DeSantis, Florida Officials Issue Warnings to Would-Be Looters Ahead of Hurricane Milton

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference at the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee, Fla., on Sept. 26, 2024. Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

Officials in Florida issued stark warnings to would-be looters during Hurricane Milton that they could get shot or arrested.

“Florida will not stand for looting—we will not stand for it. We will come after you,” Mark Glass, commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, told reporters on Wednesday morning.

A day earlier, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that “if you think you’re going to go in and loot, you got another thing coming,” noting that Florida is a “Second Amendment state.”

“If you go into somebody’s house after the storm passes, think that you’re going to be able to commit crimes, you’re going to get in really serious trouble. And quite frankly, you don’t know what’s behind that door in a Second Amendment state,” he said during a news conference.

Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly, meanwhile, told a news conference on Wednesday that for “criminals who think they can prey on our communities, just remember that we have extra deputies [who] are on patrol ... and we have lots of cameras.”

“Stay out of Flagler County if you think you can commit a crime,” he warned, adding that people who commit property crimes will “ride out this storm” in the “county jail.”

Similar warnings have been issued by DeSantis and other Florida officials in previous years. “This part of Florida, you’ve got a lot of advocates and some proponents of the Second Amendment. And I’ve seen signs in different people’s yards in the past after these disasters, and I would say it’s probably here, ‘You loot, we shoot.’ You never know what’s behind that door,” the governor said in 2023.

In 2022, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd called on armed homeowners to shoot potential looters until they look “like grated cheese” in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida’s western coast.

There were sporadic reports of looting in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which made landfall along the Florida Panhandle in late September. That included at least eight men who were arrested in eastern Tennessee for burglarizing multiple homes, officials said.

Milton weakened to a Category 4 storm on Wednesday morning, said the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The storm, which is expected to make landfall on Wednesday night or early Thursday, has 145 mph winds and is expected to bring storm surge levels up to 12 feet, according to the NHC.

“We would like to emphasize that Milton’s exact landfall location is not possible to predict even at this time, particularly if the hurricane wobbles during the day and into this evening,” the NHC said in a forecast discussion.

It is threatening the Tampa Bay area, which is home to more than 3.3 million people and has managed to evade a direct hit from a major hurricane for more than 100 years. Milton is also menacing stretches of Florida’s west coast that were battered when Helene came ashore on Sept. 26.

President Joe Biden, who postponed an overseas trip so he could remain at the White House to monitor Milton, warned it “could be one of the worst storms in 100 years to hit Florida.”

With Milton expected to remain fairly strong as it crosses Florida, hurricane warnings were extended early Tuesday to parts of the state’s east coast.

Tropical storm warnings were issued as far north as Savannah, roughly 200 miles from the projected path of the hurricane’s center.

Storm surge of 2 to 4 feet was forecast for Georgia communities including St. Simons Island, home to nearly 16,000 people, and Tybee Island, which has a population of 3,100. Wind gusts of up to 45 mph could break off large tree limbs, topple shallow-rooted trees, and cause scattered power outages, according to the National Weather Service.

The Associated contributed to this report.