Broward Sheriff’s Office used to run a gym at headquarters. Retired deputies used it. They showed credentials, signed in with security in the main lobby, worked out, went home. That was the arrangement for years.
Sheriff Gregory Tony opened a new facility. Spent $7M of our money on it. Retired deputies are out.
A very high ranking insider describes the old rule in a sentence: credentials at the desk, sign in with security in the main lobby of headquarters. Family members were word of mouth, on and off, and escorted by an employee the entire time.
Escorted the entire time. Hold onto that.
So said Animal Farm. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
100% Reader Funded
Everything here is free and stays free. Paying unlocks nothing — no bonus posts, no Discord, no tote bag. It funds the next request: filing fees, certified mail, server time.
The work is the product, and the product ships whether you pay or not.
If you want more of it, here’s the button.
Twenty-eight in, two out
I filed R533397-030926 on March 9, 2026. Twenty-eight record categories across four parts. Credential counts, approval records, audits, visitor data, ethics records. On March 20, 2026 BSO closed the request as fulfilled and produced two documents.
The first is TAB 21-61, dated October 21, 2021, titled “PSB Fitness Center Use: Rules and Compliance.” It says the facility serves BSO employees and their families. It says the facility is open 24 hours. It contains no accompaniment requirement anywhere in it.
The second is a blank hold harmless waiver, form TG#106, for the Strength and Condition Center. Blank. Any adult with a pen qualifies.
No credential counts. No approval records. No audits. No visitor logs. No exemption asserted under Fla. Stat. §119.07(1)(f), which requires an agency to name the exemption in writing when it withholds. The request required a written statement wherever no record existed. BSO skipped that too.
Twenty-eight categories in. Two documents out. The custodian typed “fulfilled” and went to lunch.
The question the paper raises
Retired deputies with twenty-five years in lost access to a building they spent their careers inside. Family members got in on word of mouth with an employee walking beside them the whole way.
So the question is whether anyone who is not a BSO employee holds a card that opens the headquarters building without an escort.
That is not a rumor question. It is a database question. Access control systems keep a cardholder record for every credential, an access level assignment showing which doors and floors that credential opens, and an event history logging every read, granted or denied, timestamped. The system has no loyalties. It has rows.
Sources say a card like that gets approved at the top of the building, by the sheriff and a colonel, I’m hearing Col. GoatzBeDay, and by nobody else. The records will name whoever signed. That is what records are for.
A message from REVOLT Insights
Sufficient Records Win Before Appeals Begin
Trial records do not assemble themselves. Sufficient Records Engineering identifies missing rulings, weak objections, transcript gaps, and preservation problems before they become appellate failure points. We help litigators build the paper trail courts need: cleaner issues, stronger arguments, fewer surprises, and a record engineered to survive review.
The camera that corroborated
A few months back, Undersheriff Steve Robson had a confrontation with a BSO civilian employee in the parking area at the training center. By an account from inside the agency, the trigger was a speeding complaint and the escalation was a reach for the lanyard holding the employee’s ID card. Within the week, someone from Internal Affairs arrested the employee for battery on a law enforcement officer under Fla. Stat. §784.07. The Broward State Attorney’s Office declined to file.
The probable cause affidavit describes a videotape. By the affidavit’s own account, that video corroborated the version Robson gave.
Reporters asked for it. Dan Christensen at Florida Bulldog was among them. BSO refused. The stated basis was security. Restricted area, sensitive facility, the usual furniture.
Reliable enough to cite in a sworn affidavit supporting the arrest of a BSO employee. Too sensitive for the public that bought the cameras. The State Attorney read the file and passed.
That is the exemption BSO reaches for, and it is the same one waiting for Items 24 and 25 of this week’s filing. Fla. Stat. §119.071(3)(a) shields security system plans. It does not shield the footage and the access logs a security system generates in the ordinary course of running. It does not shield a record the agency has already put to work in a sworn document.
Note what the confrontation was over. A lanyard. An ID card around a civilian employee’s neck.
BSO’s second in command will reach for a credential in a parking lot, and a man goes into handcuffs over what happens next. Who else carries one into that building has been an open question since March 9.
The part BSO does not get to write
Here is where it stops being a Broward story.
BSO runs CAD and RMS. Those are criminal justice information systems, and the space they occupy is governed by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Security Policy, version 5.9, effective June 1, 2020, document CJISD-ITS-DOC-08140-5.9. Tony did not write it. The County Commission did not write it. A sheriff cannot amend it by memo.
Section 5.9.1 defines a physically secure location. Section 5.9.1.1 requires its perimeter to be prominently posted and separated from non-secure space by physical controls.
Section 5.9.1.2 requires the agency to keep a current list of personnel authorized to enter that space, or to issue credentials to authorized personnel. Under CJIS the badge is not a courtesy. The badge is the authorization.
Section 5.12.1, paragraph 1, requires state of residency and national fingerprint-based record checks before unescorted access to a physically secure location is granted. Before. Section 5.2.1 requires basic security awareness training within six months of assignment and every two years after, for everyone with unescorted access.
Section 5.12.1, paragraph 7, requires the agency to maintain a list of everyone authorized for unescorted access and to hand a current copy to the CJIS Systems Officer on request. In Florida that officer sits at FDLE.
Two mandatory lists. Both are records. BSO keeps them or BSO loses its connection to state and federal systems.
Section 5.9.1.7 closes it. The agency shall authenticate visitors before authorizing escorted access. The agency shall escort visitors at all times and monitor visitor activity.
At all times. The same phrase my source used to describe how BSO handled employees’ families at the old gym. A retiree recited the federal standard from memory, because that was the standard he lived under.
So a non-employee inside a physically secure location at BSO headquarters is in one of two states. On the 5.12.1(7) list, fingerprinted, trained, routed through FDLE. Or a visitor, escorted at all times.
There is no third box. The policy does not contain one.
Pick one
BSO told reporters it could not release parking lot video because the training center is a restricted area with security concerns. That is a position. BSO took it in writing, to journalists, and it held.
Run it forward. The parking lot serves the building. The gym is inside the building, past a locked door, deeper in than the camera angle BSO would not surrender. A perimeter tight enough to swallow a garage does not go slack at the treadmills.
Which brings back TAB 21-61, dated October 21, 2021, produced by BSO’s own custodian on March 20, 2026. Employees and their families. Open 24 hours. No accompaniment requirement anywhere in it.
So either that space is secure or it is not.
If it is secure, BSO wrote and signed a policy opening it to civilians with no escort, no fingerprint check under Section 5.12.1, no training record under Section 5.2.1, and no name on the Section 5.12.1(7) list. Four years of family members walking a controlled floor alone, authorized by a document with a date on it.
If it is not secure, the video should have gone out, the exemption was wrong, and every reporter who got told no got told no for nothing.
BSO does not get both. It already chose, and the refusal letter is the choice.
Item 35 of this week’s filing asks BSO to state which areas it designated under Section 5.9.1. Item 46 asks whether a non-employee credential opens a door into any of them. The agency draws its own perimeter. It just has to draw it once, in writing, and live inside the line.
A message from REVOLT Insights
Civil litigation drafting built to survive a hostile read
Pleadings, motions, and statutory filings drafted for licensed Florida and federal practitioners. Practice areas: Chapter 119, §57.105, FDUTPA, §1983, qualified immunity, and dispositive motions. Every citation Shepardized through Lexis. Build Sheet with every draft. Flat-fee. Law-firm-only by design. The retaining attorney directs and signs every filing.
What went in
Today I filed Supplemental Filing No. 7. Forty-eight numbered items, five decision nodes, addressed to Erin Foley, BSO’s records custodian.
It asks for the 5.9.1.2 list and the 5.12.1(7) list, names redacted, along with every copy of that second list BSO has furnished to FDLE. It asks for one number off each: how many people on those lists are not employees, not sworn, not contractors, not vendors. It asks whether any non-employee credential opens a door into a designated area. It asks for the fingerprint procedure, the training curriculum, the visitor escort records, and the findings sections of every FDLE audit of BSO under Section 5.11.2, which requires FDLE to audit agencies with direct access to the state system every three years.
It asks for the access control event history, because Section 5.9.1.6 requires the agency to monitor physical access to detect and respond to security incidents, and monitoring produces a record.
It opens with a preservation demand citing Fla. Stat. §257.36 and §119.10, and it demands native files with metadata intact. Anyone who wants to build a 2019 memo this week is welcome to try. Creation dates are rows too.
Every item ends the way the last twenty-eight did. Produce the record or state in writing that none exists.
BSO can hand over the list. Or BSO can put in writing, to a records requester in Deerfield Beach, that the list the FBI requires it to keep does not exist, and then explain that sentence to Tallahassee.
I’ll take either.
Tick.
P.S.
The FBI does not audit BSO. FDLE does.
The policy allows one CJIS Systems Agency per state. Florida’s is the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Mark Glass commissioner. Section 5.11.2 requires that agency to audit every agency with direct access to the state system at least every three years. FDLE runs that work through its Compliance and Education Bureau, Audits and Compliance section, (850) 410-7126.
Section 5.12.1(7) gives the CJIS Systems Officer standing to demand BSO’s unescorted-access list on request. That is a different kind of request than mine. Tony cannot close it as fulfilled.
FDLE is also a Chapter 119 agency. Its copy of a BSO audit is a public record sitting in Tallahassee, in a building where nobody’s career depends on Broward.
I am not mailing Tallahassee this week. Supplemental No. 7 goes to Erin Foley first. Whatever she writes back becomes the attachment.
She can produce the list. Or she can put it in writing that the list the FBI requires BSO to keep does not exist.
Then I mail it north.
Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.
