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Some kids dream about growing up to become a firefighter, a U.S. Marine, an FBI agent or a lawyer; David Charles Cox, the city of Lakeland’s new emergency management director, became all four.
Cox, 53, took the emergency management helm at the beginning of November – three weeks after one of Lakeland’s worst natural disasters left neighborhoods flooded along the shores of Lake Bonny.
Street cred: “We’re excited to have him on board,” City Manager Shawn Sherrouse said at Friday’s City Commission agenda study session. Sherrouse then rattled off a list of Cox’s accomplishments that sounded like something from a Jason Bourne movie:
- 28-year Marine Corps veteran with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and northern Africa. He remains a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves.
- 20-year FBI agent and supervisor in organized crime, gang task force, white collar crimes and public corruption divisions.
- A crisis-management coordinator on mass shootings, kidnappings, counter-terrorism events and special events –– including Super Bowls and New Year’s Eve celebrations as part of his FBI duties.
- A volunteer firefighter.
- A practicing attorney in Florida.
“I don’t like hearing about myself,” Cox told the commission, joking that the description “sounds like a jerk.”
Responsibilities: Cox, the sole employee of the Emergency Management Department, will be working closely with Lakeland Police Chief Sam Taylor and Fire Chief Doug Riley.
Taylor said Monday that he met with Cox during the interview process and “liked him right away. I look forward to working with him and I’m excited to see where he takes our city’s emergency operations.”
When asked if he would have more responsibilities than his predecessors, City Manager Shawn Sherrouse said the emergency manager role has not changed from the duties performed by Audrey Cain and former LPD Chief Ruben Garcia. They are defined as:
“Planning, programming, budgeting, coordinating, and managing all aspects of the comprehensive city-wide Emergency Management Plan. The emergency manager is responsible for ensuring that strategies, policies, and plans are developed and formulated to achieve a plan that supports the goals and objectives of the city manager.” Cox will also:
- Supervise and administer all emergency and non-emergency preparedness activities.
- Develop exercises and drills to test and evaluate emergency plans and procedures.
- Analyze and prepare statistics and records for educational purposes.
- Facilitate communication and teamwork among city departments and external agencies.
Sherrouse said the city is prepared for hurricanes, but he wants to ensure safety on a wider scale.
“My concerns have been toward our emergency postures for other less common events, like civil unrest, mass shootings, crowd control at special events, aircraft crashes, etc.,” Sherouse said via email. “David’s past experiences, managing similar emergency events, will strengthen our abilities to mitigate, prepare, respond and recover.”
Background: Cox grew up in New Jersey and signed up as a volunteer firefighter the moment he was eligible – when he turned 16 years old, inspired by his firefighter grandfather.
After he graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in finance, he was hoping to join the Marines, but things fell through at that time and he went to law school. While at home, helping to take care of his sick mother, he met another military recruiter and they signed him up, but wanted him to remain in law school at Seton Hall University.
“And the irony of that is, after all of that, I went in and only practiced law for practically a year, you know, maybe a little more,” Cox said. “And then I got a chance to be a commander and then the war started.”
For Cox, the attack on the World Trade Center was personal. His father worked in one of the smaller WTC buildings, but made it home alive that day.
Cox started at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as a prosecutor and defense counsel. Three months after the Sept. 11 attacks, he became a company commander at Camp Lejeune, then deployed to Kuwait and invaded Iraq.
As a reservist, between 2019-2021, he was director of the Northeast Syria Coordination Group as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the counter-ISIS mission. In that role, he helped to oversee the security of 29 detention centers. He also coordinated and carried out efforts to release former ISIS fighters and their family members to host nations, requiring extensive coordination with the Department of State, the host nation, CENTCOM, and other agencies.
Cox said he and other American officials would go to embassies or other countries’ equivalent of a state department “and try to convince them of the benefits of repatriating ISIS fighters that (held) citizenship in those countries, and try them under their laws, as we were doing,” Cox said.
“The problem was the United States has counter-terrorism laws like no other country in the world. So there was a lot of hesitation to bring hardened fighting terrorists back into the city center of Paris and London and Rome and wherever we wanted to ask them to bring them, where they don’t have strong counterterrorism laws, and then have them released into society again. So it’s very challenging.”
G-man: In 2004, he and his wife had a discussion and they decided he would join the Federal Bureau of Investigations and become a Marine reservist.
He worked first in New York City in counter-terrorism, creating strategic partnerships among city, state and federal law enforcement organizations and prosecutors’ offices to share intelligence, create joint investigative teams, conduct tactical operations, collect evidence, and prepare cases for prosecution. He also worked on assessing evidence gathered overseas.
He shifted gears and worked in the bureau’s Washington, D.C., office, continuing to investigate terrorism, along with auditing terrorism cases and briefing the national intelligence director and White House officials.
In West Paterson, New Jersey, he headed a white-collar crimes unit. Between 2016 and 2020, he was the FBI liaison to Special Operations Command Central. Following that, he returned to New Jersey, where he was supervisory special agent of that office’s Safe Streets and Gang Task Force and the Violent Crimes Task Force.
For the last two years, he has served as the FBI senior advisor to the U.S. Southern Command in Tampa, working as the sole FBI advisor to one of only 11 four-star combatant commanders.
Currently a Tampa resident, he has also been working as a lawyer in St. Petersburg.
Cox started Nov. 4 and earns $99,527.66 annually. The position had been vacant following Garcia’s retirement in March.
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David is amazing, Lakeland is so lucky to have him on board!!
100 large a year. Geez.