South Florida’s police oversight boards have been forced to a halt after a state law went into effect in July that bans civilian boards from investigating police misconduct.
Fort Lauderdale’s Citizens’ Review Board no longer has access to internal affairs investigations of excessive force or discrimination, or the ability to tell a city manager what a proper punishment should look like.
Nor will Miami-Dade’s Independent Civilian Panel or the city’s Civilian Investigative Panel, which the city informed last week it could not continue funding.
Broward’s Police and Criminal Justice Review Board, created to study issues in policing after the racial justice protests in 2020, was suspended in June, and a proposed ordinance set to be heard at a commission meeting on Thursday would discontinue it.
Elsewhere in the state, the trend continues. In Tallahassee, the minutes for the Citizens Police Review Board’s final meeting in May simply state, “House Bill 601 will go in effect on July 1, 2024 and the CPRB will be dissolved.” In Orlando, the web page for the board now gives an error. A spokesperson told Orlando Weekly it has been “disassembled for the time being.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis had signed the bill, HB 601, in April, describing the oversight boards at a news conference as “stacked with activists.”
“You have review boards, that’s fine, but it’s got to be done in ways where you have the Sheriff or Chief of Police appointing people,” the governor said. “It can’t be people that have an agenda.”
The new law forbids civilian boards from overseeing internal affairs cases or use-of-force complaints and prohibits local governments from appointing their members. As an alternative, it allows law enforcement agencies to create their own “civilian oversight” boards composed of three to seven members, all appointed by the chief or sheriff. Those boards can offer opinions only on policies and procedures, not cases of misconduct or internal investigations.
In Fort Lauderdale, after the bill was signed, members of the board awaited instructions from the city attorney as to what would happen next. The city commission then discussed the item at a June meeting.
“It completely eviscerates a longstanding policy and practice we have in our city,” Mayor Dean Trantalis said.
Around the same time, Paul Eichner, who was chair of the board, said he received word from the city essentially saying “this is the end of the board as you know it based on the new state law.”
“The city followed the law, which is what it’s obligated to do,” Eichner said. “And the law eliminated the police review board, which I think is contrary to what the city wanted and what the community wanted, and I think ultimately it’s doing a disservice to community. But the law must be followed.”
Eichner and the board’s vice chair, Marc Dickerman, had tried to raise alarms when the bill was moving through the Legislature, hoping the city would lobby against it. Lobbyists for Florida’s local governments and for Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel appeared to speak on the bill, state records show, but to no avail.
In June, Fort Lauderdale’s board held a final meeting to review its last cases, one involving officers who overlooked several gunshot wounds in a man they called in as an overdose and another involving an officer calling people the N-word. Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Bill Schultz was there, Dickerman said, and thanked them. So were members of the police union and NAACP Broward president Marsha Ellison.
Prior to the law, Florida had approximately 21 civilian police oversight boards, according to the LeRoy Collins Institute, a nonpartisan policy organization at Florida State University. Many are now closed or will be soon. Some tried harder to fight it. Earlier this month, Tampa’s city council decided not to scrap its board after hearing Miami had not yet shut its own board down, though the board is suspended until further notice. And Miami’s CIP filed a lawsuit against the city Friday to try to keep its funding.
Supporters of the bill said the boards undermined police officers’ work and were made up of civilians who did not understand policing. The statewide police unions, the Florida Police Benevolent Association and Fraternal Order of Police, openly advocated for it.
“These boards were basically put together to, in my opinion, second-guess some of the police officers’ decisions,” Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, said during a committee meeting about the bill.
Members of the boards argued they did not have such an effect. Many, like Fort Lauderdale’s, served only an advisory role, without the power to issue punishments or subpoena people for investigations. Their recommendations were not always for a harsher punishment; sometimes, they defended officers accused of misconduct and argued for less severe discipline.
Even without much power, members felt their work was vital, serving as a window into the world of policing and the disciplinary process that is often invisible to the public and offering “solace to the community that the right thing is being done,” Eichner said.
Dickerman recalled two times in particular he felt thankful for the board’s existence. Once, when a transgender person complained about being misgendered by an officer, he said he found a video from the Department of Justice with advice for officers dealing with transgender people that officers began to use in their trainings. Another time, an officer open-hand slapped a homeless person. The case went to court, and the officer got a 20-day suspension, but the board recommended a harsher punishment.
In Miami, the CIP had more power, reviewing complaints from civilians and within the police departments themselves. It independently investigated officers accused of misconduct and their histories and issued reports on patterns of abuse of power.
“We were a place where members of the community or even members of the police department could come to us and say: ‘Hey, I was wronged either by a police officer or the department itself, can you help me?’ And we never turned anyone away,” Rodney Jacobs Jr., the CIP’s executive director, told WLRN.
Now, local police agencies may follow the new law and launch advisory boards with only a policy recommendation role. Some existing boards already appeared to do that and closed down anyway.
Broward County’s board, launched, like many others, in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a police officer during an arrest in Minnesota. It focused on research and recommendations about “police use of force, police misconduct, and such other matters pertaining to bias in the criminal justice system” and did not analyze specific cases, according to its website. Still, it will likely close its doors. Members met in late July and decided “it would be impracticable to retain the purpose of the Review Board while complying with HB 601,” the proposed ordinance states.
A member of the board told the South Florida Sun Sentinel Friday that the group discussed the matter at length and not everyone wanted to shut down. But they ultimately decided the law was too broad and restrictive to follow while trying to research policing issues like use-of-force and decided that continuing to meet could make Broward County a target of possible retaliation by the state.
The Delray Beach Police Advisory board discusses general issues like the number of crimes or internal affairs cases in a given time frame, meeting minutes show. It is unclear whether that board will remain active. Multiple members did not return voicemails Friday.
Some see a board that only makes policy recommendations as ineffective. Eichner said he had already emailed Schultz and let him know he wasn’t interested, should the police chief create such a board.
“Being in a committee appointed by the police chief to review policy and procedure is sort of like a bite without teeth,” he said. “And it doesn’t do anything to help the community by way of reviewing police cases that we were doing.”
Dickerman does hope to join such a board if it comes into existence, even if it’s a “rubber stamp type of committee.” Regardless, he said, the state of police oversight in Florida has taken a turn.
“There’s going to be less transparency,” he said. “We’re not going to know what officers are doing. We’re not going to know what kind of consequences they face.”
