The county population has steadily increased as the City of Pensacola and its surrounding bedroom communities continue to grow with residential and commercial development.

Historic American Indian tribes at the time of European-American settlement were the Pensacola and Muscogee, known among the English as the Creek.

Escambia County had been part of Spanish colonial settlement before the United States acquired it in 1818.

Essentially, the Escambia county government had jurisdiction over the "panhandle" and "big bend" areas, and St. Johns over the remainder of the entire state.

The following is a list of broadcast television stations in the Mobile, Alabama – Pensacola – Fort Walton Beach, Florida market.

Spectrum holds the cable television franchise for the county's mainland rural areas, while Mediacom serves the Pensacola Beach community on Santa Rosa Island.

[20] Pensacola was a scheduled stop on the route of Amtrak's Los Angeles-Orlando Sunset Limited from 1993 to 2005, when damage to railroad bridges and tracks caused by Hurricane Katrina resulted in cancellation of the route east of New Orleans.

The current office holders are, [21] In 2011, the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division issued a letter detailing the results of its investigation into conditions at Escambia County Jail, which houses roughly 1,300 prisoners.

The department found that, although Sheriff David Morgan had recently implemented a series of reforms, conditions at the jail still routinely violated prisoners' constitutional rights.

Additionally, the department found that, until recently, the jail had an informal policy and practice of segregating its housing units, reserving one for African-American prisoners.

According to the Department of Justice, this race-based segregation stigmatized and discriminated against many of the prisoners, and aggravated racial tensions in the jail.

[22] Between April 2012 and March 2013, the prison recorded 176 inmate-on-inmate assaults, including 20 serious head wounds.

[23] The investigation released a letter of findings: The Department of Justice concluded from these facts that Escambia County Jail's practices violated the fourteenth amendment's due process protections for pre-trial detainees, as well as the eighth amendment's protections for those convicted of a criminal offense.

Jail officials must refrain from showing deliberate indifference to conditions of confinement posing an excessive risk of harm to prisoners.

[23] Roy L. Austin Jr., deputy assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, commended Sheriff Morgan for his willingness to remedy problems identified during the course of the investigation.

The department conducted this investigation under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) to enforce constitutional mandates.

According to the secretary of state's office, Republicans constitute a plurality of registered voters in Escambia County.

This was particularly the case in the decades of the 20th century when most African Americans were disenfranchised by the state constitution until the federal Voting Rights Act passed.

Voters of the county have not supported a Democratic presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy in 1960.

In 2020, Joe Biden was the first Democratic presidential nominee to win over 40% of the county's vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

This article incorporates public domain material from Findings Letter of Investigation of Escambia County Jail (PDF).