Activists: Central Florida police changes not enough
It’s been a year since “Black lives matter” chants and demands to reform or defund policing began reechoing throughout the streets of Central Florida following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
Since then, city and state governments have attempted to respond to activists’ demands, including a bill that passed unanimously in the Florida Legislature and is awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature. Included in that package are limits to the use of chokeholds, independent investigations of use-of-force incidents and disclosure requirements for officers who resigned mid-probe.
“It’s a huge victory and a great starting place to continue having that conversation on, ‘How do we bridge that gap between law enforcement and communities of color?,’ ” said Rep. Fentrice Driskell (D-Tampa), who spearheaded the bill and called the bipartisan vote “a miracle.”
While Driskell’s bill is a significant step at patching relations between law enforcement and communities of color, experts and activists say reform hasn’t gone far enough. The bill doesn’t include accountability measures around the use of force.
“We could have gone further ... but it does require police units to have policies in place that teach de-escalation and ban chokeholds, so it’s a start,” said Sen. Randolph Bracy (D-Ocoee), who helped guide the bill through the Senate vote. “But there’s no accountability if a law enforcement officer does not follow the procedure the police unit has in place.”
Meanwhile, DeSantis has already signed a controversial bill that gives harsher penalties to rioters in what some say violates the First Amendment to protest.
It also requires local governments to get approval from the governor’s office before cutting funding to police agencies. In Central Florida, funding actually increased last year for police
departments and sheriff ’s offices, data shows, and appears ready to increase further as agencies submit budgets for the next fiscal year.
“For too long, things will happen and then local governments will appease people without any real change,” said Thaddeus Johnson, assistant criminology professor at Georgia State University and a former police officer from Tennessee. “And for there to be real change, we have to really reconsider how police operate, where they operate, and what’s the purpose for operating in these places.”
A year of reforms
During protests for racial equity and police reform, local activists were teargassed and arrested in clashes with law enforcement during protests stretching from early summer into the fall. Among their demands were stronger accountability measures, reallocating budget funds toward social programs and implementing policy changes at local agencies to stop officers from using excessive force.
In Orange County, Sheriff John Mina created new policies requiring deputies to intervene when they witness excessive force. Following community pressure after the killing of Salaythis Melvin last August, Mina moved to expand the use of body cameras to plainclothed deputies and required footage of high-profile incidents to be released within a month.
The agency also launched a new mental health unit in December, pairing deputies with clinicians to better respond to people in crisis — something it had been developing before Floyd’s death but quickly became a higher priority in 2020.
Mina said that OCSO had already implemented many of the reforms pushed this summer, like banning chokeholds or shooting into moving vehicles, and his next goals are to expand the mental health unit and the body-worn camera program to all sworn deputies. Currently, deputies not in the field, like homicide detectives or training deputies, do not have the cameras, and funding for that is not included in the budget proposal for the fiscal year 2022.
The Orlando Police Department also banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants in July. That same month, the agency proposed a pilot program to send mental health professionals to calls alongside officers, implemented in February as the Community Response Team. The agency also relaunched its neighborhood patrol unit and appointed a new youth outreach coordinator and district youth liaisons to improve community relationships, and it is still undergoing an outside review by a police consultant organization to recommend and implement further reforms, agency spokesperson Autumn Jones said.
The Seminole County Sheriff ’s Office amended their use-of-force policy in January to ban chokeholds and neck restraints “unless utilized to combat the imminent threat of deadly force,” documents show. Sheriff Dennis Lemma said SCSO already had many of the policies activists advocated for in place before last May, but the agency revised these policies to be more intentional and sensitive to the needs of the agency and the community after calls for reform.
And in Osceola County, Sheriff Marco López, who took office in January after running a reform-minded campaign, has put the focus more on community engagement and the creation of a community advisory board. Though details so far have been scant, López said it would be comprised of members
living throughout the county. The board is slated to meet next month.
While agencies across Central Florida endorsed reform, their budgets were increasing, sometimes as a result of implementing these changes.
Last year, county and city officials approved $15 million and $6 million budget increases for the Orange County Sheriff ’s Office and the Orlando Police Department, respectively. Activists were outspoken in opposing the budget increases amid calls to reduce funding for law enforcement agencies and divert it to community programs, though Mayor Buddy Dyer and city commissioners praised OPD’s budget for including steps toward racial equity in policing.
In Seminole County, the Sheriff ’s Office’s budget increased by nearly $4.3 million to over $133 million due to additional personnel. Sanford Police Department’s budget increased by $517,000 to $17.4 million, largely driven by officers’ salaries, including retirement and pension costs, documents show.
Agency spokesperson Bob Kealing said SCSO also separately requested $9 million over three years from the county through the American Rescue Plan Act to offer expanded mental health and addiction services, including outreach to people experiencing homelessness.
Lemma said he sees offering these services as part of the sheriff ’s office’s responsibility to support the community and address the underlying conditions that can lead to crime. The $9 million he requested would go toward creating a Crisis and Stabilization Center at an AdventHealth facility for people experiencing mental health crises, he said.
“I don’t envision the Sheriff ’s Office running this program ... it would be kind of a collaboration,” he said. “... That $9 million dollars would go towards providing an avenue for people to go to help close the gap for the uninsured and under-insured population [and] to provide for family services.”
Meanwhile, the Osceola County Sheriff ’s Office saw a modest 1% increase last year after the pandemic squeezed county finances, but fiscal year 2020 saw a 5.5% increase to fund new positions and a pay increase. In Kissimmee, the Police Department saw a roughly 7% budget increase in fiscal year 2021 and a 6% increase the previous year, much of which went toward maintaining and expanding staffing and diversifying its ranks, according to budget records.
The Lake County Sheriff ’s Office, for its part, raised its budget 3.3% to nearly $81 million, which would partly go toward 12 new positions.
Overall, law enforcement agencies’ budgets appear poised for another increase. The Orange County Sheriff ’s Office’s submitted budget for the 20212022 fiscal year — which it submitted to the county within the past month — proposes a nearly $296 million budget for law enforcement and court security costs, a $15 million and 5% increase from the current fiscal year.
In a letter submitted alongside OCSO’s proposal, Sheriff John Mina said the proposal included salary increases for employees and an expansion of the agency’s “successful” Behavioral Response Unit, which pairs deputies with mental health clinicians to respond to mental health calls. The budget shows a $2 million allocation for personnel position funding, including sworn staff appointed to the Behavioral Response Unit.
The Orlando Police Department’s
submitted budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year was not available.
The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office’s budget proposal shows a $137 million budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year — a $4.6 million and 3.5% increase from last year’s budget. In the proposal, Lemma attributed the increase to an expected rise in “fuel and technology costs”. The Sanford Police Department’s submitted budget for the next fiscal year was also not immediately available.
A state law signed in April written in direct response to last summer’s protests allows law enforcement officers broader scope to police civil unrest and includes a provision protecting municipal police budgets from cuts by allowing state attorneys or government officials to appeal proposed budget reductions for review by the governor’s office, complicating future efforts to divert funding from police budgets to community initiatives.
In his conversations with local activists lobbying to defund the police, Lemma said many do not realize how much the Seminole County Sheriff ’s Office invests in social and diversion programs.
“Through my exposure in conversations of defunding the police, it typically shifts once they realize how important these services are to us,” he said.
One of the sheriff ’s office’s main priorities is reducing crime through providing assistance to those who need it, be it mental health or substance abuse issues, and the agency’s budget reflects that, Lemma said.
“If we are successful with treating these social issues on the front end, my budget will then peel off on resources that were normally devoted to the tail end, meaning incarcerations [and] arrest rates,” he said. “... If we can get people healthy and clean and no longer incarcerated, then I think that we ultimately do good for our citizens, we do good for the people that are on that journey, and then we ultimately balance out our budget by just reprioritizing where we spend and how we spend money.”
Reform lags as budgets swell, activists and researchers say
Though activists have pointed to increasing budgets in their calls to reallocate those funds toward social programs, a study by the Council on Criminal Justice paints a different picture. While state and local spending on policing has increased 168% over several decades, they account for just under 4% of total expenditures.
Bloated police budgets seem to mainly be an issue in cities like Orlando or New York City, where large populations appear to justify grander spending to keep up with patrols, said Johnson, the Georgia State University professor who is also a senior fellow of the Council on Criminal Justice.
“There’s weaknesses and gaps where money can be reallocated, but what we need to focus on is holding our government accountable for their spending in general, and not just on policing,” Johnson said. “You don’t necessarily need to remove money from policing to invest in other areas. There’s enough waste as it is.”
In Orlando, community organizers have not seen the kind of large-scale law enforcement reform they were advocating for during the protests, said Maxwell Frost, an organizer with March For Our Lives and The People 407. Some agencies’ steps toward reform, like banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants, are policies that should have been in place before Floyd’s death elevated them to the national discourse, he said.
“We’re starting to have dialogue and that conversation is starting to bear some fruit, but for a lot of people it’s not
good enough,” Bracy said. “But what has happened has pushed the conversation forward and we’re starting to see some things happen because of those conversations.”
And though the Council on Criminal Justice report includes those as among its many policy recommendations, Johnson called it “low-hanging fruit.” The report, for instance, found less than 1% of civilians killed by police were asphyxiated, typically from chokeholds.
Reforms like those and others included in the package passed by the Legislature, he added, don’t address entrenched practices that he believes don’t contribute to public safety, like low-level drug arrests.
“I can’t help but seeing them as a great first step, but a first step nonetheless,” Johnson said. “But if people are drowning and you throw them a deflated tube they have to blow up themselves, that’s not really saving them.”
The Senate bill that Bracy supported would’ve allowed a state commission to establish stricter training standards, require agencies to report the use of chokeholds and set penalties for officers who violate new rules. But Driskell, the state representative who led the charge to pass Florida’s police reform bill, is hopeful, saying that the 2022 session can be used to push for further changes.
“We know the energy of protests will eventually fade, but that’s where we have to step in as lawmakers to keep the conversation moving forward,” she said.
Frost and like-minded organizers like the Reach Party protest group leader Anthony Roberts — who goes by AmpDaTruth — said they would still like to see money diverted from police budgets into community safety initiatives and support programs. Both expressed a need to “revisit public safety,” in AmpDaTruth’s words, with Frost recommending a civilian-led community violence intervention program to take the place of law enforcement patrols in Orlando’s neighborhoods.
“Policing as an institution has gained so many responsibilities over the generations,” Frost said. “... You call the police for everything under the sun, and that’s what we disagree with fundamentally.”
Local community violence intervention programs would be funded by municipalities and take over police oversight in Orlando’s neighborhoods, empowering communities to “stop violence on the streets before it even happens,” Frost added. These programs would be similar to New York City’s LIFE Camp and Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention and appoint civilian leaders called “violence interrupters” as leaders.
“These folks go out in the community, they make relationships with gangs, with normal folks, with everyone in the community, and they find out about potential gun violence happening before it happens, then they go to the individual directly and defuse the situation,” Frost said.
Despite HB 1 restricting local governments’ abilities to redirect money from police budgets to community-led programs, Frost said community violence intervention can be funded by local governments in other ways but officials have to make them a priority — and to do that, activists have to continue advocating for reform.
“People think that defunding the police or reimagining public safety means no public safety, and that’s not true. It means the best public safety for everyone [and] the best security for everyone,” he said.