- April 26, 2024
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The Sarasota Sheriff’s Office had its 15 minutes — or holiday weekend — of fame, when the whole world heard the story of an 11-foot alligator in a pool in Sarasota County.
Early the morning of March 31, deputies responded to a call to help remove an alligator from a backyard pool in Calusa Lakes, Nokomis, where it was resting after breaking through the screened enclosure.
That night, the Sheriff’s Office was hosting a virtual ride-along, known as its Tweet From the Beat initiative. An entire shift was documented online, giving followers the chance for a real-time updates.
As part of that, a photo of the huge gator in a pool, and subsequent videos of it swimming through the clear water and being pulled out, went online.
“Just no,” read one of the department’s tweets about the situation.
Communications Director Kaitlyn Perez was at the scene of a three-vehicle crash when she got the pictures, and couldn’t make it to the scene herself.
“I so wish I had been out there,” she said. “This is pretty significant.”
That became more and more apparent the longer the photos were online. Perez went to bed around 4 a.m., and within an hour, woke up to lots of phone calls.
ABC, NBC, TIME and BBC were among the news outlets that called her for interviews and more information, as well as the local media. It even showed up on a news station in Albania.
And on April 1, the story was memorialized in a Twitter Moment and promoted to the social media platform’s homepage.
“There was nothing happening in the entire world in that moment that was being talked about more than a gator,” Perez said. “That is so cool.”
Ultimately, the video they posted was viewed thousands of times on social media and YouTube, and the office gained about 300 followers on Twitter.
Although Tweet from the Beat wasn’t meant to make the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office go viral, it does try to show residents what deputies do during their shifts.
“We can’t expect the community to understand what it is that we do. We have to show them what it is that we do.”
That being said, no one expected that would involve capturing the world’s attention with an 11-foot alligator in a pool.
“You just don’t know what you’re going to come across,” Perez said. “There’s never a dull moment in law enforcement.”
