Legislation in the Florida House seeks to update the legal threshold for being a member of a street gang.
Rep. Jessica Baker’s HB 429 would make a number of changes to statute.
Among them would be considering an admission of gang membership on social media to be sufficient for the purposes of prosecution.
As the law currently stands, social media isn’t contemplated.
Baker’s bill also would allow the attestation of a spouse that someone is in a gang to be enough for the purposes of prosecutors.
Additionally, if the suspect has “authored any communication indicating criminal gang affiliation, criminal gang-related activity, or acceptance of responsibility for the commission of any crime by the criminal gang,” that is also sufficient under the proposed language.
Similarly, “criminal gang-related language on social media, including language used in a post, caption, comment, reply, thread, direct message, private message, meme, reel, username, screen name, handle, or e-mail address” or participation in “any recording that promotes or describes criminal gang activity, regardless of whether the activity actually took place” suffices.
That could conceivably include rap music, where emcees often depict very specific actions that may or may not happened.
