Meet Jon Marston, St. Augustine’s new police chief

St. Augustine has a new police chief: Jon Marston.

He took over the St. Augustine Police Department after the retirement of the first female chief of police, Jennifer Michaux.

With 17 years of experience working in law enforcement, Marston says he wants to maintain the department’s existing standards while putting an emphasis on officer development.

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“The major thing is, we have a great police department,” Marston says. “It’s not like I’m taking over a mess.”

From the frosty north to St. Augustine

Originally from Maine, Marston found his way to St. Augustine in the early 2000s after following a friend down.

Eventually, he couldn’t say no to Florida’s fairer climate.

“One year, when I came and visited him on spring break — I think it was February — I went back to Maine, I went to work, stepped out of my vehicle, stepped in about a foot of slush and had to work the whole day with my feet cold and wet and everything,” Marston recalls. “And I said, I’m done with this.”

Since he moved to St. Augustine in 2004, Martson says the area has certainly gotten busier, but he’s not really in a position to judge the influx of new St. Johns County residents.

“I see all the comments online and stuff of people saying, ‘Stop moving here,’ and all this stuff, but I can’t say that because I guess I’m part of the problem,” Marston says with a laugh. “I loved it down here, so I moved down here too. And that’s the problem when you live in such a great place.”

He transferred from one grocery management job in Maine to another in St. Augustine. After leaving that job, Marston took a position as a security guard at the local outlet mall. That’s where he came into contact with local law enforcement officers.

St. Augustine Police Department Chief Jon Marston | St. Augustine Police Department

The officers he met were kind, he says, and showed him that he might be interested in a career change.

“Security officers can’t do a lot of things,” Marson says. “I could see people steal; I could call the Sheriff’s Office. But by the time everybody showed up, I couldn’t stop anybody, and it was very frustrating.”

And while he says he had never considered law enforcement as a potential career. “I was a typical teenage kid that thought police just keep us from having fun,” Marston says. He believes it fit his personality well.

“I kind of was like the anti-bully in high school,” he says. “When I knew other kids were getting picked on, I would (say), ‘Stop that.’ And so that’s kind of what I do on a greater level.”

A ‘leap of faith’

Marston “took the leap of faith” and signed up for the police academy, and he was hired by the St. Augustine Police Department in 2008.

Since then, his record shows only four disciplinary actions, including two failures to work off-duty detail in 2010, a failure to show up for a “mandatory photo shoot” in 2011 and a late arrival for an off-duty assignment in 2012.

Marston’s two most recent evaluations by his supervisors stated he “exceeds expectations,” with his 2024 evaluation stating that he is “a wealth of knowledge” and “performs all duties with self-confidence” and his 2025 evaluation stating that he is “always early to work” — even off-duty assignments.

Marston listed his own goals for the new year in his 2025 evaluation. Those included working on his time management, becoming more organized and maintaining a positive attitude when mentoring other officers to improve department morale.

Focusing on leadership

Since he was first hired by the St. Augustine Police Department in 2008, Marston has worked in various roles from leading the department’s special response team to training other officers.

Marston says training has been an especially rewarding area and a key part of how he views being the department’s new chief.

“I’m very big on developing people into leadership, into learning people’s personalities and what fulfills them, and tapping into what they want to do to be better,” he says.

One key to that, and one of his goals as the department’s new chief, is to ensure officers get more training earlier in their law enforcement careers, Marston says.

Right now, he explains, the department has moved some sergeants from division to division to help them better understand the department’s inner workings.

“I’m trying to set it up so that corporals do that, so that once they become sergeants, they can kind of really be in the places that suit them best and moving up,” Marston says.

He was officially sworn in as the department’s new chief Tuesday. Speaking before the St. Augustine City Commission the day before that, Marston told Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline and other elected officials that he and the rest of the department are “looking forward to the future.”