Why's it always Florida, is it something in the water?
In a nutshell: Florida's Sunshine Law. It guarantees easy access to all public records from all three branches of state government, including police reports and mugshots. Like how Danbooru has a constant stream of incoming art from Pixiv and Twitter, the media in Florida basically has an endless stream of current events thanks to this law.
In a nutshell: Florida's Sunshine Law. It guarantees easy access to all public records from all three branches of state government, including police reports and mugshots. Like how Danbooru has a constant stream of incoming art from Pixiv and Twitter, the media in Florida basically has an endless stream of current events thanks to this law.
To put it another way, it's not that weirdo criminals are actually more common in Florida than in other U.S. states. The disproportionate amount of bizarre crime news that comes out of Florida is mostly due to the Sunshine Law, combined with the simple fact that Florida is just one of the most populous states in the country. I'm sure that if California and Texas had criminal court systems as transparent as Florida's, you could expect similarly high levels of weirdo crime stories from those states too.
To put it another way, it's not that weirdo criminals are actually more common in Florida than in other U.S. states. The disproportionate amount of bizarre crime news that comes out of Florida is mostly due to the Sunshine Law, combined with the simple fact that Florida is just one of the most populous states in the country. I'm sure that if California and Texas had criminal court systems as transparent as Florida's, you could expect similarly high levels of weirdo crime stories from those states too.
My old neighbor went psychotic and crashed his car in our ditch but only like, 10 people knew about it because the only report about it was a brief line in the police blotter and like, a court case with few public details outside of it being treated like a DUI. Nobody involved really felt like involving the media in anything I guess.