Sarasota Police Chief Rex Troche returns to the show with numbers most departments would kill for: a 16.2 percent drop in crime in 2023, the largest in department history, followed by a 21.8 percent drop in 2024, the largest again, for a combined 38 percent reduction in two years. Larceny fell from 1,129 incidents to 799, and motor vehicle theft from 144 to 112, drops Troche attributes largely to juvenile offenders being pulled toward other outlets before they turn to crime. The department closed all seven of its 2024 homicides, compared with zero homicides the year before, with an average clearance time of 1.7 days against a roughly 53 percent national clearance average.
Troche credits much of the shift to unconventional, consistency-driven community programs in New Town, where he says decades of distrust grew from police showing up only when a neighborhood problem became too visible to ignore. A chance idea over morning coffee turned into a STEM program built around remote-control monster truck replicas, funded through a phone call with Monster Jam owner Ken Feld's wife, and paired teenagers with community relations officers to learn robotics before racing the vehicles they built, and got to keep. A separate partnership with former Ohio State and Florida coach Urban Meyer, called Urban's Edge, brings life-skills coaching, financial literacy and public speaking to 18 New Town teens with a goal of eventually funding four-year college scholarships for kids who complete all three years.
The Rock and Remote Drones The department's real-time operations center, nicknamed the Rock, taps into privately owned business and home security cameras through signed agreements rather than building new city infrastructure, letting analysts track suspects across county and even state lines. Troche describes tracking a murder suspect's license plate from Sarasota to Miami, where a SWAT team was waiting within roughly 15 hours, and a separate homicide suspect tracked into Louisiana the same way. He says the department is roughly two to three years from deploying autonomous first-responder drones that could handle noise complaint check-ins without sending an officer.
On traffic enforcement, Troche is unapologetic about school-zone speed cameras, which issue $100 citations with no license points and give drivers a 10 mph grace window, but says he personally opposes red light cameras. He closes with a wish for a calmer 2025 hurricane season after Sarasota weathered consecutive storms, crediting the department's officers, who report for duty and sleep at headquarters through the storms without knowing their own families' status, as the real reason behind the numbers.
What you'll take away
- Sarasota's crime rate dropped a combined 38 percent over 2023 and 2024, both record-setting single-year drops
- The department closed all seven of its 2024 homicides in an average of 1.7 days, far ahead of the roughly 53 percent national clearance rate
- A youth robotics and remote-control racing program, funded partly by Monster Jam owner Ken Feld, and a coaching partnership with Urban Meyer target New Town teens with non-crime-focused trust building
- The department's real-time operations center, the Rock, taps privately owned cameras through signed agreements to track suspects across state lines without building new city infrastructure
- Autonomous first-responder drones are roughly two to three years from deployment for routine calls like noise complaints
“You can win the Super Bowl one time and get lucky, but let's win it two years in a row.”
“Without law and order, there is no economy, there is no Main Street.”
Places mentioned: New Town, Booker High School