South Florida counties rank among the highest in the state for harm caused by police misconduct, according to a new study from Florida Atlantic University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice that looked at misconduct “hot spots.”

Accounting for population, Miami-Dade ranked a clear first among all counties in the state, followed by Broward, with Palm Beach and Leon counties (where Tallahassee is located) tying for third, according to the study, which was published last month in the Journal of Criminal Justice.

Despite ranking the highest for harmfulness, none of the South Florida counties reached the top when it came to the overall rate of misconduct, suggesting that the rate alone does not provide an accurate sense of the severity.

“Is it failure to report, is it a traffic violation, or is it something serious like sexual assault?” said Dr. Lisa Dario, senior author of the study and an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. “In which case, then, we shouldn’t just be counting the number of misconduct, we should be looking at the different types of misconduct.”

One of the most harmful and prevalent forms of misconduct found in Florida was sexual offenses, a problem in need of “immediate addressing,” researchers wrote.

The study relied on data released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to analyze over 1,100 police misconduct cases between 2012 and 2023 that made it to the state level for discipline. Researchers ranked the most common kinds of misconduct as well as the counties, or “hot spots,” where misconduct is most prevalent, most harmful, or both.Harm was calculated using sentencing guidelines and punishments for various offenses combined with the number of times they occurred. While other criminal justice studies have looked at police misconduct and how it is disciplined, Dario’s team was the first to connect that misconduct to a quantifiable measurement of the damage done.

The good news: The FAU study found that the rate of all misconduct incidents per capita in South Florida was far lower than in several other counties. Leon County and Gadsden County, in the Panhandle near Tallahassee, ranked first and second, respectively. Leon County had a rate of 22.90 instances per 100,000 people, while Miami-Dade and Broward and Palm Beach counties all fell below 5.

But the amount of police misconduct on its own does not give the full picture.

To calculate the harm caused by police misconduct, researchers multiplied the minimum punishment for a crime by the number of times it happened. For example, child abuse would weigh more heavily than trespassing. Accounting for population resulted in a “relative harm” score that researchers could use to compare counties and determine how much harm individual counties contributed to the state at large.

On that benchmark, South Florida’s police fared the worst. Researchers found that, despite having a lower overall rate of incidents and accounting for population, Miami-Dade contributes the most harm by far, ranking highest in Florida with 14% of all total relative harm in the state. It is followed by Broward, with half as much, or 7% of total relative harm, then Palm Beach County and Leon County, each with 6%. Leon County ranked high for both harm and rate of misconduct.

About 80% of all harm from police misconduct in Florida over the last decade comes from only 20% of the counties, in line with a statistical principle known as the Paredo principle that says about 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes in many situations.

Frank de la Torre, a co-author of the study and a former chief assistant public defender in Broward County, said he was not surprised that Broward and Dade were at the top as he “used to see that all of the time” during his 34 years. When body cameras emerged, he began to win cases where abuses of power may have previously gone under the radar.

“I think studies like this put a light on police misconduct, and the body cameras bear it out,” he said.

Still, the data only accounts for the subset of serious cases that get reported to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for discipline. It’s possible that counties like Broward and Miami-Dade are stricter about reporting serious cases, leading to the higher numbers for harm, according to Miramar Police Chief Delrish Moss.

Moss worked as a Miami police officer as well as the chief of the Ferguson (Missouri) Police Department before returning to South Florida last year. He recalled the riots during the 1980s, a “wakeup call” for the region, setting Broward and Miami-Dade on “a mission to reverse the opinions of those days.”

“They’re more diligent and aggressive about reporting misconduct than a lot of other counties are,” Moss told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Davie Police Chief Stephen Kinsey, who also serves as president of the Broward County Chiefs of Police Association, added that the vast majority of cases he sees involve smaller infractions like an improper chase or not filling out a form, and only a tiny percentage of more serious cases make it to the FDLE for discipline.

“Most of the time they’re very innocent mistakes,” he said. “It could be somebody was out of town on vacation and got in a bar fight. All those types of things would be handled administratively.”

Still, several officers throughout South Florida are currently facing criminal cases for serious misconduct, from sexual offenses and abuses of power to COVID loan fraud.

In Miami-Dade, which did not provide an exact number of cases, a longtime city police officer was recently sentenced for using his position to shake down drug dealers for money and cocaine. And a Hialeah officer was convicted last year of kidnapping and beating a homeless man.

In Broward, at least 24 local cases are pending against a mix of police and detention officers. They include a Sunrise police sergeant accused of grabbing a female officer’s throat and a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy accused of tasing multiple people during a traffic stop, then batting away the cellphone that recorded it. Meanwhile, several federal criminal cases for the 17 Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies charged with PPP loan fraud, most of whom are suspended without pay, are still ongoing. And a Miramar police officer accused of strangling his girlfriend recently had his charges dropped by prosecutors over a lack of cooperation from the victim but still faces an internal affairs investigation.

In Palm Beach County, the State Attorney’s Office is actively prosecuting at least five different cases from within the last three years involving police misconduct. They include a July case in which a West Palm Beach Police officer is charged with using his position to try to sexually assault a woman while responding to a 911 call and a June case involving a Riviera Beach sergeant accused of striking a man in the face with his gun.

State Attorney Dave Aronberg told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that he doesn’t see police misconduct as an “endemic problem” in Palm Beach County.

“Our Public Corruption Unit exists for a reason,” he said. “That kind of conduct will occur, especially if people believe there’s no one minding the store. We do our best. My gut tells me we’re doing better than other communities because of the quality of law enforcement agencies we have in this community and the reputation of our Public Corruption Unit.”

Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor was unavailable for an interview Friday but issued a statement: “Nobody is above the law. If you are accused of a crime — whether or not you wear a police badge —— we will work with law enforcement to investigate and we will prosecute you if there is probable cause and evidence to do so.”

Perjury and failure to report information are the most prevalent forms of police misconduct across the state, the FAU study found, while excessive force is the most harmful.

De la Torre recalled seeing excessive force most often in the cases he oversaw. Then there were instances where police officers stretched the truth to make their cases stronger.

“Police would color testimony — ‘I did feel something that felt like a weapon, I pulled it out and it was drugs,'” he said. “But there are, by far, more honest police officers than ones that perjured themselves.”

He recalled one officer, in a moment of blatant honesty, admitting after a deposition in a drug trafficking case that he didn’t think a suspect had a gun but searched his pants anyway.

Perhaps the most surprising finding in the study was how high sex offenses fell on the list, especially considering that the actual number of cases is likely higher than what the data shows because the crimes are so often underreported.

“It is somewhat intuitive that excessive force would be among the most harmful instances of police misconduct. It also makes sense that traffic violations would be among the least harmful. However, our finding that sex offenses are among the most common forms of police misconduct in the current study warrants further investigation,” the authors wrote.

Domestic violence also ranked high in prevalence. Anecdotally, Kinsey said, he sees domestic violence cases most frequently when it comes to serious forms of misconduct. Despite this, researchers were surprised to find that the FDLE was not distinguishing domestic violence from assaults, so they had to manually extract the cases that fit.

A decrease since the death of George Floyd

Both prevalence of police misconduct in Florida and the associated harms sharply declined after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a police officer during an arrest in Minnesota, and the protests that ensued during the pandemic, but have risen slightly since, though not to the same level as before.

Some of that decline came as police agencies became more concerned with how the community perceives them, changing their tactics and the ways in which they interact with the public, Dario said.

Nationally and within his own department, Kinsey has noticed a shift since George Floyd’s death towards both an emphasis on de-escalation and encouraging officers to intervene if they see another officer mishandling a situation.

Dario hopes the study might show researchers, agencies and the public where to direct their attention.

“They want to put forth this perception that they’re legitimate, that they have the citizens’ best interest in mind, which I do think is largely the case,” Dario said. “… If a department is serious about bettering its perception, they need to start cracking down on some of these types of offenses more often and more seriously.”

Hiring practices and leadership ultimately set the tone for a department and determine how pervasive misconduct becomes, police chiefs said.

“I’m not gonna hire a guy that has 10 speeding tickets,” Kinsey said. “I’m not gonna hire a guy that’s got sent to collections four times … it begins with hiring the right people, but it’s not going to be 100 percent.”

Moss added that it is important for people in leadership positions, starting with sergeants, to notice and discipline the small infractions before they become big infractions. He compared it to a time when, as a kid, he had a Big Wheel tricycle that he would ride from one line in the sidewalk to another line in the sidewalk.

One day, he rode it past the second line, expecting his mother to punish him. Nothing happened. He kept going farther and farther until he rounded the corner by the back of the house and found his mother waiting with a belt.

“I never crossed that line again,” Moss said.