Commissioner reacts to state attorney ruling in death of Christopher Jordan

On Monday, the detective who fired the fatal shot that killed Christopher Jordan in his Fort Myers home went back to work.

His return comes just days after the state attorney says his actions were justified despite investigators never finding a gun.

As the black community and the Fort Myers Police Department deal with a fractured relationship, Fort Myers City Councilman Johnny Streets hopes the detective isn’t just jumping back in.

“Is he ready? What protocol do we have for him to re-enter? Does he have to go to some type of training, like sensitivity and multicultural training?” said Streets.

Councilman Streets doesn’t just have a title in this city. He grew up here and was a police officer.

Going forward, he hopes people don’t harp on dividing themselves into camps about whether the state attorney’s decision, “The detective was justified,” was right or wrong.

He believes we all need to come together on a common goal: making changes so that this doesn’t happen again.

“As Dr. King said, we still got some difficult days ahead. And we don’t need to be fighting each other,” said Streets.

Streets wants everyone to come together—Chief Fields, the State Attorney’s Office, the community, the city manager, and the mayor—to have these conversations.

He said this tragic incident can be an opportunity to fix broken parts of the system, “whether it be training, whether it be getting more experienced officers because I think that’s one of the biggest problems that I see in a lot of apartments, particularly FMPD. It’s relatively young,” said Streets.

He also sees weak points in the department of “community policing.”

Police were called to the home on Stella Street more than a dozen times in 2023 alone.

“A community-policing officer would say, ‘Well, wait a minute. We’ve been here these many times. Where’s the intervention? Surely there are some problems in this house.’ said Streets, “So we need to either make some recommendations about mental health, recommendations about domestic violence.'”

On Thursday, the NAACP will host a protest outside the state attorney’s office. Streets believes getting people around the table and finding solutions is a better way to move forward.