Civilian police review boards won’t be able to investigate complaints of misconduct for individual cops and harassing a police officer performing his or her duties will be a crime under a pair of bills signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday.
One bill, SB 184, makes it a second-degree misdemeanor to “impede or interfere” within 25 feet of a police officer or first responder engaged in their duty after a verbal warning not to approach them. Threatening an officer with physical harm and “harassing” the officer or first responder would also be a violation.
Critics of the proposal noted the term “harass” in the bill was vague and could be used to arrest and prosecute civilians videotaping police during an arrest. The video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, which led to mass protests and riots over the police treatment of African-Americans, was taken within 25 feet, for instance.
In the bill, “harass” is defined as “willfully engaging 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.”
“If you do that we view that as a problem and now you’re going to be held accountable,” DeSantis said at a bill signing ceremony in St. Augustine.
The other bill, HB 601, bars civilian police review boards from conducting their own investigation into specific complaints of officer misconduct. It also requires such boards to have members appointed by local sheriffs or chiefs of police.
Rep. Wyman Duggan, a Jacksonville Republican who sponsored the bill, noted it doesn’t ban the review boards entirely.
“They can still meet, they can still talk about policy, procedure, training, culture, systemic issues,” Duggan said. “But what they cannot do is use them as a vehicle to persecute our officers, which to many of these organizations is the only utility that organization has.”
The bills passed along mostly party lines in the House, with Democrats opposed and Republicans in favor, but the votes were nearly unanimous in the Senate, with just Sen. Bobby Powell, a West Palm Beach Democrat, voting against SB 184, the police harassment protection bill.
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