A person assaulted in an apartment parking lot, a hotel corridor or a bar’s back lot has two claims: one against the attacker, who usually has no money and may never be found, and one against the owner of the property, who had a duty to take reasonable steps against a crime it could foresee. The second claim is the negligent security case, and Florida changed its rules in 2023. The change, part of the tort reform bill known as HB 837, did not end these cases, as some owners assumed; it gave apartment owners a safe harbor they have to earn and told juries to put a share of the fault on the criminal. Here is what a victim has to prove now, and what an owner has to show to avoid liability.
The claim: a crime the owner should have seen coming
A property owner is not an insurer of its guests’ safety, but it has to protect them against the criminal acts of third parties that were reasonably foreseeable. Foreseeability is proven with history: prior crimes on the property and in the immediate area, police calls, complaints from tenants or guests, incident reports, and the owner’s own security assessments. The second element is the breach: what reasonable security would have been and what the owner did instead. Broken gates, dark parking lots, cameras that did not record, a guard post that was budgeted and never staffed, a front desk that handed out keys without checking identification. The third is causation, that the measure would have made a difference, which an expert in security practice usually addresses. The cases arise at apartment complexes most often, then hotels and motels, bars and nightclubs, shopping centers, gas stations and parking garages.
What HB 837 changed: the apartment safe harbor
Section 768.0706 now gives the owner or operator of a multifamily residential property a presumption against liability for a third party’s criminal act if, at the time of the crime, it had all of the following in place: a security camera system at every point of entry and exit that records and keeps footage for at least 30 days; lighting in parking lots, walkways, laundry rooms and common areas from dusk to dawn; a one-inch deadbolt on every door; a locking device on every window and sliding door; locked gates with key or fob access at every pool fence; and a peephole or viewer on every door without a window. The owner must also have completed a crime prevention through environmental design assessment by a qualified practitioner within the previous three years and must provide the security training the statute describes to its employees. An owner who meets every item gets the presumption. An owner who meets most of them does not, and the victim’s case proceeds as it always did. In practice the safe harbor turned the first weeks of these cases into a document fight over whether the cameras recorded, whether the gates locked and when the assessment was done, which is why the preservation letter goes out before the owner has time to fix anything.
What HB 837 changed: fault for the criminal
Section 768.0701, also added by HB 837, tells the jury in a negligent security case to consider the fault of every person who contributed to the injury, including the attacker, and to assign a percentage to each. Under Florida’s comparative fault rule the owner then pays only its own share. Defense lawyers read this as the end of large recoveries; the result so far has been that the owner’s share depends on the evidence of what it knew and did, and an owner that ignored a year of police calls at its gate still carries a large share. The 2023 reform also shortened the general negligence deadline to two years, which applies here, and the cases against bars and clubs still run under the older dram-shop and premises rules.
Hotels, bars and businesses are outside the safe harbor
The presumption in section 768.0706 is written for multifamily residential property. A hotel, a bar, a restaurant, a store, a gas station or a parking garage gets no safe harbor; the claim against it is the ordinary negligent security claim, measured by what reasonable care required for that kind of business in that location, with the same comparative-fault apportionment. A bar that over-serves and ejects a patron who then assaults someone in the lot, a hotel whose key cards open every floor, a convenience store with a history of armed robberies and no changes made, are the recurring facts.
What the victim’s lawyer does in the first month
- Preservation letters to the owner, the manager and the security contractor for the footage, the gate and access logs, the incident reports, the work orders on lights and locks, the lease file and the CPTED assessment, before the 30-day retention runs.
- The crime history: police calls-for-service records for the address and the surrounding blocks, obtained by public records request, which is what proves foreseeability.
- The criminal case: coordination with the State Attorney’s Office, whose file includes what the civil case needs; the civil claim does not wait for the prosecution.
- Coverage: the owner’s general liability policy and umbrella, the management company’s policy, the security contractor’s policy, and any assault-and-battery exclusion that has to be dealt with early.
- Medical and counseling records, since the injuries in these cases are as often psychological as physical, and both are compensable.
Talk to a Florida negligent security lawyer
If you were assaulted on someone else’s property, call or text 727-847-4878 or contact us online for a free, confidential consultation, 24 hours a day. The evidence that proves what the owner knew is overwritten within weeks, and you owe no fees and no costs unless we win. Our negligent security page explains these claims in more detail.
The hiring of a lawyer is an important decision that should not be based solely upon advertisements. This article is general information about Florida law as of its publication date and is not legal advice about any particular case; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
