coast News has found that is false. According to numbers from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, of the 26 homicides so far in 2019, the department classified 21 of them as murders. Only five of those happened in February.
The ad then says Jacksonville had a mass shooting “just last month.”
First Coast News verified that is true. A mass shooting is an incident in which four or more people are shot, according to The Gun Violence Archive.
A shooting on Brian Lakes drive left two dead and three injured January 19th.
“Curry has made Jacksonville the murder capital of Florida,” Dennis says in the ad.
First Coast News checked numbers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and found Jacksonville consistently has fewer overall murders than Miami Dade, which has a much larger population.
When adjusting for murders by population, Jacksonville frequently has higher per-capita murders than Miami Dade, but according to the FDLE numbers, in 2017, the last year for which county-by-county numbers are available, Duval County did not have the highest murder rates in the state.
Still, that’s irrelevant to the argument Dennis is presenting, which says Curry “made” Jacksonville the murder capital of Florida. In reality, Jacksonville had that unfortunate distinction years before Curry took office.