Remember Ron DeSantis? The guy who "won" the Covid epidemic? The guy who was going to save the Republican Party from El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago? Man fond of lifts in his shoes and white go-go boots? Exposed as a complete mutt as soon as the presidential campaign opened? He has returned to Florida as its governor and chief importer of terrible ideas. From the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel:
The bill, HB 601, instead allows local chiefs of police agencies to create their own "civilian oversight" boards composed of three to seven members, all appointed by the chief or sheriff. But these boards can only review policies and procedures, not oversee use-of-force complaints or internal affairs investigations. The new legislation "puts the kibosh on these extrajudicial investigations against law enforcement," DeSantis said at a news conference at the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office, describing the boards as "stacked with activists." The law does not allow members of the boards to be appointed by local governments. "You have review boards, that's fine, but it's got to be done in ways where you have the Sheriff or Chief of Police appointing people," the governor said. "It can't be people that have an agenda."
Right. As events have shown, in matters of police violence, sheriffs and chiefs of police have demonstrated that they are definitely not "people that have an agenda." The governor has not lost the gift for brainless public utterances that so endeared him to 3.7 percent of the Republican primary voters in his home state. Now he has signed a bill that literally makes it illegal for a city or town to create a civilian review board that has virtually any power to review almost anything of substance, like violence against civilians, and hands the ultimate responsibility for the boards to law-enforcement officials who supervise the officers against whom complaints have been filed. Many of the current boards, including the one for Miami, were created by referenda, so DeSantis also has lost none of his contempt for democracy, either. From the Miami Herald:
"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."
Review boards... review stuff. Who can understand these things?
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
