What are the changes to the Baker Act for 2022?

Hello everyone, its Mark. And welcome back. In this video I want to talk to you about the changes to Florida’s Baker Act chapter 394 for 2022. And specifically in this video I want to talk to you about the changes is with regards to the way that miners are being treated when it comes to being Baker acted. So here in Florida, we’ve seen an absolute epidemic of children, sometimes as young as five, being placed in handcuffs and taken to receive facilities. And the problems that we see here in our office are when either the children are frankly just not treated appropriately, they’re being tanked. I mean they’re being made to take the purple treated as if they’re criminals. Okay? They were seeing a lot of that and also we’re seeing where parents aren’t being notified sometimes at all or until after the fact and now there’s nothing they can do. So the changes and the statues that really are relevant here, and you’re welcome to look this up yourself, are 381.0 00:56 and 10 one 4.3.

Those are the sections of the Florida law here that I think you should take a look at. Specifically, section 19 of 381.0 00:56 talks about the fact that before the charge removed from the school that there has to be, quote, a reasonable attempt to notify. Right. A reasonable attempt to notify. And that means the exercise of reasonable diligence and care by the principal or the principal’s designee to make contact with the student’s, parent, guardian or other known emergency contact.

So the school is supposed to make a reasonable attempt to notify you. You shouldn’t be finding out after the fact and when your child is already at a receive facility because it’s totally inappropriate. And apparently the Florida legislature agreed. So that is the first big change that I see here and 114.3 has to do with your rights as a parent, right, and how you should be treated. So that’s sort of the first major change.

The second major change that I saw was that it now gives law enforcement the discretion as to whether or not they’re handcuffed a minor child. Obviously, unless anyone’s becoming violent with the police, if they’re a minor, I don’t see any reason why they should be handcuffed. Talk about traumatizing a child. What could be worse than being handcuffed walked out of school in front of all of your fellow students and placed in the back of a police car. I can’t imagine anything worse for a child.

But apparently now the legislature has given law enforcement discretion to do that. Now look, I totally understand. When I was a prosecutor, it was a standard operating procedure for law enforcement to handcuff somebody. And I get it. We want our men and women in blue to be safe.

No doubt about it, okay? And this is not a political discussion. This is just as a former prosecutor and having two retired law enforcement officers on my staff here we want to make sure these folks are safe. They got a family to go to, two at the end of the day, so we want them to be safe. But we also have to sort of measure that against or the rights and frankly, the emotional condition and the trauma imposes on upon a five year old, a ten year old, whatever it is, a minor child.

And so those are the two big changes I see for the bank rack. But as I said in other videos, there’s no monitoring going on here when it comes to these receive facilities. And if your loved one, whether it’s a child or an adult, is taken to one of these, if you want to get them out, unless the facility is going to see the light of day and let them go, then we need to fight. We need to fight quickly, because once the facility goes to court and gets a court order, it’s pretty much guaranteed him over. Not impossible, but very difficult, and certainly a whole lot more expensive and a longer in terms of time procedure to get your loved ones secured.

So anyway, with that said, thanks for tuning in. See you in the next video. Bye.