In the last six years, Jacksonville police officers have shot 54 people — 40 of them black — killing 29.

Only one officer has been fired as a result, but he got his job back through arbitration. Every other officer who has gone through the sheriff’s closed-door police shooting review boards has been cleared of policy violations, with little public explanation.

Amid a string of controversial police shootings of black men in the spring of 2015, Sheriff Mike Williams, who was still a candidate, distinguished himself by highlighting the need to restore trust on the issue. He promised to sue to reopen the office’s review boards, which were closed by a police union lawsuit in late 2010 after decades of public access.

It was a short-lived commitment.

Once in office, Williams quietly abandoned his promise to challenge the police union in court. It’s unclear what changed his thinking.

But the lack of transparency on police shootings in Jacksonville goes beyond court battles and private board meetings.

Under Williams, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has kept in place financial roadblocks that make it harder for the public and the families of those shot by police to learn the details of the shootings. The office has provided an incomplete picture on its website, hosting a database that needlessly purges cases more than five years old and omits any case that led to an officer being disciplined.

Sheriff Williams now shies away from discussing the same lack of transparency he once decried on the campaign trail. He declined repeated requests to discuss police shootings with the Times-Union.

Database: Tracking a decade of police shootings in Jacksonville

In the sheriff’s place, the office’s senior spokeswoman explained why entries were purged from the database by erroneously saying they had "expired" under state public records law. The office has since acknowledged that no such restrictions exist.

The closed-door culture of the Sheriff’s Office resonates more strongly with some than others. Calls for reforming the way the shootings are adjudicated in Jacksonville have come largely from black pastors and civil-rights leaders.

In the absence of official statistics on the city’s police shootings, it has been left to the news media to compile the data. The numbers reveal stark racial contrasts.

• In the last decade, 124 people have been shot by police in Jacksonville, according to a Times-Union database. Ninety-six of them — 76 percent — were black. Black people make up about 30 percent of Jacksonville’s population.

• The racial tilt of those numbers feeds into a sense among reformers that Jacksonville police officers can shoot black citizens with relative impunity. Two officers have been fired as a result of the 124 shootings. Two more resigned under the threat of termination. For 25 of the officers who shot people in the last decade, it was not their first time firing at a citizen.

• The city is a national hot spot for deadly police encounters. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office ranked ninth in the country for total number of fatal police shootings between 2007 and 2012, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Sheriff’s Office deputies deal with life-threatening circumstances all too often. Jacksonville has higher-than-average rates of violent crime — nationally, on the state level, and for similarly sized cities.

Some of the people shot by police posed an immediate danger to the public. Others dared SWAT teams to shoot them.

But there is also a gray area: cases in which it’s hard to tell whether an officer should have pulled the trigger.

To illuminate the scope of Jacksonville’s police shootings, the Times-Union has compiled a complete database of the 124 people shot since 2007.

Over the course of the next year, the Times-Union will look back at police shootings and the investigations that followed. The project, No Further Action, takes its name from the box that is checked every time an officer is cleared of violating Sheriff’s Office policy guidelines.

The ‘block of silence’

As a candidate, Sheriff Williams made transparency around police shootings a key plank in his platform.

The Sheriff’s Office, Williams said in March 2015, needed to reduce the "block of silence" in the time between a police shooting and the conclusion of its internal reviews, referred to as Response to Resistance board meetings.

"We’ve got to push to change that," Williams said at the time. "You’ve got to be able to be transparent and get the facts out to people."

Silence from police after a shooting "erodes trust" in law enforcement, Williams cautioned. His concern was reinforced after he took office.

In November, a transparency task force created by Williams issued a final report that illustrated a public perception that more could be done in regard to sharing information about police shootings.

But despite maintaining troves of public records on its history of police shootings, the Sheriff’s Office provides citizens with very little information free of charge.

After a police shooting, the Sheriff’s Office is quick to disseminate some information, such as the criminal history of a suspect and photos taken from social media. But other facts, such as where a suspect was hit by gunfire or where a gun was recovered, are closely guarded as part of an active investigation.

Those facts can remain unknown to the public for about nine months to a year, on average. Investigations are designated active by the Sheriff’s Office until its review boards are completed. After that, the office quietly issues a final report, without notifying the public when the document goes online — if it ever does.

Before the review boards were closed in 2010, the details of controversial shootings were aired out in the plain view of the public, sometimes just three months after the shooting took place. The Sheriff’s Office now charges fees for that same information.

An incomplete picture

Case reviews that led to an officer being referred to the Sheriff’s Office’s internal affairs unit are nowhere to be found on the sheriff’s website, despite language that suggests the database is a total accounting of completed review boards.That includes the only case within the database’s time frame that led to an officer being fired.

The sheriff’s public database, which stretches back five years, omitted several other cases from that time period without explanation. Those reports were uploaded after being identified by the Times-Union.

Lauri-Ellen Smith, the Sheriff’s Office senior spokeswoman, initially defended the database as adhering to state public records law. She recently said it is "not as conclusive as it could be."

The language used in summaries posted to the sheriff’s database sometimes obscures facts that are central to understanding the case. Details known at the time the reports were written, such as what injuries a suspect suffered from police gunfire, are left unexplained.

In general, the narratives typically hew closely to the statements given by officers in the wake of the shootings.

More detailed descriptions are available in the office’s full case files, which become public record after the review boards are concluded. But those don’t come cheap. A recent estimate for two such reports totaled $250.

The wait for records can be lengthy. The reports were requested Dec. 15. The Times-Union still hasn’t received them.

Open data

As a result of the Times-Union’s reporting, the Sheriff’s Office said it has begun efforts to streamline access to public records and restructure its website. It has tapped a lieutenant to oversee the creation of web portals that would include information about police shooting reviews.

The Sheriff’s Office would not have to look far for a more transparent model.

The city of Orlando’s website hosts an online spreadsheet of police shootings using police department data. The database, which stretches back to 2009, includes the basic facts of police shootings and links to more detailed reports from the local State Attorney’s Office. It is the result of a top-down data-sharing initiative started by the mayor, according to the police department.

Orlando Rolon, deputy police chief in Orlando, said the department is looking into new software that would allow it to share even more of its data.

"Those tools were not available five years ago," Rolon said. "That mindset was not there even three years ago. So we are all progressively getting better about understanding what we can do."

In Jacksonville, the Sheriff’s Office has rolled back public access in recent years. In 2011, it took police scanners back from local media organizations. In 2013, it eliminated direct media access to daily police reports.

The office did not have the technological capability to retain emails beyond 90 days, as required by state law, until the Times-Union discovered and publicized that fact in late 2015.

Calls for change

Tension over police shootings spiked in Jacksonville after the May 2016 killing of Vernell Bing.

Officer Tyler Landreville, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, shot Bing, 22, in the temple after he crashed a stolen car into the deputy’s police cruiser. Witnesses described Bing, who was unarmed, as dazed and limping away from the vehicle when he was killed.

The Sheriff’s Office has yet to provide an explanation for what prompted Landreville to fire, or give any new details on the shooting.

Two days after Bing’s death, protesters demonstrated against the Sheriff’s Office in City Hall. African-American civil-rights groups, such as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called for independent investigations of Jacksonville’s police shootings.

By the summer, they were joined by more than 300 protesters in the streets.

Attorneys representing the family of Bing have accused the Sheriff’s Office of blocking their access to information about the shooting and failing to canvass the area for witnesses.

Undersheriff Patrick Ivey told the Times-Union that the Sheriff’s Office should be notified of any witnesses the attorneys may have located and defended his office’s investigation.

"I think we’ve done a good job," Ivey said. "I know we’re good at it."

Elsewhere in Florida, the Orlando Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office have responded to growing concern over police shooting investigations by delegating the responsibility to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, an independent state agency.

In Jacksonville, the Sheriff’s Office’s own detectives do the investigative legwork, which feeds into a State Attorney’s Office review of the shooting for any criminal wrongdoing. The sheriff’s review boards look only for policy and training violations.

In the face of growing demand for third-party investigations of police shootings, the FDLE received a funding boost in the 2016 state budget to hire 14 new full-time investigators. But the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office prefers to maintain its control over the crime scenes.

Isaiah Rumlin, the local NAACP president, said that there is a lack of trust in the Sheriff’s Office’s police shooting investigations.

"They investigate themselves," Rumlin said of the Sheriff’s Office. "And in reality, you just can’t investigate yourself."

Rumlin said that FDLE-led investigations would be a step in the right direction, but the real solution in his mind would be a citizens review board with the power to subpoena witnesses and conduct its own investigations.

There is a significant hurdle, however, to such a review board: Florida state law.

The Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights ensures that only a law enforcement agency can conduct any investigation that might lead to an officer being disciplined. All investigations must also remain confidential until they are completed. Those two clauses combined, among other legal factors, preclude the authorization of a meaningful citizens review board by the City Council in Jacksonville.

The officer’s bill of rights, which has been on the books for decades in Florida and other states, is the same law that enabled the local police union to close the Sheriff’s Office review boards to the public in 2010.

In response to criticism, Sheriff Williams defends his office’s investigations of police shootings as adhering to national best practices. He stresses that he is an elected official, and that voters can hold him personally accountable for the office’s investigations at the voting booth.

They would not have that same luxury with the FDLE, Williams said.

Local control backed

Legislative efforts that would have taken the initial police shooting investigations out of the sheriff’s hands have faltered at City Hall and in the Legislature.

City Councilwoman Katrina Brown began her push for a citizens review board over the summer, until the city’s Office of General Counsel reinforced in a memo last month that both state law and the city’s charter would prevent a review board from having any real power over the sheriff or his deputies.

Former state Sen. Geri Thompson, an Orlando Democrat, unsuccessfully lobbied for a statewide mandate that would require the FDLE to investigate all police shootings, but her effort never made it out of committee.

State Sen. Audrey Gibson, D-Jacksonville, who vice chairs the Criminal Justice Committee, said she understands why some would prefer FDLE-led investigations. She said she would not support a mandate, however, because it would usurp the power of an elected official.

"If the public has no confidence in how the investigations are done or how the Sheriff’s Office is run, then they have the opportunity to do something about it," Gibson said.

Former state Rep. Charles McBurney, a Jacksonville Republican, said the Sheriff’s Office already has the resources to investigate the shootings. The FDLE is staffed mostly to help rural jurisdictions, he said.

"If the investigations of police shootings are a transparent process and there’s no evidence of bias or incompetency, then there’s no need to have a duplicative law enforcement agency conduct those investigations," said McBurney, who has also worked as an assistant state attorney.

Race relations

Some local politicians expressed an optimistic view about bridging the gap between the Sheriff’s Office and the city’s black communities.

Councilman Garrett Dennis, a Democrat who is black, said Williams’ September visit to a barbershop on the city’s Northside shows that he is serious about lifting long-standing tensions.

"That’s huge, because in the black community, that’s where African-Americans talk shop," he said. "That’s where we talk politics."

But Dennis also said that there is an "uneasiness" that persists between many black citizens of Jacksonville and the police officers enlisted to protect them.

Despite the support Williams enjoys from some elected officials, other prominent voices say his outreach efforts toward Jacksonville’s black communities have fallen short.

Diallo Sekou, a grassroots activist who helped organize the Bing protests, said that the sheriff needs to think beyond town hall events and create policies that establish real protections and transparency around the use of force by officers.

"Showing up and having conversations for a couple of hours don’t get shit done," Sekou said.

Sekou described police shootings of black people in Jacksonville as an "epidemic."

"Mike Williams inherited a force that comes out of the 1950s," Sekou said. "There has to be a cultural understanding of those officers in the community of who they’re policing. You don’t have that."

When asked about the high percentage of black people shot by police, Undersheriff Ivey said there are similar demographics in the city’s homicide data.

"We are one community, so it isn’t their problem, it’s our problem," Ivey said. "But why is it that not only in Jacksonville, but across the nation … why is it that murders, overall murder numbers, reflect alarming statistics like what you just alluded to with police shootings?"

Ivey clarified that he wasn’t blaming any one group in particular for the violence.

"I’m saying, how do we fix that?" Ivey said.

Ben Conarck: (904) 359-4103