Our Mission
To bring accountability and transparency to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, because it protects us all.
Backstory
The inspiration behind Broward Cop Watch
Did you know that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office is the highest paid contracted agency in Pompano Beach?
And did you also know that they operate with ZERO oversight?
You probably didn’t unless you’ve had to report a negative experience with a cop to BSO’s Internal Affairs department, which is completely managed internally by BSO, with officers making the decisions of whether a citizen’s complaint is valid and whether or not the deputy in question gets punished if found guilty.
I’m a Pompano Beach native of 35 years.
I went to St. Coleman’s and Cardinal Gibbons, and to be honest, I never thought much about local laws or politics or BSO… until Dec. 11, 2020, when the unfathomable happened to me; something you could only believe if it happened to you.
On Dec. 11, 2020, I was falsely arrested and assaulted by Deputy Steven Davis, who accused me of assaulting him — a felony — “Assault on a Law Enforcement Officer” is what shows on my record.
I met Davis three months prior, in October, when I was walking my two service dogs on the side of the beach by Lucky Fish, where I used to live and where Davis ate and slept all day, everyday because this was where he paroled.
It’s illegal to walk your dogs on this side of the street, unless they’re service animals, and everyone does it all day long regardless of the dog’s service animal status. When he said something to me about it, he was talking to a man with a golden retriever, which was not a service animal, on the same side of the road.
He didn’t like that I had an “attitude” when I responded back, and ever since then, he harassed me every time I walked my dogs, where I had lived for years.
Three days prior to that dreadful day in December, I had a run-in with Davis, who was in an unmarked car, and yet again, yelled at me for walking on the “wrong” side of the road, while others were doing the exact same thing.
I asked him why he only harassed me, and his exact words were, “I’m targeting you, because I don’t like you.”
I immediately went upstairs and reported him via the online Internal Affairs form and emailed Major Wayne Adkins, who is now retired.
No one replied.
I didn’t even get confirmation of my form submission, so I called. No one cared.
They said they’d get back to me. They didn’t.
And then three days later, I was stopped in an unmarked car, for nothing, and I was immediately falsely arrested and assaulted by Davis in front of my entire condo association.
It was humiliating to say the least, especially because I had spent a decade building my professional and personal reputation after overcoming the adversity of having to drop out of college due to financial constraints.
I was not allowed bail for two days, because he reported assault on a law enforcement officer. They put me on suicide watch, and it is by far the worst and most shameful feeling experience of my life. I’ve been diagnosed with the highest form of clinical PTSD by expert psychologists.
My case went on for years, because prosecutors insisted I get prison time, my lawyer told me.
After I was out, a reporter recommended I email the mayor and the commissioners, so I did and told them in detail what had happened, and Mayor Rex Hardin insisted I go through BSO Internal Affairs, which had already failed me.
He basically told me I was crazy, and the city had no problems with our police force — that they are all standup men and women.
An assault that could’ve been prevented
Flash forward three years, and Deputy Davis did the same exact thing to another young woman, Kianna Cooper, on her birthday, right in front of Lucky Fish, in almost exactly the same spot. She got it worse than me though.
He punched her in the face, for absolutely nothing. He arrested her for not producing her ID fast enough because she had long nails.
Turns out, Davis has a history of assaulting women and claiming they assaulted them.
According to records from BSO, throughout his career, Davis has claimed this false narrative at least 24 times, as that’s the number of times he’s gotten disability for the women who “hurt him” during the fake assault on him.
Now, he could be one bad seed, right? Wrong.
He had four witnesses, who were colleagues, in my case alone, who lied for him, one of whom has been in the news for domestic violence against his wife.
Then there were the prosecutors, who knew this man was bad news and still wanted to give me PRISON time — me, a productive Pompano Beach native and resident, who is smart and contributes to society. What a waste of taxpayer money!
I also requested a list of all of Davis’ Internal Affairs complaints since he began his career at BSO. There were about 5-6 complaints total, most of which he got away scot free, with no punishment, but here’s the kicker: Neither mine nor Kianna’s complaints were documented in his conduct record.
Davis has been moved to Wellington since, where he is still working as a deputy for BSO. They had to move him because he was receiving death threats after Kianna’s case.
And this is what inspired me to create Broward Cop Watch.
Objectives
I have three big objectives with this project, which I know will take some time (and a lot of data) to get implemented.
Create a Civilian Review Board (CRB) to replace BSO Internal Affairs and ensure bad cops are disciplined and removed.
My goal with Broward Cop Watch is to bring transparency and accountability to BSO by creating a Civilian Review Board (CRB) that is completely detached from BSO.
According to the ACLU, by the end of 1997, more than 75 percent of the nation’s largest cities (more than 80 cities across the country) had civilian review systems. Today, it’s at least 100, and it continues to grow due to the George Floyd killing.
Based on BSO’s indifferent attitude toward citizens and lack of accessibility, along with the mayor and commissioners looking the other way at their bad behavior, establishing a CRB will be a great fight, but to me, it’s a fight worth having.
Create an Early Warning System to spot potentially dangerous cops before it’s too late.
It’s not like this would be hard to do.
BSO already employs predictive policing technologies to make arrests before crimes occur by using data, such as that found on social media, and algorithms, based on data, like whether or not someone has been arrested before, to “prevent” crime.
An Early Warning System will only work though if we know complaints/records are being properly documented by an outside agency or board.
This information must be public.
To protect officers’ identities, we could employ a number system to identify the cops with a history of complaints or a repeated pattern of questionable/bad behavior.
(Although, we do embarrass and shame criminals, who are NOT cops, with mug shots, so why shouldn’t there be a bad cop database, which has actually been created in other cities across the U.S.)
Hold BSO accountable to clear KPIs to measure effectiveness and progress YoY.
In the 2021 City of Pompano Beach budget, BSO claimed to need a budget increase in order to increase the number of officers to parole high-crime areas and decrease the crime rate.
The irony is that there is no report with clear YoY KPIs that hold BSO accountable for its budget increases and what it’s done all year. Can you believe that — when they have such an obscene size budget?
The ACLU recommends a list of metrics that actually matter, and none of them are the commonplace ones that BSO loves to tout.
And these KPIs need to be easily accessible, easy-to-digest, public information on the BSO or COPBFL website to ensure taxpayers see the tangible results the highest paid contracted agency is producing for us.
This should be a simple KPI dashboard, not a 135-page online magazine that isn’t user friendly, downloadable and is filled with photoshoots of the sheriff — and is only produced once a year by God knows who.
How it works
The path to transparency and accountability
How to implement a better system
We start by sharing our stories.
This is my very first goal with Broward Cop Watch — to document and collect complaints against deputies from local citizens.
I don’t want complaints to get “lost” in BSO Internal Affairs anymore, like mine did, hence the reason I’m begging you to submit your complaints here too — that way you’ll have more than one form of proof you submitted your claim, and hopefully, it’ll be easier to get justice.
If you don’t have a personal complaint, but have a tip about any Broward County deputy, please submit it here, because I will be investigating BSO regularly and sharing my findings on a new local publication, called Real Pompano.
It has “Real” in front of it, because it signifies that this is the only honest, unbiased news source in our community “by the common local, for the common local.”
About
About the founder
Hi, I’m Lauren Holliday!
I studied journalism at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and my words and ideas have been published in major news outlets, including but not limited to: Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Boston Globe, Fast Company, Fortune, Business Insider and CNBC, and my first internship was at The Sun Sentinel, in 2011.
Since then (the last 14+ years), I’ve worked as a marketer and website designer for some of the biggest companies in tech, including Cisco, HubSpot and many other well-funded tech companies, as well as celebrities, such as Flo Rida and Harvard Business Review authors.
I love the Internet because it can change things, if you use it right. I love to say that the world is your oyster when you have a computer, and so I’m finally practicing what I preach.
I’ll never get the justice I deserve, but I can try to help others get the justice they deserve and prevent peers in my community from getting hurt like myself and Kianna (and the long list of other women) did.
This is the best form of revenge I can think of.
Please help me help our community be the best and most just it can be by bringing accountability and transparency to Pompano Beach and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
Thank you for reading, and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at realpompanobeach@gmail.com.
Genuinely,
Lauren Holliday
The common local, for the common local
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