MCSO transparency is woefully lacking
We feel the public should be asking: Why?

File Photo: Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods speaks about the arrest of two juveniles for the murders of three teenagers in the Ocala National Forest during a press conference at the Marion County Sheriff’s Office i n Ocala, Fla. on Friday, April 7, 2023. A third juvenile suspect is still at large. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2023.
This year, we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the launching of the “Ocala Gazette,” a bold step aimed at providing quality news reporting and commentary to our growing community, which desperately needed a fresh and aggressive news source.
Over the past five years, we’ve broken many significant local news stories and attempted to provide a voice to the marginalized, who often are denied a seat at the leaders’ table. We have established trust with countless readers, citizens and public officials throughout the county who appreciate the need for an informed populace.
But not every public official has welcomed the scrutiny we provide. Without doubt, the award for the most cantankerous and least transparent local agency goes to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and its leader, Sheriff Billy Woods.
For a public servant who stands steadfast in support of the Second Amendment, Wood seems to have forgotten the First Amendment. The department continues to hide behind a growing list of exemptions, high costs, veil of secrecy, threats to journalists, and outright disdain publicly for any independent questions.
This newspaper has asked for better communications with Woods and members of his agency time and again so we can report fairly and offer important context for some of the discrepancies we’ve discovered in his operation, but Woods repeatedly has refused. Instead, he avoids answering any direct questions by hiding behind public information officers and an attorney whom he uses to belittle or issue threats against our journalists.
For example, in 2024 the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) asked the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) to develop recommendations for police-media interactions during mass demonstrations. Law enforcement members and journalists across the country faced communication challenges after the protests following George Floyd’s 2020 murder and then the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by President Trump’s supporters at the Capitol. Leaders in both fields got together and developed some practical suggestions to improve tattered relationships.
We sent the report to the Woods’ office and the Ocala Police Department and asked if we could have an agreement in line with the report’s recommendations. A key recommendation was that during a riot, journalists should be allowed to stay and document independently how rioters are treated rather than the journalists being treated as rioters themselves and subject to the general order to disburse made to the larger crowd.
The report stresses the importance of independent accounts by journalists as vital in accurately portraying law enforcement’s treatment of protestors and building trust that things were handled correctly.
OPD Chief Michael Balken acknowledged the benefits of such an agreement for his department in the event of civil unrest locally, and the “Gazette” was able to communicate our policy on covering a demonstration to OPD. It reads: “General orders to disburse made by law enforcement to protestors will not apply to reporters covering a demonstration because reporters are not part of the demonstration nor are they doing anything illegal. If there is confusion at the scene, the reporter will identify themselves as a journalist to law enforcement and clarify they not part of a demonstration.”
Woods, through his lawyer Marissa Duquette, has refused to discuss the matter with us. He stated he would not come to such an agreement with the “Gazette” before a protest.
The frustrating, and ironic, part of this obstinance is that better communication between the newspaper and the sheriff’s office could improve the information we deliver and likely aid the messaging of the MCSO under the “iron sharpens iron” theory.
When it comes to emergency management, the Marion County Board of County Commissioners delegate the lion’s share of this responsibility to the MCSO. So far, our county has narrowly escaped catastrophic hurricane impacts.
However, the MCSO prevents media from attending any of the emergency management meetings that local officials and nonprofit organizations and select businesses are allowed to attend before, during and after an emergency and refuses to share the department’s planning information, saying it’s exempt.
This is a missed opportunity. It never hurts to have fresh eyes – in this case, professional questioners – to review an emergency plan and test emergency communications on before they are disseminated publicly. Case in point: Last October, as Hurricane Milton approached, the MCSO issued a “mandatory evacuation order for those living in mobile homes, RVs, modular-type homes, and any structure site-built before 1994.”
The mandatory evacuation caused quite a lot of panic because it impacted over 55,000 site-built homes, in addition to more than 30,000 mobile homes/RVs. Had we been with MCSO staff as they considered sending a message that required over 85,000 households to evacuate, with local shelter capacity of approximately 8,000, the “Gazette” would have pointed out that the math doesn’t work.
They walked the mandatory order back a few hours later, but the damage was done as news outlets had already set in motion reporting it.
Regular readers of the “Gazette” over the past year have likely noticed the significant time and resources we’ve put into explaining the dysfunctional policies controlling emergency communications in Marion County.
Over nearly a year we studied local emergency infrastructure and for many days we observed 911 call takers and fire/medical dispatch at the city and county call centers. We studied history, read local and nationally recommended practice and reached out with intelligent questions about why we do things differently in our community.
When the Gazette journalist asked to make a test call to see which local call center she’d ring to, the MCSO threatened the reporter with arrest despite the county’s approval- why? The county continues to grant authorization for test calls to concerned members of the public who make arrangements with the county’s 911 coordinators- as they should.
Response times, obviously, are the most important factor associated with emergency communications as far as the public is concerned. While we were granted access to observe the two 911 call centers in the county, we were not allowed to observe the MCSO dispatchers.
Our efforts are aimed at trying to understand how the MCSO prioritizes calls at the dispatch level and which resources are available to respond to 911 calls. Factor in that the MCSO does not prepare any reports that analyze response times, and we think the public does have reason to be concerned about what level of service they should expect in case of an emergency.
The allocation of resources matters. Marion County taxpayer dollars allotted to the MCSO have doubled since Woods took office, and state legislators have allowed the sheriff to move money between allocated budget items as he deems, further obscuring agency finances from public scrutiny.
As we all know, the area’s population growth has been through the roof over the past decade. Are we less safe now because of the strain that growth has put on resources? Without transparency from the MCSO, who knows?
Woods regularly says he needs more personnel when he comes to county commissioners with his budget demands. But there is virtually no accountability and little transparency to track the department’s effectiveness under his leadership.
There are some things MCSO does differently than other public safety agencies that make it difficult to grasp the call volume they are navigating and how it impacts response times. For instance, MCSO does not share what active calls it’s responding to like with other public safety agencies, including Marion County Fire Rescue, the OPD and the Florida Highway Patrol.
This past year, we had to go to court to obtain records from the MCSO that showed what the sheriff reported about the death of inmate Scott Whitley was an outright lie that was recited over and over again to different media outlets and other law enforcement agencies.
We’d like to further hold the MCSO accountable through public records from the sheriff, but these legal battles are costly and the department, which runs on taxpayer dollars, knows it.
When we recently read records prepared by MCSO staff indicating major shortfalls in medical care, the high level of deaths in custody, and the department’s inconsistent reporting to the state and investigation of them we asked for emails drafted by the same employee to members of MCSO leadership and the medical team at Heart of Florida.
The response was a bill for over $95,000. We narrowed the request to only emails from 2023 and 2024 and received a reduced bill: still, a whopping $20,218.10. Keep in mind, these are public records, created using the public’s money.
We’d ask all of you to please join us in demanding better transparency and cooperation from Woods and the MCSO so that you know if the agency is humanely incarcerating not just suspected criminals but the mentally ill, like Scott Whitley.
We think you would also like to know how quickly you can expect help when you call 911.
The saying goes, knowledge is power. That makes Woods the most powerful person in Marion County because he alone controls the amount of life-saving information you receive—which leaves you and your family in the dark and vulnerable.