Florida sheriff says homeless crackdown a quality of life issue, warns

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On Tuesday a new statute banning the homeless from “camping” out or sleeping in public spaces took effect in Florida.

“HB 1365 prohibits counties and municipalities from authorizing or allowing individuals to regularly sleep or camp on public property, at public buildings or their grounds, or on public rights-of-way within their jurisdictions,” according to a memo by Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

The goal of the law is to prevent the homeless from hampering the quality of life of the non-homeless.

“Our family, our children, our wife, our husband, our significant other has the right to walk down a sidewalk without having to step over or walk around a homeless person that’s decided to set up camp in the middle of the sidewalk,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd explained to Fox News.

“That’s a quality-of-life issue for everyone. And because you don’t want to live in housing and because you don’t want to work and live like the rest of America, it doesn’t give you the right to lay around in the public parks, lay on the benches, set up your nasty little camps. So that’s what we’re cleaning up. But we’ve always done that here, and at the end of the day my heart breaks for them, and we’re going to help them, but they’ve got to help themselves,” he added.

(Video Credit: Fox News Digital)

That said, even though the law grants cities the power to arrest disobeying homeless men and women, Judd is hoping to avoid this by working with the homeless as best as possible — though that’s not easily done.

“What we’re working toward is what we’ve always done, [which] is not letting the jail be a de facto homeless camp, and that’s not going to happen,” he said. “We’ve got to be careful when we implement this. It’s designed so that government really doesn’t set up housing camps because that part of it is very onerous.”

“What I hear overwhelmingly is, ‘We want food, clothing, and shelter, but we don’t want to go into homes. We don’t want to go into organized places. We just want to be left alone.’ So our challenge is: Where do they go?” he added.

It’s a fair question to ask, especially in light of the current hurricane season.

“If you think about the horrendous storm that just tore up the Southeast, if people had been experiencing homelessness and had been more isolated further into the woods, farther away from other people, harder to find, they may not have even known that the storm was coming,” Homeless Services Network of Central Florida CEO Martha Are noted to Fox News.

“They’d have been afraid to believe it, to listen, so if they had seen a police officer coming out to try and encourage them to get to safety before the storm, they may have avoided that officer, never gotten the message, and then been completely overwhelmed in a storm. Those are the kind of real-life consequences with this type of legislation,” she added.

Outreach teams are providing Miami’s unsheltered community with a safe, dry haven from Milton’s winds and rain. And they’re back at it this morning. #realchange #homelessmiami#HB1365@ChapmanPartner @No1isHomeless @camillushouse @CorpsHope @SalvationArmyUS @MiamiBeachPD pic.twitter.com/Ri0ufcsiJ7

— The Homeless Trust (@HomelessMiami) October 8, 2024

In addition to banning the homeless from sleeping in public spaces, the new statute also empowers residents and business owners with the right to sue a municipality if it fails to do its job.

“There will be quite a few enterprising attorneys out there who will use this as an opportunity to rake in tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis warned in a statement to the Associated Press.

There’s also the problem of disobeying law enforcement officers like Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony, a black Democrat.

“Homelessness is not a crime, and the county jail system is not a solution,” he recently wrote in an op-ed for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, adding that he won’t allow the homeless to be arrested and thrown into his jail.

Under the new law, local jurisdictions do have the right to offer “county-owned land” for the homeless to sleep on, according to Fox News. The only stipulation is that the jurisdiction “keep it clean and free of crime” and ensure the homeless sleeping there “are provided access to showers and mental health services.”

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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.