Governor's Incentive Scheme Recruits Anti-Vaxxer Officers With History
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Fortunately, there's a well-armed citizenry ready to shoot to kill if they believe they are endangered by corrupt Dago Desantis' violent anti-vaxx criminal recruits.)
Ron DeSantis, who is expected to launch his campaign for the 2024
Republican presidential nomination this week, launched the program to
attract officers frustrated by Covid-19 mandates.
Florida
DeSantis's $13.5m police program lures officers with violent records to
Florida
Governor’s incentive scheme recruits officers with history of excessive violence or who have been arrested since signing up
Richard Luscombe in Miami
@richlusc
Mon 22 May 2023 20.39 BST
Numerous police officers lured to new jobs in Florida with cash from
Governor Ron DeSantis’s flagship law enforcement relocation program have histories of excessive violence or have been arrested for crimes including kidnapping and murder since signing up, a study of state documents has
found.
DeSantis, who is expected to launch his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week, has spent more than $13.5m to date on
the recruitment bonus program, which he touted in 2021 as an incentive to officers in other states frustrated by Covid-19 vaccination mandates.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses the crowd before publicly signing HB7, "individual freedom," also dubbed the "stop woke" bill during a news
conference at Mater Academy Charter Middle/High School in Hialeah Gardens,
“This will go a long way to ensuring we can have the best and the
brightest filling our law enforcement ranks,” Florida’s Republican
attorney general, Ashley Moody, said in April last year as DeSantis
announced one-time $5,000 bonuses for new recruits.
However, among the almost 600 officers who moved to Florida and received
the bonus – or were recruited in state – are a sizable number who either arrived with a range of complaints against them, or have since accrued
criminal charges, the online media outlet Daily Dot has discovered.
They include a former trainee deputy with the Escambia county sheriff’s
office charged with murdering her husband; an officer with the Miramar
police department fired for domestic battery and kidnapping; and a former member of the New York police department (NYPD) who was hired by the Palm
Beach police department having once been accused of an improper sexual proposition.
That officer, named by the Daily Dot as Daniel Meblin, was also part of a $160,000 settlement by the NYPD for violence at a 2020 protest against the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in which officers were accused
of beating Black males without provocation.
A Palm Beach police spokesperson told the Daily Dot that Meblin – who had complaints against him including abuse of authority and sexually
propositioning a teenager – had disclosed his background during the hiring process, according to the NYPD watchdog 50-a.org.
He has been an “exemplary” officer since he was hired in October 2022, the
same month he left the NYPD, the spokesperson said, while denying a
request to allow Meblin to be interviewed.
The Daily Dot compiled its report from state records it obtained from the Florida department of economic opportunity through a Freedom of
Information Act request. The undated document lists payments of more than
$8.8m split between 1,310 newly hired officers, with most receiving
$6,693.44 from the signing-on and additional bonuses.
In a press release earlier this month, DeSantis announced the program had
since grown to more than 2,000 officers, with a parallel rise in cost to
more than $13.5m.
“To date, 595 law enforcement recruits from 49 states and US territories
have relocated to Florida, including more than 215 recruits from
California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania,” the statement said.
For its report, the Daily Dot matched information from the 50-a and NYPD databases, as well as published media reports, to officers’ names listed
by the state.
It says it uncovered “an exodus” of officers to Florida law enforcement agencies from the NYPD in the wake of a backlash against the department
for its brutal handling of racial justice protests in 2020 after the
murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Among them were at least two dozen officers whose names matched those on
the NYPD’s civilian complaint review board database, including some who, according to those complaints, “unlawfully pepper sprayed, assaulted, and pointed their firearms at suspects, as well as used chokeholds and
offensive language regarding race and ethnicity”.
A civil rights lawsuit filed in 2018 against former NYPD sergeant Haitham Hussameldin alleged the officer used physical violence against a teenager
on her way to school. Hussameldin, now employed by Florida’s Manapalan
police department, accrued six formal complaints, including “multiple allegations of abuse of authority and overuse of physical force” in New
York, the Daily Dot said. All the complaints were withdrawn or
unsubstantiated.
Another former New York officer now employed in Florida was involved in
two deaths, one of which led to a $100,000 civil settlement, the Daily Dot reported. And in October 2022, the Apopka police department hired as an
officer Justin Burgos, 19, the son of a retired NYPD deputy inspector, who
a year earlier was charged with reckless endangerment, reckless driving
and obstruction of governmental administration for driving his car into protesters in Manhattan calling for the firing of an officer accused of
beating a Black suspect.
None of the police agencies contacted for comment responded, other than
the Palm Beach department, the Daily Dot reported. DeSantis’s office did
not return a request for comment from the Guardian.
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