u/ChurchOMarsChaz

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If you want to know how a government thinks about your money, don’t read the budget. Look at the tires.

This is Deerfield Beach Fire Rescue’s new truck. Ford Maverick. Steel wheels, because nobody checked the box for the fancy ones. The tires are whatever came on it, say 300 bucks a corner. Came right out of the Pep Boys Factory Outlet store -- its a work truck bought by people who knew someone was going to look at it and ask.

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Take one (of the many) of Instagram-Sheriff Gregory Tony’s trucks. Chevy 2500HD, lifted, aftermarket wheels, aftermarket exhaust. Between the wheel and the rubber you’re looking at 2-4 dimes a corner ...

Read the rest of the story on Substack.

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Quick recap for the newcomers.

2013: I blew up his Dania Beach campaign. Claimed he ran an $8M state grant at age 12. He didn't. Claimed the mayor recruited him. Mayor's house had never heard of him. Ran a "chamber of commerce" out of a residential address with zero members.

2018: Wins a council seat in Haverhill, FL (pop. 2,100) by 18 votes. Vice mayor calls him "an incessant liar" in open session. Loses by one vote in 2020. Town passes a residency ordinance so he can't come back.

2024: Posts a photo of Kamala Harris swearing him in as a Selective Service "Governing Board Member." Job doesn't exist. Photo is a Getty shot of Harris swearing in the U.N. ambassador with Sohn's Haverhill swearing-in pasted over it. Six weeks later, a photo of him shaking hands with Biden. It's Biden and the President of Israel in Jerusalem with Sohn's head swapped in. Coral Springs Talk runs "Florida's George Santos." He resigns as CEO of the Orlando Pride Chamber within the hour.

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Dec 2024: Sonoma County, California appoints him to its Human Rights Commission. Nobody Googled.

Yesterday: Broward's Children's Services Council, a taxing district, puts him on their podcast, introduces him as "the Honorable," and he says he's a registered Florida appropriations lobbyist with clients before the Legislature.

He isn't. Neither branch. Any year. I checked, then I filed a sworn complaint with the Lobbyist Registration Office under s. 11.045. Either he's lobbying unregistered or he invented a license on a public agency's camera.

Then there's our 2013 phone call where he talked himself into a higher octave. Beyond surreal.

The $2,000 offer to sue me for defamation still stands. It has stood for two years. He knows what discovery means.

An eye-popping story on my Substack. You're likely not to read anything else like it this year.

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Someone commented that he was hitting the gym, which earned a sneering, "Yeah, duh."

You do not strap on body armor stamped SHERIFF GREGORY TONY across the chest to lift weights on Saturday AM. That is cosplay. Same as the heavy-bag clips. Same as the turnout gear photo ops. Same as the reels about fighting in the trenches for the unwashed masses.

We're supposed to see a commander. Instead, we eyeball a man who cannot go to the taxpayer-funded gym without wearing full body armor.

SOUND UP! No really, SOUND UP.

Keep it up kids, the purty little daisy is starting to wilt!

The videos. Denied applications. Philly shooting records, a fourteen-year-old, a dead eighteen-year-old, a sealed docket. Him on tape, on the power of that office to fuck you up.

Saturday. Elevator. Full kit. Official handle. He posted it because the noise reached the building.

A sheriff in control ignores it.

He answered.

Keep the paper coming.

AMF.

On Substack, might be the best thing I've ever produced.

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Atlanta PD sent me two fee letters for public records. $123.88 total.

Both say Georgia gives you the first fifteen minutes free. Neither total takes it off. Both cite the wrong section for the rule. Both misspell "estimated" in the total line the same way.

Two requests, two tracking numbers, one form letter.

I wrote back that a quote missing what the law requires isn't an offer yet, so there's nothing to accept.

The records I asked for: whether an AI search tool is running against Atlanta's camera network.

The kicker is that I'd already filed a separate request asking how the City sets its records fees. That one went in first.

On Substack.

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>2. Finished my undergrad work in Applied Mathematics with a 3.7 GPA. BSO's Sheriff, per the record, finished barber school with a 1.47. I did not know you could graduate with that. I stand corrected, and a little concerned.

That's #2 (deuce!) of a dozen-item sworn statement sent earlier today, because our plank-performing Sheriff has just Streisand-Effected himself, and it will be glorious.

Speaking of a sworn statement, boy oh boy, did I swear.

For the unfamiliar, or just arriving in from Planet Xeon: in '03, Streisand sued to hide her home's photo and, in doing so, taught the entire internet where said humble abode was.

The Streisand Effect: simply nature's most reliable law, ranking just above gravity and just below "I want to talk to your supervisor."

Sheriff Gregory Tony is about to discover this head on.

You see, Casual Reader, here's a photo of an SUV. Sitting in a lot. Owned by the taxpayers. $30K in upgrades were bought by us. We paved the lot.

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And thanks to the camera work of a longtime deputy, we all can enjoy the photo.

Oh, I should mention, that's Tony's 2nd $100K ride.

A normal person's response? Yawn.

Tony, with his banana hammock (size: husky-lesbian) now in a knot, launched an IA investigation, put the poor sergeant on leave, and demanded I explain myself under oath in 72 hours.

Go ahead, fuck right off.

Normally, six people would have scrolled past it, and now, thanks to the magical power of the Streisand Effect, Tony personally franchised it, becoming the executive producer of his own humiliation. We're thinking, he deserves back end points.

Come on Reddit, let's make Tony famous!

I obliged the oath. Item 6 involves the leather seats. You'll want item 6.

Over on Substack.

Ha ha! I jest. Here's the truck in question.

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Also, I think that tint is illegal.

I got busted for limo tint back in the day. Let's pay it forward. I'm going to call up non-emergency and report a crime.

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There's this podcast called the GodPod, hosted by God and Jesus. They asked me to drop by.

Seems the Bible was on God's punch list, with Jesus focused on the dictionary's bad words. A lot of them in there! We'll come back to it.

Sidebar: Having established Satan's my boss, God offered to put in a good word about my missing paychecks. I am still waiting.

Here's what I told them.

In '22, Florida passed HB 1467, allowing any resident to challenge any book in their county's school libraries.

Goddamn!

Any resident. No need for a kid in school, no need to have read the book, just fill out a form, and blam-oh!

Ok, that's easy, I thought, so let's put it to the test.

First up, the Bible, in all 63 Florida school districts.

But before you get all wonky, know what I knew. Thanks to recon, I knew the Bible wasn't on those shelves.

And that was the point.

The target was the law. A stress test. A pentest. A fuzzing of the process.

I'm not a librarian, never claimed to be one, never claimed to tell them how to do their business, wouldn't know where to start.

No copy to review. No parent, in theory, to upset. No content to weigh. All that's left is the process. Does the form work when the wrong guy fills it out?

Most districts ignored me.

Easy call for them. I live in Broward. No residency in the other 62, no standing, tell me to take a hike. I knew that when I filed.

So write me that sentence. Cite the residency rule, deny the challenge, close the file.

Most of them never wrote it. I got ghosted instead. A rule enforced by silence produces no denial, no record, nothing to appeal. Call that what it is. A preference with a file number.

But that's just a gift with purchase, and small potatoes for what I was after.

Next stop for me back in '22?

The Oxford English Dictionary. Twenty volumes. Eighteen hundred clams. For a dictionary.

It also contains every curse word in English. All of them. Alphabetized. Cross-referenced by etymology, so a sixth grader can learn where the word came from before using it on the bus.

Thundering cunt waffle, you don't say?

Also, I asked them to nick Tucker Carlson's book. Also not on the shelves. I filed anyway, because I wanted to play hacky with his sacky.

Returning back to God and his pod, I put it this way. Florida took the library and put it on a diet, then left the box of Krispy Kremes sitting on the counter. All I did was point at the box.

Every time I tell this story somebody says I'm just as bad as Moms für Liberty. No.

They file against books to get books removed. I filed against books that weren't there. That's a magic trick. Not one of my filings ever cost a library a single book. Not one. None of it reached a librarian, a shelf, or a kid. It died, as designed, in the C-suite.

I want more books in the library. I want libraries ordering more card catalog cabinets for their overflowing card catalogs. The answer to a bad art review is more art. The answer to a book ban is more books.

I lived inside that process for two years. Forty thousand dollars, most of it might own, in legal fees. Hundreds of hours. That's what fuzzing the process costs.

In '24, Florida narrowed the law. The DeSantis administration said I was the reason. They already had a residency rule that disposed of me on paper. They wrote a new law anyway.

A law that breaks when you point it at a book that isn't even there was already broken.

Over in Clay County, Bruce the Objector filed 94% of that district's challenges. 287 books came off the shelves. Nobody wrote a bill about him.

They wrote one about me.

The difference between us is the letter after my name.

Also, DeSantis and his minions loathe me, so that's another gift with purchase.

PS.

You're my people. We might come at this from different directions and argue about how to get there, but we want the same thing. No bans. More books.

My methods run odd. Divergent is the better word, since that's how my brain’s wiring works. The values are the same as yours.

Here on the social medias we live in the gotcha economy. Someone's the villain, someone's grifting, someone's conning. Somebody wanting to do good, for the sake of doing good, doesn't compute. There has to be an angle. If not, we'll make one up with creative editing.

Thirty years in. Not one dollar out of it. Thousands of interviews, no bad news bubbling up. A lot of my own money in. Plenty of attaboys, not many offers of help. If this is a con, tell me what it's buying, because the best case is a Daily Show booking or the front page of CNN, and that is a strange thing to chase with forty grand in legal fees.

I haven't spent the last ten years posting seventy-five comments a day. I've been trying to get shit done.

A few people from down under read my writing, found it strange, and decided that made me a con. New Zealand Public Radio came to a different conclusion.

I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. I want you to have the truth as I see it. You might think this is bragging, it is not. It is my ASD providing data, so you can make a better informed decision.

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I've read a lot of Flock coverage over the past year and almost all of it is about the cameras, the network, and the retention window. Sure it's out there, I haven't seen much coverage about Flocks AI prompts That's strange, because the prompt is the part with a person in it. A plate read is a machine noticing a car. A prompt is an officer deciding what kind of person to look for and writing it down in a text box.

On August 13, Flock Safety announced a set of reforms. Audit monitoring now mandatory, searches need a case code, accounts lock automatically when sketchiness arrives, 2FA (hello?!) is required, and the default retention on plate reads drops from 30 days to 7.

That came after local Atlanta media reported on officers getting arrested for using the system to look up people they knew. Flock is headquartered up the street from Coca-Cola.

So on August 31 I filed a 15-category, 32-page open records request with the Atlanta PD.

One category about the reform list. Announcing a policy and switching it on are two different things. They leave two different documents.

Another asks for the text of every FreeForm search. Think ChatGPT, say "dark SUV with rear bumper damage."

Another asks for the blocklist. Flock says it moderates FreeForm to stop subjective and invasive searches. If that's true there's a list of terms officers can't type, and a log of the ones they tried. Imagine that CSV file of delight!

Another asks for logs from the Loudermilk Video Integration Center, funded by the Atlanta Police Foundation. Hard to fuck with a machine-generated log file.

I expect a big fee estimate. Like GIANT, say $5K. So I asked the City how it builds those estimates.

The full writeup, and be warned, it's technical, precise, and dense, is found on my Substack.

UPDATE, because I buried the lead.

I sat on this waiting for today, about to mash send, thinking I was done.

Then it hit me.

Holy shit, thanks autism.

The pink Yugo scenario is normal policing. A few keystrokes, out goes Car 54. Like Flock or don't, that's the job.

Here's what I missed. LEOs misusing Flock. Stalking exes. Tracking girlfriends. Running plates on people they knew. Every one of those cases got made off a plate query.

But FreeForm isn't a plate query. It's a text box. So what does the misuse look like now?

You don't need her plate anymore. You need a sentence. Silver Civic with the dented rear quarter panel, run across the whole network.

But wait. Did you see it?

It's not the car. It's not the dented quarter panel. It's Susie the ex, wearing her pink Mouse House pullover.

They track clothing. Flock says so. That's the whole reason it isn't facial recognition.

So what happens when Susie's riding in her new guy's blue Pacer?

The plate is useless. The pullover isn't.

Which means the question is no longer what car she drives. It's what Joe Swanson typed. That sentence is his intent, and it's sitting in a database in a text field.

Which is also Flock's problem. How do you moderate that? A blocklist catches slurs. It doesn't catch a man describing his wife's car. There's nothing in "blue Corolla with a Braves sticker" for a filter to grab.

And there's nothing in "pink Mouse House pullover" either.

So either the system can't tell the difference, or the audit assistance they announced last month can, and there's a log of it flagging exactly this.

Either answer is worth having in writing.

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The county's own summary says the purchasing card is for "low-dollar, routine items." Staplers. Toner. Those binder clips that breed in desk drawers.

It never says what happens when the cardholder is a commissioner.

So I built a ladder.

Working lunch at Outback.
Then dinner, three figures a head.
Followed by a birthday party at the pizza place with the animatronic mouse.
A receipt for BEVERAGE SVC. *
Capped off with an overseas trade junket.

* Scarletts

Tell me which rung is where somebody says no.

Here's where the joking stops. The reviewer is a county employee, and the spender votes on the the reviewer's budget. You're a lieutenant reviewing Patton's expense report. You have a mortgage.

Commissioner Alexandra Davis sponsored the amendment this past January. Before it, commissioners paid out of pocket and got reimbursed, which meant somebody looked first.

Records requests are filed. Nobody has bought anything improper that I can prove. That's the point. The rulebook is missing before the first dollar moves.

On my Substack.

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Last week, I dropped a post here about the Clay County School District. 287 books removed in the '23-'24 school year, with one man filing 94% of the challenges.

So, I decided to look into the filing limits. Asked Clay to show me how they checked the residency issue. Not the policy. The record.

Instead, Clay threw a $1000 invoice over my transom.

Seriously, what the actual fuck?

Also, let's break down their answers.

They answered with a policy. I asked for records showing the review committee read the books before it voted. Clay sent me a policy. Policies document what's supposed to happen. I specifically asked what happened. Governing leaves a paper trail.

Or not.

No records found. Either nobody read the books, or nobody wrote it down. A no is not the end.

They named the software. Clay said it checked the objector in the student information system. That names an app used for student enrollment.

Apparently, Bruce The Objector is in 7th grade.

Oh, and they invented a deadline.

My original email search, priced at three hours and costing about a hundred dollars, was cut to two mailboxes, ten months, six terms. Now it's 14 hours and $500. Smaller search, five times the price.

Six new records requests went out August 28. Why six? An omnibus request, or a request without different IDs, will be bunched up and hidden behind a four-figure fee.

I told Clay it has until September 15.

None of this took a lawyer. It took engineering the FOIA request.

Full writeup on Substack: Clay County, Part Two — Anyone Can File a Records Request

Happy to take questions on request wording, retention schedules, or fee estimates.

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Guys. We need to talk about a thing that happens in Florida. It happens south of the belt and north of the knees. It happens to every man in this county. Our whole plan since the Bronze Age has been to wait for it to stop.

It does not stop. It is August. It will never stop.

For me, it's ongoing right now, and I'm in a server room.

So I built a squeegee. Shaped like a man's sack. This was an engineering decision. I know that from the outside it can look like a cry for help.

Four models. One size fits all is government thinking. Government thinking is how we got the DMV.

1. Oh, You Poor Thing. 55mm. For the humble. Ships in a plain envelope. We are not going to make this weirder.
2. Standard Sweat. 90mm. The Yugo of ball squeegees. It works. It is boring. Nobody steals it.
3. Grande Nuevos. 140mm. The schematic tells the buyer to check a mirror first. That note took four drafts. Draft two was mean. I am not proud of draft two and you will not be seeing it.
4. Ball Down. 70mm. Wipes one side. The engineering notes list the use case as "asymmetric swelling or ambitious optimism." I wrote that at 11 at night. Rum was involved. I stand by it.

Every unit ships with a Sweat Evacuation Cleft. That is a flow channel down the middle of the silicone body. It is also a great name for a punk rock cover band. Every unit has a Flexible Wiping Edge with a dual-lip profile. Every unit has a No-Drip Seam, molded integral. Not glued. Never bonded. Not organic, nor vegan. Molded integral. A novelty item glues something on and hopes for the best.

Then there are the notes. The notes are where I lost control of this thing.

1. Not a razor. Not a window tool. Not an ice scraper. Not a toy.
2. Operating environment: August in Florida. 218 in the shade. 425 on the asphalt, and check the steak to see if it's done.
3. Fitment: check a mirror. When in doubt, size up or beg a friend's helping hand, as it were.
4. Clean after use. Air dry. Store flat.
5. Replace if the edge shows nicks, compression set, or loss of spirit.

Loss of spirit has never appeared on a rubber spec sheet. Not once. Rubber has a long history. That history includes tires, gaskets, and the Hindenburg. Loss of spirit is also how every person in this county feels by August 15th.

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Atlanta police are checking whether officers used Flock license plate cameras to spy on people for personal reasons. Cops in other Georgia towns were arrested for that this summer. The ordered a review.

An audit needs records. On August 23 I filed a public records request with Atlanta PD. Sixteen items. The Flock contract, user list, logs, and written policy.

Four days later they sent 900 pages. It was a contract for security cameras and door badge readers. Flock is not in it. What the Flock? Thirteen of my sixteen items got the same copy-paste answer. Policies said to be attached, but gone MIA.

Flock gave the cops free access for three years. That deal ended in 2024. Nobody can show me what replaced it.

The cops are auditing a system they cannot find the paperwork for. Three more requests are in. Full story in my Substack.

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* forced Florida to rewrite ... sorry.

Florida's book ban law passed in '22. Any county resident could ask for a book pull. I did the recon and knew the Bible wasn't in those libraries. Filed in all 63 districts anyway, because I wanted to watch them flip out over the title.

So, I asked them to remove a book that wasn't on the shelf. Two years later the state rewrote the law, with the governor's office pointing the finger right at me.

In the immortal words of the Church Lady, "Could it be ... Satan?"

Now I'm on something new.

In the '23-24 school year, Clay County pulled 287 books, with one man filing 94% of the challenges.

Filing has a residency requirement, so I asked for the proof Clay checked.

Not the rule. Which they provided.

The proof. A box on a form. A verified address. A note from Mom. Anything.

Simple, you'd think.

Got dick instead. Four folders of nonsense, plus a bill for $957.45.

Here's what they sent me and where it breaks ... on Substack.

 [UPDATE] I've posted part two of this series.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedbooks/comments/1w2h9yn/clay_county_part_two_clay_removed_287_books_on/

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Suppose you want to buy 138 police officers. This is not a normal thing to want. Normal people want a sandwich. But suppose you're Broward County, and you've been renting your airport cops from Sheriff Gregory Tony for thirty years, and lately you've started wondering what exactly you're renting.

On August 21 the sheriff posted a graphic to Facebook to help you think this through. Left column, $146 million, 125 BSO employees. Right column, $232 million, 138 new officers. Between them a yellow VS., the kind that sells tickets to a fight.

Subtract. $86 million. In May the Sun Sentinel reported that Jensen Hughes priced leaving BSO at more than $85 million over four years. Same number. The graphic is a four-year startup total, which it never mentions, the way a car ad never mentions the part where you make payments.

Four years is how long it takes to build a police department out of nothing, and building a police department out of nothing means buying, in no particular order: cars, radios, a building to keep the cars near, academy seats, donuts, badges, holsters, the little clips that hold the badges, more donuts, evidence lockers, a property room, a lock for the property room, a key for the lock, a guy to sign for the key, did I mention donuts?, a second guy to confirm the first guy signed, shoulder patches nobody has drawn yet, the artist who draws the patch, Patch Adams, the committee that rejects the patch, the second artist, signing bonuses to pull cops off other agencies’ payrolls, and a second round of signing bonuses when the first round takes the money and goes back to Sunrise. Stack all of that into one column and you get a number that reads like a ransom note. Year five costs something else. Year five is a normal year with normal payroll and no patch committee.

Also the columns don't buy the same thing. 125 people on the left, 138 on the right. That's thirteen additional human beings for $86 million, or roughly six and a half million dollars each. At those prices Broward should stop hiring cops and start breeding them.

The study behind all this cost about $100,000. Commissioner Steve Geller asked how the county trusts a report it hasn't seen.

Nobody's seen it. Tony has. He made a poster out of it.

On Substack.

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https://reddit.com/link/1vufpdq/video/841vz1cx6qkh1/player

Thirty years of public records work, and an engineering background before that. This one was built for me.

Quick background if you haven't met these things. Flock builds automatic license plate readers — cameras bolted to poles around your town that photograph every plate driving past and keep it. There are north of a hundred thousand of them out there now. Almost all the reporting so far has been about cops abusing the search side. Running an ex's plate. Tracking a woman around town. It's real and it's ugly.

But every one of those stories is about a plate that got captured. That's the front of the beast. I went around back.

Here's the whole method, and you can point it at anything, not just cameras. If a decision got made, somebody had the authority to make it, and that leaves paper. So find the decision. Then ask for the one record that has to exist if it was done properly. Not "all records" — that's how you get a four-figure invoice and an eight-month runaround. One specific thing that either exists or doesn't.

So. These systems have a suppression feature. A plate can be exempted from the whole apparatus. Made invisible.

And if a plate can be exempted, somebody decides who.

That's a decision. Decisions leave paper. Who's on the list, who put them there, and where is the record?

Sarasota PD answered, and credit where it's due, they answered straight and they didn't stonewall. Yes, the capability exists. No, we don't use it.

Then they told me the part that stopped me cold. When a plate is removed from that list, nothing logs it. No entry. No timestamp. No record of who pulled it or when.

It just ceases to exist.

Sit with that a second. A plate could ride that list for a year and then come off, and the system keeps no memory it was ever there. No before, no after, nothing to compare. Any engineer will tell you deletion is the sensitive operation — that's the one you log.

You cannot audit a state that leaves no trace of having existed.

Which is what makes the question a trap, and it works on every agency in the country running this software. Ask them for their log of suppression list changes.

They keep one? Produce it. Now we know who was on the list, who put them there, and who took them off.

They don't? Then they've just told you in writing that the list is unauditable.

There's no version where they win by answering.

Total cost of this operation: one email, and three decades of trial and error.

Be warned: my Substack article is wonky and runs about four thousand words.

https://reddit.com/link/1vufiog/video/53vmih5g5qkh1/player

Thirty years of public records work, and an engineering background to boot. Debugging ALPRs is my wheelhouse.

I'm often asked for a FLOCK FOIA template. Don't have one, and that's on purpose. I won't waste your time with a form.

See friends, a template without a method is a Google search with letterhead. You fill in the blanks, ask for all records. You end up with a 4-figure estimate, nailed over scope, denied the good bits, and after eight months, left with your dick in your hand.

Records requests need to be wielded like a scalpel, not chucked like a grenade. Force either a single record or a written no. Personally, my PRRs are so precise, I hunt for "no" … Jazz is the silence between the notes, and the non-answer is typically much more interesting.

>Pro-tip: If it was legal, it left a paper trail. If there's a process, there's a policy. If a decision was made, there's a policy. Find the decision, then demand the records sufficient to show it was made lawfully. That last part is a term of art. Use it. This is the Stevens Method.

Over the summer, I've pointed my attention at Flock (ALPRs).

Lots of folks are working the search side, and they should be. All sorts of LEO shenanigans. It's ugly. You know this; not telling you shit you don't already know.

However …

Those stories about a captured plate are the beast's maw. I'm hunting the ass end of things.

Thanks to a ton of FOIA recon and the Sarasota PD, I discovered these systems have a suppression feature that allows a plate to be exempted. And if a plate can be exempted, somebody decides who.

That's a decision, and that leaves a paper trail – who's on it, how did they get there, and where is the record?

Well, sort of…

Like I said, Sarasota answered, something along the lines of, the suppression capability exists, SPD doesn't use it.

And then they stopped me cold with this shared tidbit: when a plate is removed from that list, nothing logs it. No entry. No timestamp. No record of who pulled it or when.

That data just ceases to exist.
Think about what that means in practice.

You could suppress whomever, say elected officials, and then when they leave office, delete them from the list. No log, no before, no after.

Also, some unsubstantiated (as of now) intel about these deletions making it out to a 3rd party analytics service.

Here under Florida's Sunshine Law (Chapter 119), there's a serious argument about what that missing record is and isn't. I have sued, pro se and won, for far less.

Seems to be a clean trap for any agency running this software. Cough up your log of suppression list changes. Or don't.

1. They keep one. Produce it. Now we know who was on the list, who put them there, and who took them off.
2. They don't. That glorious non-answer means the list is unauditable, and you got it in writing. You cannot audit a state that leaves no trace of having existed.

Either way, it's a hell of a campfire story. There's no version where the agency wins by answering.

Be warned: my Substack article is wonky and runs about four thousand words.

https://preview.redd.it/25xd6f3nokkh1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=73fafa39694a9d14c75e36f6237c4679cb76549d

I have filed public records requests in Florida for thirty years, and the hardest part is not the denial. It is the tip that lands ready to print.

The claim going around is that Shevrin Jones held a no-show job at Broward Sheriff's Office. It traces to Pembroke Park Mayor Geoffrey Jacobs, who says unnamed deputies told him Jones had an office and rarely used it.

https://reddit.com/link/1vtrkry/video/jgl486klokkh1/player

I wanted it. It was clean, it was quotable, and it would have moved.

I killed it.

Jacobs led the campaign to strip BSO of the Pembroke Park policing contract. In April 2026 an outside law firm hired by his own town investigated his own legislative aide over whether she performed her duties, and found no evidence she failed to work. A man in a contract war with the agency, weeks removed from his own ghost-job story, passing secondhand deputy gossip, is not a source. He is a motive with a phone.

So I filed instead. Position titles, position numbers, classifications, pay grades, hire date, separation date, every personnel action form in between, every assigned supervisor, and any telework authorization.

Maybe Jacobs is right, maybe he's not -- but actual data > quoting unnamed sources.

The rumor would have been read Tuesday and forgotten Wednesday. The certification BSO signs is on the record forever.

On Substack.

Raphael Olmeda, Sun-Sentinel Court Jester

Fucking hot outside, amirite?

Last week, I dropped the BSO payroll spreadsheet in here. Over 250,000 views in a sub with 20,000 members. You read it. All of it.

Then I called Rafael Olmeda at the Sun Sentinel and handed him the rest.

• One BSO sergeant. $457,000 in a single year.
• Six employees in one jail department. $2.3 million between them.
• The Sheriff's secretary. $187,000, twice what the next secretary makes.
• A mechanic. $225,000, with 68% of it in overtime. 19 mechanics, only 2 working OT.
• Agency-wide 2025 overtime. $107 million across 1.53 million hours.

He passed. Said you lacked the attention span, couldn't follow along, and preferred Karen videos.

Fuck that noise.

So I wrote the paper a letter to the editor. 141 words. They will not run it, and the reason is not space.

Running it means printing, in their own ink, that their courts reporter looked at 133,000 rows of public payroll data and decided the people buying the paper were too thick for it.

Here is the letter.

I brought your paper a $107 million story. Broward Sheriff's Office overtime, 2025. 1.53 million hours. One sergeant at $457,000. Six jail employees splitting $2.3 million. A mechanic at $225,000, two thirds of it overtime.

Your courts reporter, Rafael Olmeda, passed. He told me your readers lack the attention span. Too much for them. They just want the quick thing. I asked if he meant TikTok and Karen videos. He said yeah.

I posted the payroll data on r/Broward instead. Over 250,000 views in a subreddit of 40,000 members. Broward residents read spreadsheets about their own sheriff, for free, on purpose.

Your reporter described his own copy and put your readers' name on it.

Take "paper of record" off the masthead. Democracy doesn't die in the darkness. It dies in the sheer laziness of those paid to protect it in print.

Olmeda's readers, here on Reddit, followed along a quarter million times while he was busy explaining they could not.

Full piece is on Substack.

Press play. Tick.

https://reddit.com/link/1vr1sxe/video/896yqu1phzjh1/player

BSO runs a gym inside its Research, Development and Training Center. Public building, public money. So, WTF, let's see the sign-in log. That was five months, a $400 special service charge estimate, and one litigation threat ago.

https://preview.redd.it/3r1kki55izjh1.png?width=636&format=png&auto=webp&s=415c21d082f25f5fac3ee216dba9b6533de194cd

Today, Ye Olde Spreadsheet landed. 2,973 entries, August 5, 2024 at 11:10 a.m. through July 28, 2026 at 9:56 a.m. Seven columns. Five of them hold the same value in every row.

Guest last name: Guest. Guest first name: Guest.

I never wanted the guests' names. Florida protects the names of spouses and children of law enforcement staff at §119.071(4)(d)2.a. BSO's Rule 1, printed over Sheriff Gregory Tony's name, says the only guest allowed is an employee's spouse or domestic partner. Cite the statute and we are done. Black out the guest.

Rule 1 says one more thing. An employee has to walk the guest in and stay with them.

So every one of those visits carries a second name. The BSO employee who escorted a civilian into a secured facility. That name is public in Florida. Only the home address, phone, birth date, and photo are protected. It is the one column that shows whether Rule 1 was followed.

It is the column BSO did not export.

And I asked. And now, have re-asked.

No exemption claimed. Not one statute. Not one field name. Under §119.07(1)(e), an agency holding something back has to say in writing what law lets it. BSO overwrote a stored value in 2,973 records and mailed a cover letter.

Er, nyet.

The second attachment in the same production is 26 non-employees, every one named, every one marked "Vendor."

Tony's agency will tell me who teaches the Zumba class. It will not tell me who takes it.

I asked for January 1, 2023 forward. The export starts August 5, 2024. That is 582 days gone, no retention schedule, no citation.

Sloppy, lazy, something else? PS I ain't going away.

I filed again on August 17. Notice of Deficiency to Records Custodian Erin Foley, copy to General Counsel Terrence Lynch. Supplemental Filing No. 8, severable: the escorting employee on all 2,973 entries, by name.

They put the system in writing. That door does not close again.

Press play. Tick.

More about this nonsense on Substack.