Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri has won reelection for the third time, beating Democratic opponent Eliseo Santana.
Gualtieri won reelection with 63 percent of the vote, or 342,283 votes, compared to his Democratic opponent Eliseo Santana, who won 37 percent of the vote, or 204,686 votes.
Gualtieri has worked in law enforcement since the early 1980s and has been Pinellas County’s sheriff since he was appointed in 2011 by then-governor Rick Scott.
Asked why he ran for a third term, Gualtieri said there are several items on his to-do list that he’d like to see through. One of those items is the office’s mental health unit, which launched in 2016.
Recently, the sheriff’s office announced an expansion to its mental health unit that includes a “pilot” area where teams will respond to mental health calls 12 hours a day.
“We are in the process now to expand that unit, and it will probably take a couple of years to really build it out,” Gualtieri told 10 Tampa Bay during candidate interviews.
When asked what the first thing he would do to combat crime if re-elected, Gualtieri said “keep doing what we’re doing,” saying crime in the county is down 49.5 percent in the last 10 years.
To him, Gualtieri said the Black Lives Matter movement means “we have a race problem in this county, and we need to do it better and differently. And the first thing is to bring awareness to it and have hard conversations.”
When asked about mandatory body cameras for law enforcement, Gualtieri said “yes, we’re going in that direction.”
Last week, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office began implementing its new body-worn camera program. The initial phase is a field trial, outfitting 30 deputies with the devices. The agency hopes the trial phase will help work through logistics and lead to the drafting of a policy that will end with more than 800 deputies getting body cameras.
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