A part-time Pensacola police officer drove home from his airport security shift — and stopped to buy hydrocodone along the way. In uniform. In his marked patrol car.
PENSACOLA, Fla. — Matthew Baxter, 47, was arrested Monday, October 12 after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Pensacola Police Department wrapped a joint investigation into repeated purchases of prescription opioids — with no prescription at all. The tip reached FDLE less than a week before the cuffs went on. He was picked up in uniform, in his PPD cruiser, and booked into the Escambia County Jail on felony narcotics charges under a $15,000 bond. The department terminated him within days.
The joint press conference Tuesday was where the story stopped being routine. Police Chief Eric Winstrom didn’t spin it. He called the arrest a “self-inflicted black eye” on the department and said plainly that it makes him “very angry.”
“When he arrived to purchase drugs in uniform and in a marked police car, with all the history and knowledge he has in his head about how this impacts the world that we live in, it was just extra destructive,” Winstrom said.
Then came the question nobody wanted to ask out loud. Alongside his airport security shifts at Pensacola International, Baxter had been picking up random school security details around the city. Reporters wanted to know whether any of the pills ever moved near schools.
“My instinct so far is this is all adult transactions,” Winstrom said. So far. FDLE confirmed the investigation is active, with agents still working leads — and more charges on the table.
The badge history makes it worse, not better. Baxter was hired by Pensacola PD full-time in 2001, bounced through several other agencies after leaving in 2005, and came back part-time in 2018. That’s over two decades around the badge — including the years specifically spent learning, on shift after shift, exactly what opioids do to a community. He wasn’t an SRO, the chief clarified, but he was the adult in the room at schools across the city on random security shifts.
And the mugshot you won’t see? That’s not a choice by anyone. Florida law exempts law enforcement booking photos from public release — one of the few states that does. The booking never surfaces, the case moves on, and the public record stays a little lighter for the people who wore the badge.
Presumed innocent until a court says otherwise. But a 25-year officer sitting in a marked patrol car buying hydrocodone on the drive home from airport security is about as self-inflicted as a black eye gets — the chief’s own words.
