WEST PALM BEACH — Wellington residents woke up one morning earlier this month to find over 100 antisemitic flyers littering their lawns, an occurrence that became so common across South Florida last year, it was almost routine.
The antisemitic incidents, which appeared to taper off over the past few months, are popping up again — but this time, if the perpetrators are caught, they will be treated as felons for acts like littering, trespassing and displaying images on buildings under a new Florida law designed specifically to thwart them.
“It appeared as if these acts were over,” Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said at a news conference at the State Attorney’s Office in West Palm Beach on Tuesday, asking the public for help. “Now they rear their disgusting little heads again … they’re testing our law.”
Aronberg was joined by Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw and State Rep. Mike Caruso, who represents District 87 in Palm Beach County and introduced the bill last session. He joined Gov. Ron DeSantis when he signed the bill, HB 269, into law in Jerusalem in April. It went into effect in July.
Antisemitic incidents rose to new highs in Palm Beach County and throughout South Florida in 2022 and early 2023. In January, a group projected a swastika onto the AT&T building in downtown West Palm Beach; another set up a table with a banner on Florida Atlantic University’s campus with antisemitic messages. Hundreds of antisemitic flyers littered the lawns of homes in the Jewish neighborhoods of cities like Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and Surfside.
The incidents have begun picking up again across the state and elsewhere, as well as in South Florida, where the Wellington incident was the first since the new law passed. This past week in Orlando, officers arrested two men in the hanging of an antisemitic banner over Interstate 4 earlier in the summer. They are being charged under the new law.
In some of the incidents prior to the law’s passage, some arrests were made in Palm Beach County under anti-littering or anti-trespassing laws, the consequences minor, as the speech itself was not factored in. As far as Aronberg knows, Palm Beach County was the only county in Florida to prosecute any of the incidents.
The new law has not yet been used in any arrests. But it has built on the previous usage of littering and trespassing laws by placing additional penalties on those crimes based on the speech used in committing them.
Now, in response to the distribution of antisemitic flyers, the law makes it a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison to litter — if the litter “contains a credible threat” and is dumped onto private property “for the purpose of intimidating the owner.”
When the people projecting the swastika in West Palm Beach were stopped last January, they “laughed at the police officer,” Caruso said, because he couldn’t stop them.
The new bill makes it a misdemeanor to project any image onto a building or structure without permission. Should that image contain a “credible threat,” the act is a third-degree felony.
A previous law banning speech that targets a specific group was thrown out by an appeals court on First Amendment grounds, Aronberg said. The new law is hopefully “crafted in a way that will stand court scrutiny,” should someone challenge it.
“We’re going to enforce it because it’s on the books,” he said. “Hopefully the courts will give it their approval.”
Antisemitic messages have reached hundreds of homes and spread from Orlando to St. Petersburg to Miami, and in neighboring states, escalating in severity. In one case, Bradshaw said, people placed themselves in the driveways of synagogues, shouting at people through bullhorns. In another, Caruso said, a woman taking two young children to school in Surfside was harassed by a group of men.
“Where does it stop if you don’t draw a line in the sand?” Bradshaw asked. “They continue to ramp up what they do.”
While the breadth of incidents gives the appearance of widespread antisemitism, one group is behind many of the same incidents and is made up of a handful of people, Aronbeg said.
He declined to name the group Tuesday, saying he didn’t want to give them additional attention, though he said they are originally from California.
“They want you to think it’s an army of individuals,” Aronberg said, adding that the “leader” is also one of the people throwing out the flyers.
Officials hope that the new law will help stem the new tide of incidents, saying it already appears to have altered their behavior. Previously undaunted when confronted by law enforcement, the perpetrators are now more concerned about getting caught, Aronberg said.
But their new evasiveness also means law enforcement needs the public’s help to build a case, through sending tips, evidence like Ring camera videos, and calling 911 while the incidents are happening so officers can catch them in the act.
In the Wellington case, the suspects wore masks and distributed the flyers overnight; deputies still haven’t made any arrests, Bradshaw said.
“This was the first time we saw this since the statute passed,” Aronberg said. “And we would love to prosecute. But we need the help of the community.”
