The city of Gainesville has seen significant growth in the past couple of years and when it comes to public safety, Gainesville Police Chief Jay Parrish said he has not seen a spike in crime.
“We’re just tackling the challenges of what Gainesville is today compared to was it what it was 20 years ago. So everything that we're seeing, you know, if there's an increase in any numbers is relative to our population growth,” Parrish said.
In 2022, the Gainesville Police Department noticed a rise in fentanyl in the community. According to Parrish fentanyl is being added to a lot of drugs, causing a lot of overdoses and deaths. It has become one of the biggest hurdles the department faces on the front lines.
“We were able to make a homicide case, this year against someone that sold fentanyl-laced drugs,” Parrish said.
Moving forward in 2023, Parrish said they hope to tackle the overdose cases better.
“I would love to continue that effort going forward to make cases against these people that are distributing the poison into our community and causing these deaths,” he said.
The Gainesville Police Department will be working with the Drug Enforcement Administration to access some of their software and analytics to track the overdoes better. Parrish said that the department has not always collected that data. Therefore, going into 2023, they will have real-time data that shows trends such as location spikes, time of year spikes and time of day spikes. They will be able to use that data to deploy the resources to crack down on the fentanyl overdose problem.
Parrish said he owes the success of the Gainesville Police Department partly to the support from the community.
“I'll just say, you know, to our citizens, we do appreciate the support,” he said. “Our police department receives support that I hear other communities don't get, and I think that is a huge driver in the success for Gainesville as a whole."
