On the presidential campaign trail, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken as many opportunities as possible to contrast crime-ridden cities in blue states with his pro-law enforcement approach back home.
Throughout his Tallahassee tenure, DeSantis cast himself as a tough-on-crime, law-and-order Republican. But does that claim stand up under closer scrutiny?
The answer is tricky, because the FBI overhauled its method of compiling crime data in 2021 and getting a full picture of state information is mired by incomplete reporting due to changes in methodology as well.
Still, there is much to glean from the DeSantis record. Here is a look at how Florida fared under his watch.
‘Crime is at a 50-year low’
On occasion, DeSantis has claimed that “crime’s at a 50-year low in Florida.” Based on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s 2021 Annual Uniform Crime Report, his claim is true — at least on paper.
However, that data point is based on incomplete information due to agencies within the state switching to incident-based reporting.
Most recently, the FDLE adjusted its crime data using a sample size of 75.9% of the state’s population and pegged the crime rate for 2021 at 1948.6, a 9.7% dip from 2020.
“When someone [asks], ‘How much crime is there in Florida right now?,’ the answer is, ‘I don’t know,’ because we don’t have all of the data,” University of Miami criminologist Alex Piquero told The Post.
One fact that appears clear is that violent crime in the Sunshine State had been on a downward trajectory before DeSantis took office.
Homicide data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shed some light on the outlook in Florida — without suffering from the same data problems as afflicted the FBI and FDLE.
Florida generally ranks in the middle of the pack compared to other states in terms of the death rate from homicides, per the federal agency.
The Sunshine State had a death rate of 7.4% with 1,468 homicides in 2021, the most recent year available. This is higher than in 2019, DeSantis’ first year in office, when the CDC reported a death rate of 6.7% and 1,334 homicides.
But even that comparison is misleading because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which coincided with a national surge in homicides and crime.
In 2020, Florida recorded a 7.8% death rate and 1,530 homicides, per the CDC.
“Those increases weren’t as large as other cities in the US — say for example, Philly, New Orleans, Baltimore,” Piquero noted.
“We didn’t continue those increases the way other cities did, or other states did.”
An uptick in opioid deaths
Like many governors, DeSantis has taken several steps to combat the opioid crisis, including efforts to expand treatment and fund more prevention efforts.
Last year, his administration expanded Coordinated Opioid Recovery and appointed the first-ever statewide director of opioid recovery.
His administration has also enacted tougher punishments. In 2019, DeSantis signed a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that marked one of the biggest revamps of the Florida system in decades.
That measure boosted the threshold for penalties against hydrocodone trafficking, instituting a three-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for anyone convicted of trafficking as little as 4 grams of the drug.
In May last year, DeSantis signed legislation to ratchet up penalties against opioid traffickers.
At the time, his office explained that the new law would raise “mandatory minimum sentence for trafficking fentanyl from 3 years to 7 years for 4-14 grams, and from 15 to 20 years for 14-28 grams.”
Much like the rest of the country, Florida endured a surge in drug deaths during the pandemic, with opioid-related deaths up 28% and opioid-caused deaths up 42%, according to data from FDLE.
“Largely this could be attributed to pandemic-related experiences such as the combination of isolation and lack of available resources for treatment,” Christian Cochran, the director of conservative group Right On Crime Florida, told The Post.
That trend continued into 2021, with a 7% increase in opioid-related deaths and a 6% spike in opioid-caused deaths, per law enforcement.
By 2022, the trend appeared to reverse, with opioid-related deaths ticking down 7% and opioid-caused deaths falling 10%, according to interim data from the FDLE.
One recent move DeSantis made to help the situation was signing legislation to decriminalize fentanyl test strips, according to Cochran.
“Having fentanyl test strips decriminalized as paraphernalia helps to alleviate potential for overdose,” he said.
Targeting prosecutors
One of the most buzzworthy moves DeSantis made as part of his “tough on crime” approach as governor was to suspend two elected prosecutors.
Last year, DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, who indicated he would not enforce some of the state’s abortion laws. A federal judge upheld that suspension earlier this year.
Then, this past August, DeSantis suspended Orlando-area State Attorney Monique Worrell, accusing her of “neglect of duty and incompetence.”
“Prosecutors have a duty to faithfully enforce the law. One’s political agenda cannot trump this solemn duty, refusing to faithfully enforce the laws of Florida puts our communities in danger and victimizes innocent Floridians,” DeSantis said at the time.
DeSantis has declared that if he becomes president, he will target prosecutors across the country who don’t enforce the law.
“We are going to use the Department of Justice to go after some of these rogue prosecutors who are causing people to die by not enforcing the law,” he told the Floridian Press last month.
Pro-police initiatives & other reforms
In 2021, DeSantis signed the Combating Public Disorder bill into law. The bill, which bolstered protections for law enforcement, also allowed for arrested protesters to be detained until a court appearance instead of immediately posting bail.
Additionally, the governor has backed a law enforcement relocation program that has millions of dollars worth of funding to encourage officers from other states to come to Florida for work.
Over 900 law enforcement personnel from other states and territories have taken the state up on its offer, per the state’s Department of Commerce.
“As a former law enforcement officer, I can tell you with absolute confidence that having an officer with boots on the ground helps to deter crime better than any other solution,” Cochran said.
Throughout his time as governor, DeSantis has also made some tweaks to Florida’s penalties for various crimes.
The 2019 criminal justice bill he signed, for instance, bumped up the felony threshold for theft from $300 to $750.
Back in May, DeSantis signed legislation to permit the death penalty against child rapists — defined as individuals convicted of violating a person under 12 years old.
Last year, he signed a bill to crack down on retail theft that permitted the use of third-degree felony charges against individuals who steal 10 or more items from two or more locations over a 30-day period.
Ultimately, one expert noted, Florida has some unique characteristics — such as high elderly and immigrant populations — that set it apart from other states, including in criminal behavior.
“It’s virtually impossible to isolate the exact effect of a policy change at a state level,” Piquero concluded, “because you’re not measuring the kinds of things [like] people’s attitudes, people’s perceptions, and a lot of their behavior.”
