Category: Florida News Articles & Reporting

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office jail population peaked at 22.5 percent over capacity in early March, a stark rise since last year’s short-lived decrease at the start of the pandemic. The rise in the jail population is largely driven by defendants awaiting trial, according to data provided by the law-enforcement agency.  Originally, Duval County’s three jails […]

Florida is in the beginning stages of what appears to be a third wave of COVID-19 cases, but unlike the past two surges, this one is driven entirely by younger residents, with the older population more heavily vaccinated and protected from the virus. The surge in viruses is entirely coming from those 55 and younger, […]

The Local Media Association, a trade group of news organizations, announced it is partnering with The Tributary, offering $35,000 as well as coaching, assistance and a fiscal sponsorship agreement as The Tributary launches this year. LMA’s CEO, Nancy Lane, said she believes The Tributary’s business model — a nonprofit news organization designed to collaborate with […]

Nine years after The Florida Times-Union revealed then-Public Defender Matt Shirk to have committed so many scandals they can’t be contained in a single sentence, an official body finally took action against the man. To recap Shirk’s background: He’d never defended a homicide case and had little experience when he ran for office in 2008 […]

Florida’s racial disparities in administering the COVID-19 vaccines hasn’t budged in the last few weeks, with whites 2.7 times as likely to be vaccinated as Black residents. No county has seen Black residents more likely to receive a vaccine than white residents. Duval, however, has seen its rates fall to 2.2 times, just more than […]

As Florida passes the 1 million vaccine marker, white Floridians were three times as likely to get the vaccine as Black Floridians, even as the virus has infected and killed higher rates of Black residents. You can see interactive versions of all the below graphics here. Florida’s COVID vaccine data so far doesn’t track ethnicity, […]

Happy New Year, friends. I’m going to keep this post relatively short and focus on a few numbers from 2020. Support The Tributary 2020 saw the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office shoot the most people in a decade, with police shooting 14 people, killing nine. Eight of those shot by police were Black, while four were white […]

Maps, maps, maps Jacksonville’s redistricting in the coming months will shape how the city handles racial equity, poverty, crime and nearly every major lever of public policy in the next decade. Unlike the state legislature, which is barred from partisan gerrymandering due to constitutional amendments that passed in 2010, the city is not under similar […]

I’ve already written some of the obvious political analyses of the election results. Joe Biden won Duval County, the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Yet every Democrat in a competitive down-ballot race lost. Duval is now a purple county, not a blue one. Joe Biden won Duval by less than […]

One-hundred and seventy Jaxsons have died this year to violence. The last time that many people died in a year in Jacksonville to violence was 1990, the year before I was born. One of the biggest stories in Jacksonville, one that deserves more scrutiny and investigation, is why the city is failing to keep its […]