Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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June 9
The Orlando Sentinel on requiring authorities to wear body cameras:
Imagine the possible outcome if a video recording had not captured Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck.
No matter how many eyewitnesses might have described the brutality that ended Floyd’s life, Chauvin and his fellow officers could have easily concocted an alternative reality where Floyd was resisting the entire time, or he was posing a threat to the police, or he never begged officers to let him breathe, or that Chauvin had never pinned Floyd to the ground with a knee on his neck in the first place.
The video, however, didn’t lie. And because of it, we know what happened to Floyd.
But what if bystanders with cell phones hadn’t been around, or hadn’t recorded the scene? Or what if there hadn’t been any roadside video surveillance?
Those what-ifs are why the Florida Legislature needs to mandate that every patrol officer in Florida must be equipped with a body-worn camera.
Every last one of them.
The law should include real consequences for officers who conveniently forget to activate their cameras, or deliberately turn them off to avoid scrutiny. And it should require the state to help departments pay the expense of the equipment and the digital storage required.
This is a no-brainer, assuming Florida has even a passing interest in addressing the injustices behind recent protests across the nation. State Sen. Randolph Bracy has called for a special session to take up body cameras and other reforms. The governor and legislative leaders should heed his call.
Body cameras are not the answer to police brutality. Not even close.
But it’s a start, and it’s not unprecedented.
South Carolina (that’s not a misprint) passed just such a law in 2015 after Walter Scott, a black man who was fleeing, was shot in the back multiple times by a white police officer in North Charleston. The department tried to lie about the incident but got caught when a bystander’s video of the incident went public.
The law was good P.R. for then Gov. Nikki Haley, but it was riddled with loopholes. The state didn’t provide departments with money to buy cameras. Police weren’t disciplined for failing to use them. And South Carolina lawmakers exempted the footage from public disclosure.
Florida toyed with the idea of mandating body cameras that same year, partly in reaction to the 2014 police shooting deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. But the bill went nowhere, and the state instead seized the opportunity to create a new public-records exemption for body-cam video. The following year the state approved a law requiring law enforcement agencies that use body-worn cameras to have policies guiding their use.
More half measures, more excuses.
Many of Florida’s police departments and sheriff’s offices have equipped their patrol officers with body cameras.
But as long as it’s optional, some departments won’t.
In Lake County, a place burdened with an ugly racial past, Sheriff Peyton Grinnell’s department is an outlier, one of the few in Central Florida refusing to use body-worn cameras.
Holdouts will remain a problem until state lawmakers stop making body-cams optional.
Smart chiefs and sheriffs understand that body cameras protect their cops as much as they protect the public.
If an officer is falsely accused of misconduct, the camera’s there to clear them. If they did wrong, it holds them accountable. It’s one of the few instances where the horrible win-win cliche applies.
“It’s going to catch the good, the bad and the ugly,” Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said in 2015 when he was Daytona Beach police chief. “Everybody behaves better when the cameras are on.”
He’s right.
A 2017 study of 400 officers in Las Vegas found those wearing cameras “generated significantly fewer complaints and use of force reports relative to control officers without cameras.” A yearlong study in Rialto, California, found dramatic reductions in use-of-force by officers wearing cameras and in complaints against officers.
Other studies have been less definitive about the benefits of body cameras, but there’s no questioning whether justice is better served for everyone if there’s video than if there’s not.
Here in Florida, lawmakers have whined about not wanting to place mandates on local law enforcement.
Please. The state has minimum requirements for someone to become a law enforcement officer. It has rules for when officers can stop and frisk someone. It requires police to use an interpreter if they arrest someone who’s deaf. The state even has rules departments must follow to use drones.
As ga-ga as law enforcement is over having the latest equipment, there’s no excuse not to use 21st century technology to protect both the public and cops, and to hold both accountable for their actions.
Video is why Derek Chauvin, now charged with murder, and other officers are being held to account.
Body cameras probably wouldn’t have saved Floyd. Chauvin kept kneeling on his neck and ignoring Floyd’s pleas even though it was apparent people were recording, another reason why Floyd’s death was so horrifying.
But a camera on a cop might save the next victim, and that’s why body cameras need to become as essential to law enforcement as guns.
Since some police departments can’t see that, the state needs to open their eyes.
Online: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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June 5
The Miami Herald on a protester getting shot in the face with a rubber bullet and an officer with 79 excessive force complaints patrolling protests:
Wait a minute. Can you believe that after a Fort Lauderdale police officer shot LaToya Ratlieff in the head with a foam rubber bullet, bloodying her face and damaging her eye socket, the police department shied away from opening an investigation, even though the officer’s action may have been a violation of policy?
This, at a time when the actions of rogue police officers are at the very root of the protest where Ratlieff - who, according to video and Herald reporters’ eyewitness accounts - was running away from tear gas, not throwing bottles at police, when she was shot.
Clearly, department authorities didn’t get it.
Fortunately, many other citizens did, taking their outrage to social media. On Thursday, egregiously late in the game, the police department announced that it was opening an internal investigation into the incident.
No doubt, the scene of the protests was chaotic that night. Police were entrusted with protecting both peaceful protesters and themselves. But Ratlieff, 34 and a grant writer, had been on her knees, demonstrating peacefully and urging others around her to stay calm. That’s when police launched tear gas into the crowd. By all accounts, she was making her escape when she was targeted and shot by an officer who has neither been identified nor relieved of duty.
The injuries to Ratlieff’s face are hard to stomach: a knot the size of a golf ball; two swollen black eyes, nearly closed. Given that she was unarmed, shot as she was obeying orders to disband, why is the department giving this officer cover?
Police Chief Rick Maglione said Wednesday, “I am responsible for every single thing that my police department does.” He should prove it then - get this rogue officer off the streets and tell the public who he is. There might be other complaints about his style of policing - or statements of support - that the department needs to hear.
Another Fort Lauderdale officer isn’t getting such kid-glove treatment. As Steven Pohorence waded through demonstrators kneeling on the ground Sunday, a black female teenager was blocking his path. He allegedly brusquely shoved her onto the pavement. All hell then broke loose in the crowd, which spurred the incident in which Ratlieff was struck. We commend a fellow officer, a black woman named Krystle Smith, for getting in Pohorence’s face and removing him from the scene - an action that none of the three now former Minneapolis officers dared take as their colleague Derek Chauvin was squeezing the life out of George Floyd.
Pohorence has been suspended, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating his conduct at the protest.
And now we know that Pohorence, who is assigned to Fort Lauderdale’s black communities, has been reviewed 79 times by Internal Affairs for using excessive force. But, according to the records, since he was hired in October 2016, he has never been found to have violated department policy. In his latest evaluation, his supervisor said Pohorence “is a positive, proactive and motivated individual.” Still, he was sent to mandatory training to improve his interactions with the public, his supervisor wrote.
Which is why we don’t have the highest of expectations that the unnamed officer who shot Ratlieff in the head will face much, if any, penalty.
But we stand ready for Chief Maglione to surprise us and make clear that he holds his officers to a higher standard.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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June 4
The Sun Sentinel on the Florida Supreme Court voting against an assault weapons ban, proposed for the 2022 ballot:
It’s not just criminals who get no sympathy from the Florida Supreme Court. There’s none for law-abiding citizens, either. Not when the choice is between public safety and the morbid absolutism of the National Rifle Association.
By a 4-1 vote Thursday, the court’s far-right bloc disapproved an assault weapons ban proposed for the 2022 ballot. Not only did the gun lobby ask the justices to reject the citizen’s petition drive, so did Attorney General Ashley Moody. She’s supposed to be the people’s lawyer, but she is arm-in-arm with gun manufacturers and others who believe the Second Amendment allows no limits on personal ownership of weapons of mass destruction.
Remember Moody the next time there’s a Florida dateline on news of a mass murder.
The ill-fated citizen’s initiative was inspired by the 2018 Valentine’s Day slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where a 19-year-old former student armed with a military-style assault weapon left 17 students and teachers dead and 17 others wounded.
In the two preceding years, there had been mass murders of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and of five people at the Fort Lauderdale airport, but nothing had been done after those.
Now, those who organized the petition drive to prevent more such tragedies have gained only another bitter lesson in applied civics.
“Not only has the Legislature made it harder to pass ballot initiatives,” said the group’s chairwoman, Gail Schwartz of Boca Raton, whose 14-year-old nephew, Alex Schachter, was murdered at Stoneman Douglas. “Now the people must also face a court of right-wing ideologues who will only approve initiatives they agree with politically.”
The group’s real-world education began when then-Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature refused to even consider, much less enact, legislation to properly limit the possession of AR-15s and similar weapons of mass destruction to law enforcement and the military.
Then they saw the Constitution Revision Commission refuse to consider the issue. Pam Bondi, Moody’s predecessor as attorney general, was on the gun lobby’s side that time, too.
Thursday, those who support sensible gun laws saw four justices engage in mischievous wordplay to deny the people an opportunity to vote on the issue.
It came down to a strained - and in our view discreditable - interpretation of 15 words in the initiative’s ballot summary.
Those words informed voters that the initiative “exempts and requires registration of assault weapons lawfully possessed prior to this provision’s effective date.”
Aha, said the four justices, the amendment “does no such thing.” It exempts only “the current owner’s possession of that assault weapon.”
To most people, that would be a distinction without a difference.
You’re not entitled to know who wrote this act of judicial malpractice. It was issued “per curiam” - for the court. Perhaps the actual author was ashamed. If not, he should be.
But the four had to sign it. They were Chief Justice Charles Canady and Justices Ricky Polston, Alan Lawson and Carlos Muἦiz. Justice John D. Couriel, the newest justice, did not vote.
Justice Jorge Labarga dissented, as he has often had to do since Gov. Ron DeSantis began turning the court into a chapter of the Federalist Society.
The ballot title, Labarga wrote, does what’s required - to clearly communicate the “chief purpose of the initiative and clearly summarize the content.
“In fact, the language is accurate, and the majority simply concludes that the language is insufficiently narrow,” Labarga said. “The ballot title and summary provide fair notice and equip voters to educate themselves about the details of the initiative.”
Here again, the people’s right to amend their own Constitution has been foiled by a trap the Legislature set with a 75-word limit on initiative ballot summaries. No such restriction applies to amendments the Legislature itself asks the voters to approve.
The excuse that the court majority seized upon to disqualify the assault weapons ban closely resembled arguments raised both by Moody and the NRA. Their briefs bristled with other objections as well, but the court needed only one to stiff the initiative.
It wasn’t the first time the so-called people’s lawyer - as the attorney general is often described - was clearly on the wrong side of the people’s right to vote.
She also argued against an initiative, still pending before the court, to legalize adult marijuana use, and against the open-primary initiative that the court did approve for the ballot.
The assault weapons ban had troubles enough without the court striking a lethal blow. Despite spending a reported $1.9 million, the initiative had only 145,000 of the necessary 766,200 voter signatures by the Feb. 1 deadline to make this year’s ballot.
As a result, organizers reset their sights on 2022. Now they face new legal hurdles the Legislature passed - and Gov. DeSantis signed into law - to make it harder and more expensive to collect signatures.
The campaign could start anew with revised language, but with no assurance that the attorney general and the Supreme Court would not come up with another spurious objection.
These are not good times for popular democracy in Florida.
Online: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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