Less transparency means less trust between police and public | Editorial

State lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis should be working to find ways to bridge the gulfs of fear, anxiety and distrust widening between many Florida law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.

Instead, DeSantis has just signed a pair of measures that can only serve to deepen those dangerous disconnections.

One, House Bill 601, strips away the ability of civilian review boards to consider complaints about individual officers’ misconduct. Another, Senate Bill 184, allows police and other emergency workers to order bystanders to maintain a distance of at least 25 feet or face a charge of “impeding, threatening, or harassing first responders.”

Neither law is needed.

A lack of examples

Supporters of these two bills never managed to identify examples of review boards run amok (though one of the sponsors of HB 601 claimed he knew of multiple cases) or situations where bystanders, or the cellphone video they often record, resulted in an innocent officer being accused of wrongdoing.

When he signed the bills in St. Augustine, DeSantis parroted the same speculation of review boards harassing officers who have done nothing wrong.

“They’ll set up these things called citizen review boards, usually in these very-tilted-politically jurisdictions,” DeSantis said. “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.”

That’s manifestly untrue. In fact, a review of cases Orlando’s civilian oversight board looked into over the past year reveals that the board almost always exonerated the officers involved — and that officers benefited from broad protection under Florida’s police officers’ bill of rights.

Oversight reduces hostility

Even so, a 2022 study by the LeRoy Collins Institute found that communities with oversight boards saw less disparity in arrests of marginalized populations, fewer clashes between police and the public, and safer communities.

HB 601 does allow law enforcement agencies to set up their own citizens’ review boards, but they would be limited to reviewing “policies and procedures” of the departments involved.

SB 184 has its own problems. Restricting bystanders from coming into the vicinity of police officers may be appropriate in some situations — which is why interference with an officer is already a crime.

But this law, which takes effect next Jan. 1, would allow officers to arrest bystanders who “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 legitimate purpose.”

That could allow for a defense when a bystander observes an undeniable case of law enforcement abuse. But it wouldn’t stop officers from threatening people who are trying to capture video of suspected aggression.

Transparency, not threats

Threats won’t solve the problem of police/community distrust. Transparency will.

That’s why smart police administrators promote it — mandating that officers wear body cameras, asking for independent reviews of questionable conduct, and moving quickly to discipline officers who are proven to have abused the powers of their badge.

They know trust is essential to effective law enforcement — especially in communities where there’s a history of disconnection between police and residents in some neighborhoods.

Trust flourishes in sunlight. Public oversight by civilians who aren’t part of police culture can be critical to building that trust.

In their absence, the narrative is too often driven by noisy conflict between attorneys seeking five minutes of news coverage and “back the blue” posturing from politicians and law-enforcement leaders.

Giving a panel of average citizens access to official records, body-cam video and personal testimony from the people involved — and letting them capture their own records of public altercations — can go a long way toward defusing ideologically driven faceoffs.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.