On Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis put forward a bill that would stop police from stopping boaters for safety and compliance checks without an order or a good reason.
At the Miami International Boat Show, the governor announced the plan, which would need to be approved by the Florida Legislature. He said that under current law, cops can stop boaters “who are just out having fun when there are no signs that something is wrong.”
DeSantis was talking about the cops who go on boats and look for things like fishing licenses, life jackets, flares, and other safety gear that is required by law. Police officers often find other breaking of the law during these checks, such as people fishing while drunk.
DeSantis, on the other hand, said that boaters have been put through pointless sobriety tests because of these stops, even though they were later found to be sane.
“These thorough searches shouldn’t be done on people who are just out having fun when there are no signs that anything is wrong,” DeSantis said.
It happened just like that to Todd White in May of last year. Off Little Torch Key in the Lower Florida Keys, he was on a boat with his wife Cynthia and their daughter. A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer got on board and searched them.
An FWC officer decided that Todd White, 57, was not sober after giving him a set of field sobriety tests on the boat. He said he wasn’t and that he had two beers hours before the stop. Cindy, his wife, told the Herald that there were four beer cans on the boat: two from that day and two from the day before.
The breath test for alcohol that White took when he got to shore came back as.000, according to his arrest record. There is a legal limit of.08 to be called impaired. Still, he was arrested right after the test and later charged with fishing while drunk, but the charges were dropped by the Monroe County State Attorney’s Office in August.
“This young, rude so-called officer wasn’t even reprimanded for her actions in my false arrest,” Todd White said. “I lost my freedom for 78 days, my family lost our summer, and $5,000 in attorney fees.”
Cindy, his wife, said that the fact that her husband was caught in front of their teenage daughter “has left us traumatized and distraught.” Our trust in the people in uniform who are meant to protect us was also broken.
The arrest record and all other files were taken down from the Monroe County Clerk of the Court’s website after the case was dropped.
Ad for “Florida Freedom”
Instead of having to go through mandatory compliance checks, DeSantis wants people to get a “Florida Freedom” decal for their boats when they register them. This would “reassure law enforcement that the boater has done the due diligence of inspecting and maintaining proper boating safety requirements.”
At first, it wasn’t clear if fishing itself would be a good reason for a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer to check out a boater’s gear. The law as it stands now says that police can “board, inspect, and search any boat, fishing appliance, storage or processing plant, fishhouse, spongehouse, oysterhouse, or other warehouse, building, or vehicle engaged in transporting or storing any fish or fishery products” without a warrant.
DeSantis also said that his plan would stop cities and towns from making it illegal for gasoline or diesel-powered boats to operate in their own seas.
DeSantis said, “We want to create a right to boat initiative in the state of Florida by ending local rules that make it illegal to sell or use boats based on fuel sources.”
“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to drive an electric boat.” “You have the freedom to do gas, and we want to make sure you can keep that freedom,” he said.
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