Ron DeSantis Offers Unvaccinated Police Officers $5,000 to Move to Florida Transcript

Ron DeSantis: (00:03)
No. It’s for officers, period. This has nothing to do with their vaccination status, so that’s just wrong. I think there was a headline from a corporate outlet, which we all know corporate media lies. They do not tell the truth. Assume what they tell you is false, and then figure out why they’re telling you a false narrative.

I put that out there as a proposal months ago, and the reason we’re doing it is because people are being treated poorly in Seattle, in Minnesota, and NYPD. They don’t have the support. They’ve had their funding cut. They get criticized if they just enforce law. Some places, they don’t even enforce the law, like in San Francisco. They don’t prosecute people shoplifting, so you have rampant crime.

So that’s why we’re doing it, because morale is low. Morale is low for years because of how law enforcement has been treated. But when you saw all the rioting last summer, all the vitriol directed at them, Florida stood up and said, “We back the blue.” We are 100% excited about saying anyone that’s being mistreated, if the morale’s low, if you can’t take that environment, and we have openings here, you’re going to get an environment where people are going to support you. I think that that’s something that’s… And I can tell you, the people that have come down from some of these places already, you talk to them, it’s the best decision they’ve ever made.

So we’re looking to capitalize off a lot of communities across our country who’ve turned their back on law enforcement, who aren’t providing them the support, where there’s all kinds of different problems with just being able to do the job. It has nothing to do… It will be available to anyone who comes. If people are trying to say it’s a vaccine issue, it’s not. It has nothing to do with that. They’ve been mistreated for a long time.

I don’t think a police officer should be fired over shots. I don’t think that that’s correct. They’ve been out in the… They’ve been out for months, a year and a half, two years doing their job. We said that they were heroes for a while, and now all of a sudden, some jurisdictions want to fire them. I think that’s wrong for sure.

But our $5,000 bonus, that applies to anyone. If you’re in NYPD and you’re not getting the support you need, and you’re qualified, and you come down here, you’re going to get a bonus because we’ve got your back. It’s a way to say thank you, just like we did with the $1,000 bonuses that we gave for every sworn law enforcement officer in last year’s budget, as a way to say thank you. While other jurisdictions were defunding police, we were funding them and then doing bonuses, so we’re going to continue to do that.

We’re also going to have a proposal to increase pay for the state law enforcement agency, so we can make sure we keep folks there and that’s competitive. We lose people from corrections and stuff because, fortunately, it’s a tight labor market, so people have more options. We’ve got to remain competitive, so we’re going to do all that, but that’s really just about creating a good environment, a pro-law enforcement environment. I can tell you, when you let that go, when public safety starts to erode, all these other things we’re talking about, jobs, education, all this stuff, quality of life, it all is undercut, because you’re not going to have a thriving community if you don’t have a safe community. We are committed to that, and I think we have an opportunity.

We talk about bringing businesses here, and that’s great. We’re going to continue to do that, but we have a historic opportunity to bring in very talented people in law enforcement to come to the state of Florida who have not been treated well by their communities. We stand ready and willing and able to capitalize on that, and guarantee them an environment that they will be appreciated.

Ron DeSantis Offers Unvaccinated Police Officers $5,000 to Move to Florida Transcript

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