The Gainesville Police Department’s crackdown on firearm violence and increased recruitment efforts have both so far been successful, a new report on the department shows.
The report, displayed at a Gainesville City Commission meeting Thursday evening, compared statistics from the first six months of the past two years.
It showed the amount of shots fired in 2025 were half the amount in the same time period of 2024 — dropping from 80 to 37 in a year. Similarly, the number of injuries caused by a gun dropped from 29 to nine this year.
“I’m happy to report that there’s continued and steady decrease in most of our metrics,” Gainesville Chief of Police Nelson Moya said while presenting the statistics to the commission. “We always say it — any one is too many. But we sit better than we did last year.”
The department first created its gun violence prevention unit in late 2023, Moya added. Since then, the department has continued to see upticks in the number of firearms seized and recovered by law enforcement officers — reducing gun-related violence as a whole.
Later in the meeting, Mayor Harvey Ward proclaimed Aug. 25 to 29 as SMART Week in Gainesville. SMART, an acronym for a campaign launched in 2015, encourages gun owners to properly secure firearms to prevent child deaths.
Accompanying these efforts to reduce gun violence is the GPD’s campaign to increase recruitment efforts.
The department reported receiving 218 applications this year alone, of which it hired 24. The department still has 21 vacant positions, but Lieutenant Marquitta Brown said the department is currently tracking 16 potential officers through the police academy and plans to fill all positions by Jan. 1, 2026.
Commissioner Ed Book asked Brown and Moya if recruiting was sufficient to fill all vacancies by the end of the next fiscal year. Both gave identical answers: “Absolutely. Yes, sir.”
The successful recruitment efforts are thanks to Brown and her staff’s efforts, including going to training to improve recruiting, Moya added, as next year may be the first in “recent memory” his department is fully staffed.
Contact Grace Larson at glarson@alligator.org. Follow her on X @graceellarson
