Florida’s Risk Protection Order Cases and Intimate Partner Violence: A Descriptive Study

In Florida, risk protection orders (RPOs) allow law enforcement to petition the court to temporarily prohibit firearm purchase and possession by an individual who behaves dangerously and is at risk of engaging in violence against themselves or others. RPOs are also known as extreme RPOs or red flag laws. We collected all (N = 4,695) Florida RPO cases filed from March 2018 (when the policy was enacted) to June 2020 and coded a random sample (n = 2,406) to examine how RPOs have been implemented in Florida, a state that has granted substantially more RPO cases than any other state analyzed thus far. The main objectives of this descriptive analysis were to characterize the RPO respondents (those subject to an RPO), the events that led law enforcement to petition for the RPO, and the RPO case outcomes. We specifically explored how respondents were reported to have used or threatened intimate partner violence and whether they had a domestic violence protective order (DVPO) against them. Of Florida’s 67 counties, 59 counties had at least one RPO case, with a high of 731 cases in one county to 35 counties with fewer than 10 RPO cases. In Florida, RPO petitions were filed by law enforcement in response to concerns of suicide and violence against others, with the majority (89%) of final RPO petitions resulting in final RPOs. Twenty-six percent of coded cases included descriptions of threats and uses of violence against an intimate partner, and 20% of these cases with intimate partner violence included that the respondent had a current or previous DVPO. In cases of intimate partner violence, RPOs allow law enforcement to respond quickly to imminent risks of violence and temporarily prevent the purchase and possession of a firearm.