St. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Friday morning at the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, flanked by deputies and K-9s as he signed two bills that he said would further develop the state’s track record of supporting law enforcement.
“We’re going to do a couple bills that I think provide support for people who are wearing the uniform and recognizes that, you know, we’ve got some strange currents going on in our society right now that really seek to delegitimize law enforcement and what they’re doing,” DeSantis said. “The first bill, SB 184, is going to prohibit the harassment of a police officer, first responder, when they’re actively doing their job. (...) The other bill is HB 601 and what it’s going to do is it really puts the kibosh on these extrajudicial investigations against law enforcement; they’ll set up these things called citizen review boards, usually in these very tilted, politically, jurisdictions, they’ll stack it with activists and they’ll just start reviewing things and trying to put people under the gun even if there’s no basis to do that.”
The bills, SB 184 and HB 601, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2025, and July 1 of this year, respectively.
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SB 184, “Impeding, Threatening, or Harassing First Responders,” is a two-page bill deeming it a second-degree misdemeanor to — after a warning — impede or interfere with a first responder’s ability to perform legal duties, threaten the first responder with physical harm or to “harass” them, which is defined in the legislation as to “willfully engage in a course of conduct directed at a first responder which intentionally causes substantial emotional distress in that first responder and serves no political purpose.”
Florida Rep. Alex Rizo, R-District 112, said that he lovingly refers to SB 184 as “the halo bill,” taking up the issue with what he claimed is the monetization of interactions with law enforcement.
“It was people that would just get up into an officer’s face who was on duty, put that camera right up in there for no reason other than to harass them, was basically putting this back onto social media, monetizing these interactions. I was disgusted with that frankly, and so I sat down with my my longtime friend, he’s like a brother to me, Al Palacio, who is the district director for FOP,” Rizo said. “We sat down at our favorite pizza place in our hometown and we started talking about it and I said, ‘What does ‘step back’ mean when a police officer says that?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s sort of subjective.’ What do you mean subjective? We’ve got to put something to that, we got to make something, we have to make that mean something.”
SB 184 does not contain language outright banning the filming of first responders. Locally however, so-called “First Amendment auditors” — people who exercise their right to record video in public places — have come under some heightened scrutiny as their actions relate to law enforcement settings. In DeLand, the city commission voted this week to ban video or audio recording inside of the police department’s lobby, citing an increase of incidents involving people attempting to record residents’ potentially sensitive conversations with receptionists.
HB 601, “Law Enforcement and Correctional Officers,” is a 12-page bill providing that civilian review boards created by “political subdivisions” — such as a board, city, office, town, county and so on, defined in the bill as “a separate agency or unit of local government” — may no longer receive, process or investigate any complaints of misconduct concerning individual law enforcement or correctional officers. The bill instead allows chiefs of police and county sheriffs to establish their own civilian oversight boards to review the policies and procedures of the law enforcement agency and its subdivisions, boards which must be comprised of at least three and up to seven members appointed by the chief or sheriff, one of whom must be a retired law enforcement officer, the text states.
The governor and his guests, including Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass, were adamant that HB 601 would not impede existing citizen review boards’ ability to meet and discuss such things as law enforcement policies and procedures, training culture, systemic issues and so on.
“I read ACLU’s comment today saying this would impede the community with the law enforcement. I say I wish ACLU would get things right instead of getting it wrong. If they would pay attention to how our state works, we have review boards, we have the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission that deals with every incident that’s referred, that’s mandatorily referred by state statute over to them,” Glass said. “Every agency has an internal affairs and if they don’t, they utilize another agency’s internal affairs to investigate an incident, whether it is to see if it’s criminal or non-criminal to the officer that it’s involved with. So right there is several different ways, also too let’s talk about the policies and procedures; policies and procedures are done, almost every agency within the state of Florida are accredited through the state accreditation and that’s what they look at, policies and procedures. So I commend this legislation, House Bill 601, establishing these oversight boards for looking at policies and procedures because that’s where it starts at, the policies and procedures. If they violate the policy and procedures, they’re held accountable by their agency. These men and women do not need to be scrutinized again and again by a committee that has no idea what they’re talking about.”
HB 601 also revises sheriffs’ base salaries, instituting $5,000 raises across the board. Sheriffs of counties with fewer than 49,999 residents will make a base salary of $33,350 as opposed to $28,350 while sheriffs of counties with a population over 1 million will get at least $48,575, previously $43,575.
DeSantis previewed the bills as necessary due in part to what he called a negative portrayal of law enforcement in media outlets.
The governor on Thursday signed 10 bills into law, including Senate Bill 1090, which increases penalties for breaking Florida’s laws regarding the sale of alcoholic beverages. Anyone who operates a place where these types of drinks are sold unlawfully can now face a third-degree felony charge, along with fines of $5,000 to $10,000. The law will take effect on July 1.
Watch Friday’s news conference again in the video player below:
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