How the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Uses Copaganda to Stifle Public Dissent

"Whoever controls the media controls the mind."
-Jim Morrison

Politics, or the struggle for power, has taken many forms throughout history, but the media has always been the ultimate battleground. As abolitionist movements continue to grow in response to the Trump administration's military policing tactics, law enforcement has increasingly had to rely on copaganda to justify unjust violence. Perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than in Jacksonville, Florida. 

Over the last three years, the city's Sheriff's Office hasn't just been running good public relations; it's successfully carrying out a taxpayer-funded media campaign designed to preempt accountability and discredit any critique from the public. Since taking office in November of 2022, Sheriff T.K Waters has pushed for substantial increases in the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO) budget, lobbied for veto power in cases of lawsuits involving officers, and employed a communications strategy to justify both. The language JSO uses is curated to silence any speech that may threaten its power.

The George Floyd uprisings of 2020 served as the catalysts for this new era of strategic JSO communication. Jacksonville was one of the many Republican-led cities that saw an increase in police spending, as police departments like JSO pointed to videos of protesters in the streets and damaging property as justification for needing more officers. Expanding the police force and presence was a key issue for Waters' 2023 campaign, which was bolstered by the full strength and funding of the Republican Party. For a city that already had one of the highest homicide rates in the region, his commitment to more police to reduce crime was music to the voting electorate's ears.  In a city like Jacksonville, even the Democrats are Republican.

As a result, even our own Democratic mayor has given her full support to Waters, fully funding the JSO budget requests for the last three years. Last year, JSO received 32 percent of the city's budget, roughly $638 million. This year, they are slated to receive roughly 35 percent, at $675 million.  JSO reasoned that since Jacksonville's population has grown to just over one million, they must continue to hire officers and develop new technologies to patrol and monitor it. The traditions of the South run deep, and the law and its enforcers, no matter how violent or unjust, are to be obeyed.

Town Halls

Since 2023, Waters and his team have held a series of annual town halls in each police zone. I've attended two JSO Town Halls, one last year and one this year. Almost all were held at local megachurches. Attendees were welcomed by recruiters from all agencies and a room mostly made up of other cops before Strategic Communications Executive Vic Micolucci kicked off the program. Micolucci is a well-known face, having served as a journalist with the local news station for 14 years before joining the Sheriff's Office in 2024. 

Each Town Hall begins with prayer, followed by the presentation of colors, a live performance of the national anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance, and two highly produced promotional videos. After remarks from the sheriff and undersheriff comes the "question and answer" portion of the night. Attendees filled out question cards that were then selected by the sheriff's team to be asked by JSO's Chief of Public Affairs, Lara Zaroulis Mattina, Esq.

The topics that dominated the Q&A portion during this year's District 1 town hall on July 23 were the same topics dominating local news: flock cameras and teen takeovers. These questions served as springboards for Waters to justify the need for greater police intelligence, power, and force. Regarding police surveillance, Waters defended flock cameras as a means to find criminals, and that any privacy concerns were null and void, stating that only criminals are afraid of flock cameras, and that citizens should understand that roadways are public; therefore, there's no expectation of privacy. 

The phenomenon of teenagers gathering in public after dark also got a clear law-and-order response from Waters. In February of this year, one of these gatherings at Jacksonville Beach stirred the community after four teens and one adult were shot. Since then, JSO and the media have been vigilant about how, when, and why teens gather, with other incidents such as fights and recovered drugs being widely publicized. 

When asked about what JSO was doing to address "teen takeovers," Waters opened by saying he doesn't even like referring to them as such, because he doesn't believe these are teens causing trouble, but adult criminals. He points to gun violence and property destruction as reason enough to crack down on the gatherings. He shared the same sentiment at an earlier Town Hall, when he expressed his intention to apply even greater levels of force when gatherings of 13- to 19-year-olds turn violent, stating, "I don't think they're teen takeovers. I think when you start destroying property, they're riots. I'm going to approach our federal partners and see if we can start handling it differently."

Waters reframed teenagers trying to have fun as a step away from a riot. He reframed a citizen concerned about their 4th Amendment rights as a step away from a criminal. These instances are perpetual justification for JSO to continue treating people as violently as they see fit.

While JSO may believe their Town Halls are the pinnacle of transparency, it's not transparent if you can simply ignore the questions you don't want to answer. Exercising control over the parameters and context of public discourse is a chief component of copaganda, and the main tool utilized by JSO's Public Affairs Department.

Over the last two years, JSO has found a new media platform to promote its messaging enforcement: social media. Since 2025, JSO has begun partnering with content creators to showcase the behind-the-scenes operations of JSO and in-depth interviews with the city's sheriff. 

Copaganda Influencers

YouTuber Peter Santenello documented his exclusive access with Waters in March 2025; law enforcement influencer Nick Off Duty shared his late-night ride-along with the gang prevention unit in May 2025; YouTuber Tommy McGee launched a series of videos depicting police drug raids in "Florida's Former Murder Capital" that same spring. In one video from Tommy G, JSO responded to a fake kidnapping call that resulted in an innocent man being detained after armed officers stormed his property. They later apologized for the mistake.

The videos frame officers as warriors putting their lives on the line to enter "dangerous neighborhoods" (where many families already live) and arrest criminals. In many of the videos, the people they're arresting are visibly terrified and confused. Still, JSO insists they must be aggressive to take out bad actors, drawing a clear dividing line between who they deem as "criminals" and everyone else. A line that even Waters reinforces in Peter Santenello's video covering the gang prevention unit's Operation Safe Passage ride-along with the sheriff, Pastor Garland Scott, and about a dozen other officers in tactical gear. 

In the video, Santenello commented that the neighborhood they were visiting didn't "look struggling." Waters responded that while it's not a struggling neighborhood, "You might have an outlier living in one of these houses." This framing is important. While the stated purpose was to connect an at-risk teen with resources, Waters' comment suggests that it is instead to identify outliers who do not belong, rather than address the root causes that may lead a child to commit "crimes" in the first place. Othering citizens like this is one of the many ways Waters uses copaganda to discredit victims and justify violent behavior for the sake of maintaining order. 

Media Statements in Response to Police Brutality

The handling of the Will McNeil Jr. case is a prime example of how much of JSO's crisis communication is dependent on that othering. In July 2025, McNeil released footage of his February 2025 arrest that shows an officer punching him in the face several times after he asked for a supervisor. The initial reason for the stop was for driving without headlights, even though it was daytime and several officers' vehicles also had their headlights out.

The video went viral, prompting an immediate response from the Sheriff's Office to justify and control the narrative. In the released statement, Waters said the video "does not comprehensively capture the circumstances surrounding the incident. At the bottom of the statement, they included a photo of a knife allegedly found in the back of McNeil's car, even though the knife had nothing to do with the officer's decision to punch McNeil in the face.

JSO also held a press conference, in which Waters publicly criticized McNeil's timing of releasing the video and emphasized his refusal to comply as "criminal resistance." While the officer was cleared for unnecessary force and the officer's sucker punch of McNeil was deemed a legal "distraction tool," legality alone does not equate to righteousness. This tactic of separating residents into categories of who deserves violence and who does not only moves away from the type of action that could save lives. 

Take the murder of Charles Faggart, a man arrested on misdemeanor charges who was beaten by nine officers in the Duval County jail. In the immediate aftermath, JSO statements asserted that Faggart had resisted, that he had fentanyl in his system, and that he had suffered a seizure while in custody. The medical report obtained by The Tributary disproved two of those claims, finding no signs of fentanyl in his system and no signs of seizure. They did, however, find a stun gun barb in his back, something JSO did not mention in their reporting.

This would shake anyone's trust in law enforcement, but to express as much would also place you in a criminal-adjacent category. Waters said as much during last year's August 7 Finance Committee Budget Hearing when he stated: "The ones who don't trust us, probably don't trust us because they're involved in things that they should not be involved in…they're doing things they shouldn't be doing." This characterization is not only false but dangerous. 

How This Impacts Freedom of Speech

The true cost of propaganda is the power we lose to call for accountability, because it counters the existing narrative that our system of policing is built upon. Copaganda aims to overinflate the good and downplay the bad, so those in power don't have to take action. We are not allowed to critique or call for any reforms without being labeled a criminal or a criminal sympathizer. 

This is not only harmful; it's intimidating to those who dare to publicly question JSO's policing, at the risk of being labeled by the most powerful man in Duval County as anything other than a citizen with rights. 

This is how you make senseless acts of violence make sense—and the constant calls for funding, despite being the most funded department in the city—a reasonable ask.  In the arena of the mind, JSO's propaganda machine has won over the public, and with it, all the power.