Under a proposed bill, Florida would no longer allow officer misconduct complaints to be filed anonymously—requiring that they be signed by the complainant, under oath, in order for any action to be taken. Filing a “false declaration” against a law enforcement or corrections officer would be criminalized as third-degree felony perjury.
HB 317 will be the first bill up for consideration by the Judiciary committee on April 17. Similar legislation has been moving through the Senate. If enacted, it would take effect July 1.
According to the Florida Phoenix, the bill has divided local law enforcement. While rank-and-file cops are in favor, many in leadership positions—backed by the Florida Sheriffs Association and the Florida Police Chiefs Association, both prominent lobbying groups—are opposed.
The Phoenix reported that at an April 10 hearing, Jennifer “Cookie” Pritt, executive director of the Florida Police Chiefs Association, gave a powerful testimony recounting how early in her career she had been discouraged from reporting a senior officer who had sexually assaulted her. Several lawmakers in attendance who were initially in favor of the bill reportedly changed their minds after Pritt’s testimony. Nonetheless, the bill was advanced by a vote of 11 to 6.
“There’s a game out there. When correction officers are doing a good job you make a bunch of complaints against them,” James Baiardi, president of the Corrections Chapter of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, said at the hearing according to the Phoenix. “If you want to make a complaint against somebody, and if you’re not lying to me, you don’t have a problem putting your name on it.”
One the bill’s other provisions would prevent any record of an investigation from being included in an officer’s file unless that investigation had resulted in disciplinary action.
Most departments usually approach all complaints the same way regardless of whether they were made anonymously;
A regional Florida guide to police misconduct complaints suggests that departments usually allow them to be filed in person as well as by mail, email, phone or fax, and that they approach each complaint the same way regardless of whether it was made anonymously. Several departments have stated this explicitly, on their complaint forms or on their websites.
However, the North Miami Police Department online complaint forms require identification fields filled out in order to submit them, while the North Miami Beach Police Department states on its website that “it is difficult to conduct an investigation and make a determination based on anonymous information, due to a lack of complete information and victim / witness cooperation.” The Florida International University Police Department states that “[t]he chief of police has the discretion on whether to investigate an anonymous complaint.”
Another bill currently being reviewed in the Florida Senate, SB 1266, would establish that “certain records identifying law enforcement officers who are involved in a use of force incident are confidential and exempt” from public records requests for a minimum of 72 hours. After that, however, the head of the department has the discretion to extend the exemption indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has put a nationwide freeze on civil rights litigation, and taken down the only database tracking federal officer misconduct. According to the Appeal, 70 percent of complaints in that database filed between 2017 and 2024 involved officers from the Bureau of Prisons or from Customs and Border Protection.
Image (cropped) via Miami-Dade County
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