Police in the Sunshine State will be able to ticket drivers for playing music too loud from their cars starting on Friday.
The law makes it a noncriminal traffic violation for any driver’s music to to be “[p]lainly audible at a distance of 25 feet or more from the motor vehicle,” according to the legislation.
Drivers will be dinged a fee of up to $114, according to nbcmiami.com.
Some think the law makes sense, saying they hope it will cut down on obnoxious noise levels in the public sphere.
“Living in the area where there’s a lot of downtown activity, there are cars that come through at 12 or 1 o’clock in the morning with their blaring music bumping through the neighborhood,” Orange County resident Lamonte Gwynn told WESH Ch. 2. “If [the law] is really to cut down on the noise then I think it would help in some respect.”
Others decry the new rule as just another way for the state to make money at residents’ expense.
“To me, it looks like a money grab,” Jerome Douglas told WFLA.
Yet others complained that the loud music crackdown will give police a way to target racial minorities and serve as a trigger for warrantless searches.
“It’s a pretext to pull people over for other reasons,” St. Petersburg lawyer Richard Catalano, 61, told Palm Peach Post columnist Frank Cerabino.
“The law uses radio noise as a way not only for officers to do unwarranted drug searches but it includes a provision to impound the cars for up to three days for non-criminal traffic infractions if they happen during unsanctioned beach parties, which are typically attended attended by young Black people,” Cerabino wrote in a June 26 column criticizing the law.
“If they have reason to pull somebody over that they’re kind of targeting because of music, and then they find weed or you get a subjective resisting arrest, we’re violating civil rights left and right,” lawyer John Phillips said to Action News Jax.
