A Visitor's Guide to Florida's Most Notorious Law Enforcement Agencies

Florida criminals have a well-earned reputation as some of the strangest in the country, possibly the world. But as the Escambia County Sheriff's Department demonstrated late last month, when it shot an unarmed man in his own driveway, it's not just Florida perps who are out of line. A number of the state's police and sheriff's departments are every bit as notorious for employing weird, backwards, and even criminal Floridians.

1) Escambia County Sheriff’s Department
Two Escambia County Sheriff’s deputies made headlines late last month when they fired 15 rounds at an unarmed man in his own driveway. Roy Middleton, 60, was looking for a cigarette in his mother’s car when the deputies asked him to turn around, then unloaded their weapons when he did so (hitting him twice in the leg). A week later, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick notes, Escambia deputies climbed through the window of a couple’s home, cuffed them, and killed their dogs. They were looking for a suspect, didn’t have a warrant, but saw an overturned bucket and assumed the suspect used it to the enter home. (He hadn’t.) While such abuses are not that uncommon, the reaction of Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan is. In the wake of Middleton’s shooting, Morgan said that “the tragedy of this is the noncompliance to the directions of law enforcement officers.” A week later, before a Rotary Club audience, Morgan suggested that the bigger problem is that whites are not allowed to talk about how inherently violent black people are. With leadership like that, it’s no wonder Escambia deputies feel empowered to shoot black people who turn around too quickly. And dogs.