Police Chief Troche and command staff provide presentation to City Commission
Overall crime in the city of Sarasota dropped 18% from 2024 to 2025, leaders of the Sarasota Police Department reported to the Sarasota City Commission during the board’s regular meeting on April 20.
“That is an amazing number,” Chief Rex Troche emphasized during the presentation. “I will tell you that police chiefs and sheriffs from around the country would be happy with a 2 [percent] to 3% drop, and, in some cases, a flat [trend].”
A slide that Troche and his command staff showed the commissioners pointed out that the largest decrease year-over-year for a specific type of crime was 71.4% for murders. The total number was seven in 2024; in 2025, it was two.
Capt. Johnathan Todd, who oversees the Criminal Investigations Division, reported that both of the 2025 homicide cases were cleared by arrest within 24 hours. Thus, he said, the Sarasota Police Department’s clearance rate for such crimes last year was 100%, compared to the national rate of 61%.
The next largest decline for a specific type of crime was for aggravated assaults: In 2024, the number was 248; the 2025 total was 165, marking a 33.5% drop.
The third biggest change involved robberies. The decrease was 33.3%, from 51 such cases in 2024 to 34 in 2025.
Troche credited his officers and members of the community with the overall drop in crime, noting “much collaboration” between them.
Further, he told the commissioners, the decline in offenses from 2023 to 2024 was 21.8%; from 2022 to 2023, “We had a 16% drop,” Troche added. “So that’s a total of 56% … in the last three years.”
In related data, Capt. Robert Armstrong, who leads the Patrol Division of the Sarasota Police Department (SPD), noted a 43% increase in DUI arrests from 2024 to 2025.
Officers have become more comfortable in handling those incidents, Armstrong explained, because of the training they receive and their use of body-worn cameras. The latter, Armstrong pointed out, show the impaired drivers as officers engage with them during stops.
The number of DUI arrests in 2024 was 207, the related slide said; the figure was 221 in 2025.
Charges involving the Patrol Division’s work in 2024 added up to 3,953, the slide also showed; in 2025, the total was 3,655.
The number of felony arrest charges fell from 1,413 in 2024 to 1,252 in 2025, the slide further noted.
In discussing the work of the Criminal Investigations Division, Capt. Johnathan Todd pointed out that SPD’s clearance rate for crimes against persons in 2025 was 64.1%, compared to the national rate of 44%. Its clearance rate in property crime cases was 19.1%, he added. The national clearance rate for those is 15.9%, Todd said, noting that he is “particularly proud” of those SPD statistics.
In 2025, a slide showed, the Criminal Investigation Division’s personnel investigated 228 property crimes, 220 cases involving personal crime, 139 white collar crimes, and 128 crimes against children.
Further, Todd discussed the accomplishments of the Strategic Investigations Unit (SIU) and the Community Action Team (CAT).
The SIU focuses on vice and narcotics investigations, Todd said. The members of the CAT “work hand-in-hand with members of [the SIU] to combat crimes involving firearms, narcotics and other quality-of-life issues throughout the city,” he explained.
In 2025, the SIU seized 54 firearms and $581,028 in currency, a slide showed. That unit’s efforts resulted in the arrests of 67 individuals, the slide said, with a total of 206 felony charges and 23 misdemeanor charges.
The CAT seized 34 firearms in 2025, another slide showed, and it arrested 114 individuals. The slide added that 142 felony charges and 43 misdemeanor counts resulted from that team’s work.
The firearms data was the most important statistic on the CAT slide, Todd told the commissioners. The members of that team, he said, “were very successful in 2025.”
He added, “I think it’s worth noting” that the CAT comprises just four officers and a sergeant.
Further, Capt. Armstrong discussed Operation Shots Free, which began on May 25, 2025 in Zone 3 — in north Sarasota — as an effort to deal with the development of “significant intelligence indicating a potential rise in the number of shootings and gun-related crimes in the City of Sarasota,” as the slide put it.
Data analysis combined with the intelligence personnel had developed led the agency to put the focus on that zone, the slide indicated.
From May to August 2025, another slide showed, 19 firearms and 21 kilograms of narcotics were seized.
The operation led to nearly a 90% decrease in the number of shots fired in Zone 3 from 2024 to 2025, Todd pointed out. “This was an outstanding job by our units.”
“I cannot applaud you enough,” Commissioner Kyle Battie told the Police Department leaders. He especially noted “just how important” the drop in crime has been in Newtown, in north Sarasota, as well as “the amount of community engagement” with police personnel.
Newtown is in Battie’s District 1 territory.
In response to a question that Battie posed about the age range of the suspects in the firearms cases, Capt. Todd told him, “The majority of them are younger folks,” ranging from mid-teens to mid- to late 20s.
Chief Troche explained that the agency’s Real-Time Operations Center can track the movements of juvenile offenders wearing ankle monitors, instead of officers having to make regular home visits at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., as they did in the past.
If any of those youthful offenders try to leave the area in which they have been ordered to remain, Troche continued, “We can pinpoint [them] within 10 feet. They know this, so a lot of this [technology] has really helped reduce the challenges that we had.”
“In my opinion,” Vice Mayor Kathy Kelley Ohlrich told Troche and his staff after the presentation, “the many things you do to build trust, to build community with our residents, are really paying off.”
Capt. Armstrong explained later during the presentation that each new officer hired by the agency undergoes 13 weeks of training, to learn the policies and procedures of the Sarasota Police Department.
Troche added that a refresher course for all officers takes place every two years. City Attorney Joe Polzak, Troche said, was a big factor in the agency’s implementation of its current training program.
The value of the ‘ROC’
Troche also took the opportunity during the presentation to underscore the value of the agency’s Real-Time Operation Center (ROC), making it clear that the commissioners’ support had made the ROC possible.
“The days of solving crimes in weeks, days, hours are no longer,” he pointed out. “We’re solving crimes in seconds.”
“As this operation grows,” Troche continued, “we are only limited in our imagination as far as what we connect to it.”
The agency’s Raven Gunshot Detection Program, which tracks gunshots in real time, is tied into the ROC and connected to the officers’ body-worn cameras, he said, so staff can ensure that officers are safe or whether they need help if they are not answering their radios.
“In the very near future,” he added, staff will be able to use all 600 of the security cameras installed in Sarasota County School District facilities in the city to track incidents. “That will be a major game-changer,” Troche stressed. Officers will be able to know exactly where a threat exists and be able to respond to it immediately, he said.
For an example of the value of the Raven program — which is available from the Flock company — he discussed an incident in which a man was shot through the door of a vehicle “and was bleeding out.. No one ever called 911,” Troche pointed out.
The Raven program alerted the ROC staff to the incident, so officers were able to save the man’s life, Troche told the commissioners.
That incident occurred in September 2025, he added.
During Capt. Todd’s remarks about the work of the Criminal Investigations Division, he talked about the importance of the ROC in the arrest of the suspect in the February 2025 case involving the murder of a resident of the Lyra Apartments on Ringling Boulevard, just east of the School Avenue intersection in downtown Sarasota.
Investigators quickly were able to identify the victim’s ex-fiancé, Djalma Gordon, as the suspect, Armstrong said. With the use of the ROC, he continued, the SPD and other law enforcement agencies were able to locate Gordon in Louisiana. Within 12 hours of the murder, he continued, SPD detectives “were on the way to Baton Rouge to attempt to interview Gordon …”
“This is a great example” of how the ROC is improving detectives’ ability to solve city crimes, Armstrong pointed out.
The relevant slide that Armstrong showed the commissioners said that Gordon is awaiting trial.
Two new programs in the works
Deputy Chief Scott Mayforth reported to the commissioners that two new programs are expected to be launched later this year.
In about two weeks, he said, the implementation of another software system will enable the ROC specialists to hear 911 calls as they are received by the Public Safety Communications Center, which the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office manages.
Thus, Mayforth emphasized, the agency no longer will have to wait for a dispatcher to send out an alert about a call before officers can be dispatched. Agency staff estimates that the officers’ arrival time on-scene will be sped up by 1 minute to 3 minutes.
Second, he continued, in October, the agency hopes to begin using a drone as a first responder. That will complement the ROC personnel’s notice of 911 calls in real time, he added.
Whenever the ROC analysts hear a 911 call that meets specific criteria, Mayforth continued, “They can upload the information to the drone,” and then press a button to launch it. The drone will proceed directly to the scene of the incident that prompted the call, he said.
The drone is expected to be able to get to any site in the city in 3 minutes or less time, Mayforth added; its top speed is 60 mph.
Whenever the battery in the drone gets low, he said, the drone will return to the agency’s headquarters, where it automatically will exchange its batteries for fresh ones before relaunching itself and returning to the scene.
The ROC analysts will be able to take manual control of the drone when they need to do so, he said.
“This is going to give us a tremendous benefit as far as officer safety goes,” Mayforth stressed.
The Homeless Outreach Team
During his remarks about the Patrol Division, Capt. Armstrong discussed the work of the agency’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT).
“The primary goal remains outreach, services and housing,” he pointed out.
In 2025, Armstrong continued, the team recorded 2,805 individual contacts; of those, 361 people were the focus of initial outreach.
“We are a best practices model,” he said, with representatives of law enforcement agencies coming from all over the world to shadow the team and learn the Sarasota Police Department’s processes.
A sergeant, three officers and two case managers comprise the team, Armstrong noted.
Yet, regardless of the amount of outreach and assistance that the HOT members provide, he continued, some individuals refuse to accept any help. When necessary, Armstrong said, the team will make physical arrests, as a means of enforcing city regulations. In 2025, a chart showed, the number of arrests was 561.
In response to a question from Vice Mayor Ohlrich, he explained that most of those arrests involve the sales of drugs or possession of a firearm.
When Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch asked how many of the agency’s officers are trained for HOT work, Armstrong replied, “One hundred percent.”
“Is that a typical number?” she asked him.
“That’s how we do it,” he told her. During the 13-week training period for new hires, he explained, each officer participates in a full day of education about the Police Department’s HOT program.
The USF ‘predictive model’
Another initiative of the Patrol Division, Armstrong said, has been what a slide characterized as “the development of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven crime forecasting tool, created by USF [the University of South Florida] in collaboration with the Sarasota Police Department.”
The model uses documentation of officers’ activities, he added.
Assistant Professor Yongjei Lee and his team within USF’s Criminology Department worked with the agency’s Intelligence Unit and other members of the Sarasota Police Department on the use of the data to develop a list of the top 10 “hot spots” for crime in the city, Armstrong continued.
The goal,” he said, is to place officers in the areas “where crime is predicted to occur.”
“We just completed Phase 1” of the initiative, he added. It resulted in a 19.6% reduction in crime citywide, Armstrong told the commissioners.
Agency staff and the USF team are working on new locations for Phase 2 of the program, he noted.
The Sarasota Learning Center
During his remarks, Armstrong also discussed the Sarasota Learning Center, explaining that it “is a state-of-the-art mobile learning center.”
A private donation “from a very caring individual in the city of Sarasota” enabled the department to create the program, he said.
“This trailer can be brought to schools and special events,” he added. It primarily serves youngsters of elementary school age, Armstrong noted. “It’s equipped with iPads, 3D printers and interactive learning materials.”
The Police Department uses the Learning Center to build relationships between its personnel and students, he told the commissioners.