City of Milton hires new police chief
MILTON, Fla. (WKRG) — The City of Milton has a new police chief.
According to a news release from the city, Jennifer M. Frank will step into the role in April.
Angie Stone dies in car crash after performing at MAMGA Grand Marshal's Ball
City officials said she is the first woman police chief in Northwest Florida and the 21st in Florida.
'I'm not the first female police chief—I'm just Chief,' Frank said. 'If you show up, do the work, and hold your own, gender doesn't matter. Breaking the glass ceiling is one thing, but bringing others with you is what truly matters.'
Frank has served 19 years in law enforcement including tenures with Plymouth State Police, Norwich Police Department and Windsor Police Department. She was most recently the Windsor Police Chief in Vermont where she came up with 'community driven policing strategies that reduced violent crime calls by 50%,' according to Milton officials.
The Windsor Police Department also received the National Leadership in Community Policing Award in 2023 under Frank.
Frank's career has included traditional policing and even presidential security details for public figures such as President George W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, President Joe Biden, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, New York Governor George Pataki, and presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.
Frank was a teacher before becoming an officer. She once had to disarm a student she mentored when he entered the classroom with a 9mm gun.
She emphasizes staying connected with the community and working with the next generation as she launched a cadet program in 2008 and has mentored at-risk youth over the last 16 years.
'We've had kids enter the program because they made poor choices,' Frank said. 'They start with community service, but then they become the rockstars and leaders of the program. Some of them even become officers and, more importantly, great humans.'
'Some people need a diversion program, some need a ticket, and some need jail,' she continued. 'Our goal is always to be the least intrusive while ensuring safety. When we eliminate dangers—whether it's crime, or something as simple as giving kids a safe place to be after school—we make a real difference.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Former Bayou La Batre police officer B.J. Squires arrested again
Editor's Note: We have updated this article to correct the cause for Squires' arrest. MOBILE, Ala. (WKRG) — A former Bayou La Batre police officer who was arrested in November has now been arrested again, has learned. MCSO: One detained in Eight Mile shooting on Markris Circle According to a Mobile County Sheriff's Office news release, B.J. Squires was arrested today after violating the terms of his bond. Squires was arrested in November following an investigation by the sheriff's office and the Mobile County District Attorney's Office. That investigation led to a grand jury indictment on charges of first-degree rape, second-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse and second-degree sexual abuse, the release said. The terms of his bond required Squires to 'not depart from State,' but the DA's office received information that Squires had gone to a baseball game in Biloxi, Miss., June 5, the release said. The DA's office immediately filed a motion to revoke Squires' bond and signed a warrant for his arrest, the release said. Hundreds run across iconic Mobile bridge to help Africatown Mobile County Sheriff's deputies found Squires today and arrested him, along with two other individuals, on Dauphin Island Parkway, the release stated. The two with Squires, 52-year-old Frankie Goss and 53-year-old Jeffrey Goss, were charged with first-degree hindering the prosecution. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Germany's first lady, an active judge, to retire this month
Elke Büdenbender, the wife of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a judge, is set to retire at the end of this month, she told dpa on Tuesday. "After 30 years as a judge - including breaks - I will retire in June from the judiciary," Büdenbender told dpa in Berlin. The 63-year-old said she would continue her duties as Germany's first lady. "Of course I will continue to accompany my husband in the remaining years of his term and attend to my duties at [the official presidential residence] Bellvue," she added. Büdenbender's husband, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was elected German president in 2017. Büdenbender served as a judge at the Berlin Administrative Court since 2000, but took leave after her husband was elected the 12th German president. He was re-elected for a second term in February 2022. Büdenbender returned to working part-time at the court in May 2022. She continued to fulfil her role as first lady, albeit it a somewhat reduced form, accompanying her husband less frequently on trips abroad. "It was a pleasure for me to be able to return to my court for a few more years at the end of my professional career as a judge," Büdenbender said on Tuesday. "The profession of judge is exciting, sometimes challenging, and I have enjoyed doing this job all my professional life." The couple married in 1995 and have a daughter, according to the presidential website. In 2010, Steinmeier donated a kidney to his wife, who was suffering from organ failure. "The donation has given me a life," Büdenbender said in an interview with German magazine BUNTE last year. Due to the disease, she is able to retire earlier.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Contributor: California's long history of National Guard overreaction to peaceful protesters
American history has the receipts. As we approach the 250th anniversary of this nation's birth, it ought to be common knowledge that putting the National Guard into the center of turmoil is not to be taken at all lightly. Federalizing the California Guard to quell a supposed insurrection on the streets of greater Los Angeles is a bold move of presidential showmanship and look-tough opportunism. It is also risky on many fronts. We have been here before, and we would be wise to heed history's caution. In the spring of 1894, a nationwide railroad strike, spreading out from the outskirts of Chicago, paralyzed freight and passenger rail traffic up and down California. Strikers took to the streets, occupied railroad depots, often with their families, waved signs, and erected tents and hastily constructed shanties. In Oakland, strikers who had 'killed' a locomotive covered it in black crepe. Political leaders and railroad officials insisted that the strikers were insurrectionists ripping at the fabric of the republic. But the public did not necessarily see things the same way. Strikers who were hunkered down in Northern California depots took in provisions from farmers loyal to their cause. A U.S. marshal sent to Sacramento to clear them out and get the trains moving was beaten up and insisted later that the local police force was sympathetic to the strikers. Judging the Sacramento situation as an insurrection, Gov. H.H. Markham of Pasadena called up the National Guard, which mustered first in San Francisco on July 3. Some elderly Civil War veterans volunteered for duty but were politely turned away. Instead, young California guardsmen, each given 20 rounds of ammunition, marched to the Bay amid a jeering crowd, took a ferry to Oakland and tried to get to Sacramento by train. But all train service had been interrupted by the strike, and skilled rail operators did not want to cross the picket lines. After nine hours, the exhausted guardsmen arrived in Sacramento early on the morning of July 4 — having taken a train through a circuitous route to avoid trouble. They marched to the city armory, then on to the occupied depot, where they were met by Sacramento members of the National Guard who were already deployed. Guardsmen — about 1,000 weekend warriors — stood in the hot sun, rifles at the ready alongside the Gatling gun they brought, facing the railroad strikers camped out in the depot with their wives and children. One Guardsman's gun went off accidentally, killing a bystander. Officers ordered their men to fix their bayonets and, if ordered to shoot, to 'aim to kill.' One Sacramento unit reported that its men would not fire on their friends and relatives. Other Guardsmen wore their sympathies on their sleeves and lapels: pro-striker buttons. The strikers and their families began to mingle with the phalanx of guardsmen. 'Frank, if you kill me you make your sister a widow,' one striker informed her brother-in-law in the Guard. Some guardsmen removed the ammunition from their weapons; others lowered them and just wandered away — toward the lemonade and ice that the protesters themselves provided. The strikers stayed in the depot for weeks. The whole thing was a chaotic farce. Matters were hardly any less tense in Southern California. People lined the streets of downtown Los Angeles, chanting and cheering for the strikers, many of whom wore American flag lapels. Photographs of goings on in Sacramento and the Bay Area got passed from one Angeleno to another in the crowd. Guardsmen in L.A. expressed the same kind of trepidation about bringing militarized force to bear on the strikers. 'If we had to fight Indians or some common enemy,' one guardsman offered in a revelatory admission, 'we might have some fun and excitement. But this idea of shooting down American citizens simply because they are on strike for what they consider their rights is a horse of another color. All of the boys are against it from first to last, and many are in sympathy with the strikers.' In hindsight, the federal and state response to the rail strike of 1894 appears to have lacked some consideration of unintended consequences. Calling in the Guard only created chaos, emboldened the strikers and, for a time at least, sustained much of the public's support. The federal government, with some seeing 1894 as 'the greatest crisis in our history,' allied with the rail corporations in a set of legal maneuverings that led to the deployment of federal troops across the country. As the strike dissipated, each side tried to take the high ground of intention and behavior: The crisis was lawlessness or it was unwarranted government overreach. Though it is too soon to know how things will play out here in L.A. this time, nothing looks good from the rough scenes in downtown and the adjacent freeway exits and entrances. Mark Twain said that 'history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.' Here we have that rhyme written in the latest Los Angeles verse of our tense world. The administration's move to federalize the Guard in the name of quelling a domestic insurrection has poured more gasoline onto the tinder of our times here in the Southland. Deverell is a professor of history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
