Miami Beach Homeless Arrests Spiked in February Under Anticamping Law
Arrests of homeless people in Miami Beach for violating new anticamping laws sharply spiked in February, according to public records obtained by Reason.
In one particular week in mid-February, arrests of homeless people made up two-thirds of all arrests in Miami Beach.
The numbers are a glimpse into enforcement of anticamping laws in the city that became a model for the rest of Florida. And Florida is now leading a national crackdown following a Supreme Court decision that it’s not cruel or unusual punishment to criminalize sleeping in public, even when there was no other shelter available. When Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a statewide law last year banning cities from allowing camping in public, he chose Miami Beach for the location.
DeSantis and Miami Beach officials say the laws are a firm but compassionate way to get people off the street and stop unsightly tent camps. However, homeless advocacy organizations and civil rights groups say criminalizing homelessness is cruel and counterproductive.
The arrest statistics were obtained from weekly memos that the Miami Beach city manager sent to the city council from last September through May on homeless outreach and enforcement. All of the memos are available here.
The memos show that in 2024, Miami Beach police arrested 261 people under an anticamping ordinance that it strengthened in October of the previous year.
The Miami Herald reported this January that, in addition to the anticamping ordinance, Miami Beach police were heavily enforcing quality-of-life offenses and nuisance crimes along the iconic beach and boardwalk. The result, the Herald reported, was that 42 percent of all Miami Beach arrests in 2024 were homeless people.Â
That kind of percentage isn’t unheard of; in 2022 Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that roughly half of all arrests in Portland over a four-year period were of homeless people.
But in February, memos show that Miami Beach police began enforcing the law in a way that dwarfed its previous efforts.
According to a March memo from the Miami Beach city manager, the number of arrests for prohibited camping went from 10 and 13 in December and January, respectively, to 78 in February. The number of camping arrests dropped to 27 in March.
During the week of February 17, Miami Beach hit a particularly eye-popping statistic: Of the 125 total arrests that week, 82—66 percent—were of homeless people.
Of the 445 total arrests by Miami Beach police in
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