They only include cases reported to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and don’t include those that were unsubstantiated due to insufficient evidence or violent encounters that were never reported.ĭata on use of force incidents nationwide are also limited. The 1,671 excessive force cases are almost certainly an undercount of instances when officers used more force than necessary, experts say. “Nobody wants bad cops in a police department or sheriff’s department or a correctional facility. What happened to Floyd in Minnesota is “just unconscionable,” Puckett said. But he noted that “the predominant number of interactions with law enforcement end without any type of physical altercation.”
Matt Puckett, executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, said there is no acceptable number of excessive force cases. It’s unclear from the data how many of the excessive force cases in Florida were fatal, but media reports show some were. And Chauvin and another officer involved in the Floyd case faced a complaint in 2013 for drawing their weapons on a teenager, USA TODAY reported.
Between 20, the police department cleared Chauvin in three shootings, one that resulted in a death. The commission stripped law enforcement credentials from 141 officers, and 44 voluntarily relinquished them, representing about 11% of all the cases.Īn additional 175 received penalties ranging from letters of guidance to suspension of their certificates but were not permanently barred from working in Florida law enforcement.ĭerek Chauvin, the now-former Minneapolis police officer charged with the second-degree murder of George Floyd, had previously used deadly force.
At least 104 of those officers, or about 20%, landed another law enforcement or corrections job in Florida, reporters found. But they also reveal that officers who use unnecessary force are often spared the worst consequences.įewer than a third of the cases, or 515, resulted in an officer’s termination or resignation. More than 70,000 people work as law enforcement or corrections officers in Florida, and the data show that only a small fraction are ever disciplined for using excessive force. That’s the equivalent of nearly one excessive force case per week since the state’s Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission began tracking discipline cases in 1985. Most Florida law enforcement and corrections officers who were disciplined for using excessive force on suspects and inmates kept their jobs, according to a USA TODAY Network - Florida analysis of the state’s law enforcement complaint data.įrom 1985 to mid-2018, there were 1,671 cases in Florida in which deputies, police officers and jail and prison guards were disciplined by their agencies for using excessive force, according to the analysis of Florida Department of Law Enforcement data.
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