AWCA

09/02/2026

A 180 indeed.

ty MP

BREAKING NEWS - FLOCK CAMERAS TO BE REMOVED IN SANTA ROSA COUNTY: Santa Rosa County Chief Deputy Randy Tifft has confirmed that Flock cameras will be removed in Santa Rosa County. Tifft said a news release from Sheriff Bob Johnson is forthcoming. Developing story...

UPDATE: SANTA ROSA COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE ENDS USE OF
AUTOMATED LICENSE PLATE READER SYSTEM

Sheriff Bob Johnson has directed the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office to end its use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. The agency will discontinue the program as Florida continues to examine the placement, regulation, data practices, and oversight associated with this technology.

The decision comes after the Florida Department of Transportation revoked access to state right-of-way locations used for license plate reader cameras. Sheriff Johnson said that development, combined with broader questions surrounding the collection and sharing of vehicle-location data, makes this an appropriate time for the Sheriff’s Office to step away from the program.

“These cameras have helped law enforcement, and I am not going to suggest otherwise,” Johnson said. “They can provide investigators with information that helps locate suspects, stolen vehicles, and people who may be in danger. But a useful tool still has to operate within clear rules that the public understands and trusts.”

Sheriff Johnson said his concern is not with the manner in which Santa Rosa County deputies have used the system. Rather, the issue is the larger environment in which ALPR information may be stored, exchanged, accessed, and governed as the technology expands beyond any single law enforcement agency.

“I am confident in the way our people have handled this technology,” Johnson said. “The bigger question is what happens to information once these systems become interconnected and more widely used. Citizens should not have to wonder who can see their information, how long it remains available, or where it may ultimately be shared.”

The Sheriff’s Office believes any future statewide framework should clearly address who may access ALPR information, the legitimate law enforcement purposes for which it may be used, how long data may be retained, when information may be shared outside the originating agency, and what auditing and accountability measures are required.
Sheriff Johnson said the agency would be willing to reconsider the technology in the future if Florida establishes a clear and consistent legal framework that balances legitimate law enforcement needs with meaningful protections for individual privacy.

“Sometimes leadership means being willing to stop using something that works until you are satisfied the rules surrounding it are where they need to be,” Johnson said. “I would rather step away now and allow the Legislature and appropriate state agencies to establish clear standards than continue forward while those questions remain unsettled.”

The change will not alter the Sheriff’s Office’s approach to protecting the community. Deputies and investigators will continue to rely on proactive patrol, criminal investigations, intelligence, direct observations by law enforcement officers, community cooperation, and partnerships with local, state, and federal agencies.

“Santa Rosa County was safely policed before license plate readers existed, and our deputies will continue doing their jobs without them,” Sheriff Johnson said. “Technology can assist good police work, but it does not replace good deputies, strong investigations, relationships with our citizens, or common sense.”

The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office will continue to monitor changes in Florida law and policy regarding automated license plate reader systems. Any future decision to resume use of the technology would be based on the legal standards in place at that time and the Sheriff’s determination that adequate safeguards exist for the citizens of Santa Rosa County.

“Our responsibility is straightforward,” Sheriff Johnson said. “We are here to protect people, enforce the law, and respect the rights of the citizens we serve. We can be aggressive about public safety without losing sight of privacy and individual liberty.”

08/25/2026

In the 1830s, a town on the Florida panhandle coast was so rich and rowdy it was called the wickedest city in the Southeast. 🏚️ A decade later it had vanished so completely that today you would never know it existed. This was old St. Joseph.

For a brief, glittering moment, St. Joseph was a booming port with fine hotels, a racetrack, and one of the busiest harbors in the region. It even hosted the convention that wrote Florida's first state constitution in 1838. Money and ambition flowed through its streets. Then the disasters came in a merciless string. A ship reportedly carried yellow fever into the port, and the epidemic tore through the crowded town, killing a huge share of the population and sending survivors fleeing in terror. 🌫️

As if that were not enough, a powerful hurricane later swept in and finished the job, driving the sea over what remained. Within a few short years the wickedest city in the Southeast was a ghost, its buildings gone, its people scattered or dead. The modern town of Port St. Joe eventually rose nearby, but the original boomtown simply disappeared from the map. ⚰️

It is eerie to think a whole thriving city could vanish so completely in a single decade. Had you ever heard of Florida's forgotten boomtown of old St. Joseph?

08/16/2026

❤️

08/15/2026

08/06/2026

A silent hero.

ty Jason ❤️

Nobody in Walton County knew who was buying up the Panhandle. Timber companies sold him tract after tract. Sod farms. Played-out peanut fields. Pine that had been cut and cut again. The buyer was a timber and oil commodities trader, and he never told a single seller what he wanted it for.

He was buying it so it could NEVER be developed again.

Marion Clifton Davis grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in the Florida Panhandle. He summed up the whole childhood in one sentence: "I grew up with five other people in 300 square feet in a wore-out trailer on a dirt road."

He gambled his way out, hustling pool and poker from the time he was 16 until he was 30. It paid for a political science degree and then a law degree. He moved the winnings into land and mineral rights, and they turned into hundreds of millions of dollars.

He had spent his entire life climbing out of that trailer, and he got all the way to the top of it. Then he said this: "I finally made some money and it wasn't what it was advertised to be."

What changed him was a traffic jam. Stuck in a line of cars going nowhere, he read a high school marquee advertising a presentation on the Florida black bear. He pulled out of the line and walked in.

"I hate to confess to this. I didn't know Florida even had black bears at the time." He gave the two women running the presentation enough money to keep going for another two years, then asked them for a reading list and spent the next year working through Thoreau, John Muir, and a Harvard biologist named E.O. Wilson.

In 2000, he started buying. He spent roughly $90 million assembling more than 50,000 acres along the Choctawhatchee River, tract by tract, never tipping his hand until each deal closed. He named it Nokuse. It is the Muscogee word for black bear.

Then he did the thing no land man does. He took it apart. His crews thinned 22,000 acres of pulpwood pine and hand-planted EIGHT MILLION longleaf seedlings across 24,000 acres, scattered in deliberately random patterns so the forest would never come back in rows. They burned about 10,000 acres a year on purpose, because longleaf needs fire.

He told people it was a 300-year project.

In 2009 he spent $12 million of his own money on a 28,000-square-foot science center for Panhandle schoolkids. He named it for E.O. Wilson. Not for himself.

In November 2014, doctors found stage 4 lung cancer. He kept working. That June he sat down with a national radio crew and said it plainly: "I'm dying, as we all are. It's well advanced."

He got 15 years of the 300.

M.C. Davis died on July 11, 2015, eight months after the diagnosis. Not one tree he planted had grown tall enough to matter yet.

He spent thirty years learning how to take. He spent the rest putting it back.

Around here, thousands of Panhandle fourth graders get loaded onto a school bus and driven out to that center. Almost none of them ever find out who paid for the trip.

Then the bears came back.

They cross under US 331 now, through three wildlife underpasses finished in 2012, funneled in by a mile and a half of fence on both sides of the four-lane highway. The man who did not know Florida had black bears built them a way under the road. They den on land named after them.

Nokuse Preserve is 56,258 acres today, endowed and permanently protected, the largest private conservation project east of the Mississippi River. More than 3,800 gopher tortoises pulled off Florida development sites have been released there since 2006. In 2025 the E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center took in 5,500 students from 56 schools, and it charged none of them a dollar.

A longleaf pine can live 400 years. The seedlings put in the ground in 2004 are barely out of childhood, and the forest he was actually aiming at will not stand until sometime around the year 2300. He knew that when he wrote the checks.

M.C. Davis, a poor kid from a dirt road, spent everything he ever won on a forest he would never walk through. Nobody alive will get to thank him. The people it was built for have not been born yet.

That was the whole point.

07/17/2026

Bunch of $ #!+ stirring, anti-American broadcasting didn't stop our Blues and didn't stop us from watching our Presidential Address about the declassified documents being released in re. the "tampered with" 2020 Presidential election!
❤️‍🩹💙🇺🇲

On Wednesday, officials with the Blue Angels said they were conducting a review after social media footage showed the jet flying low over a crowd of beachgoers.