Marcos Lopez was sworn in as Osceola County’s first Hispanic Sheriff just over a year ago. He’s been visible in the community, holding crime prevention events and being on the front line of several police operations.
The News-Gazette was able to sit down with Lopez at a “meet and greet” coffee event March 4 at Woodsby’s Cafe south of Kissimmee, and ask him about some of his reflections on his first year in office.
Osceola News-Gazette: Has the percept ion of what you thought running the Sheriff ’s Office would be matched what it’s actually been like this year?
Sheriff Marcos Lopez: Everything’s gone really well. In our first seven months, we’ve been able to implement our campaign promises right off the bat in order to help improve the quality of life of our citizens.
We created our Community Advisory Review Board (CARES) to provide transparency so the community could know why we function and how we have our policies. They didn’t understand the process for why we discipline our employees. We created the mental health division and Veterans advisory and outreach division, to identify Veterans on the streets in crisis instead of just making arrests. We don’t want to abandon them, we want to get them the services they need.
Our juvenile division is almost complete; it will provide direct outreach and mental health. So if a kid is starting to get into trouble, we can have the deputies assigned to it get involved and provide some of that positive influence around them.
ONG: What you get out into neighborhoods, what are you hearing as concerns from residents, about the job you’re doing and what’s going on?
ML: A lot of people wanted transparency. In a county that’s 64 percent Hispanic, they wanted more of an understanding of what, how and why we operate. We’ve created Facebook en Espanol (www.facebook.com/ OsceolaSheriffEspanol), we’re up to almost 1,200 followers who will ask questions that we normally wouldn’t hear from that community, which really helps. We’ll put our videos in both languages to explain why we’re affecting the arrests we do. Many people coming here are from Puerto Rico, and they don’t want to see the same riff raff from there. We started seeing those trends and we worked to suppress them so we can maintain that quality of life they came here seeking. We’re working directly with Puerto Rico in intelligence sharing, we’ve got a (Memorandum of Understanding) already drafted for that.
ONG: In a county that’s nearly two-thirds Hispanic, and you being its first Hispanic Sheriff, do you think that’s helped create a more connected community with law enforcement?
ML: Definitely, and we’ve upped our percentage of minorities hired by like 11 percent. Many of them have been in communications, we were seeing a translation issue. People weren’t understanding why we do what we do.
ONG: So what are you working on in your second year in office?
ML: We’re still working on those agreements with the Puerto Rican government. We’re going to start improving more programs to benefit one of the largest Hispanic communities in the state. When I went to the Florida Sheriff ’s Association, they presented all these programs that were out of touch with the Hispanic community, especially since we’re getting a lot of Venezuelans now, who don’t speak English, which isn’t their fault because they’re politically driven here. We’re driving that outreach and education.
We support our whole community, and we appreciate that this community supports us. We want people to know we have a firmer stance on crime than the past administration. We’re really trying to combat the fentanyl epidemic this year. We’ve talked to the governor to put more resources into that, to improve the quality of life for this county.
