Negligent Security in Florida: When a Property Owner Is Responsible for a Crime
By Brett J. Yonon, Florida Super Lawyers, 2024 and 2025 Published October 26, 2026
A violent crime on someone else’s property is really two cases. The criminal one can put the attacker in prison, and it pays you nothing. The other is civil, and you bring it against the company that owned the property. The claim is that it did not keep that property safe, and that its failure helped the crime happen.
That second case is called negligent security, or inadequate security. It is a claim against the owner or manager of a property. The claim is that it failed to protect people from a crime it could see coming. A tenant shot in the parking lot of their own complex wants to know if the complex is responsible. So does a family attacked at a hotel or a bar.
One of our clients was shot a few steps from the front door of their family’s townhome. What decided that case was not the person who fired the gun. It was a gate, a fence and some cameras, and what the company that managed the community had done about them.
What happens if you wait is the part nobody warns you about. Security video can be gone in a month. Whatever was wrong with the property gets fixed, and the proof of it is gone too.
By the end you will know the four things you prove, how a lawyer shows the crime was foreseeable, what the 2023 law changed, the checklist an apartment owner can hide behind, and which evidence disappears first. I am Brett J. Yonon, a trial attorney at Wolf & Pravato, and I bring these claims across South Florida.
Key takeaways
- A negligent security claim is brought against the property owner, not the criminal. The fight is over whether the crime was foreseeable.
- You have two years from the date of the crime to file one, and security video can be gone inside a month.
- Since 2023 the jury has to put a share of the blame on the attacker, which lowers what the property owner pays.
- A community of five units or more gets a legal head start only if it checked off a list of security measures.
What negligent security means, and the 4 things you prove
A property owner who invites the public in has to take reasonable steps to protect them. That duty applies when the owner knows, or should know, that violent crime is a real danger there. Say the owner does nothing, and somebody is hurt by a crime those steps might have stopped. The owner can be made to pay.
Florida courts apply that rule anywhere the public is invited in. A negligent security lawsuit names the owner, the manager and sometimes the guard company. It never names the attacker.
Number two is where almost all of these cases are lost.
The proof starts disappearing while you are still in the hospital
Security video is the first thing to go. The only number Florida law puts on it is 30 days, and that rule only applies to apartment owners. Many systems record over themselves sooner than that, and no rule requires a bar to keep a camera running at all.
The paperwork disappears more slowly, but it still disappears. Incident reports, complaints and office emails sit on a server until somebody deletes them. Repair tickets for gates, fences and lights are what show the company already knew about the problem. In our client’s case those tickets still existed, and that is how we proved it. The longer you leave it, the less of it is still there.
A lawyer’s first move is a written demand to the owner and its insurer: keep the records, stop deleting. Send it in the first week and the case gets built on documents. Leave it and it gets built on what people remember. Photograph the gate, the fence and the lights yourself that night if you can.
Proving the crime was foreseeable
If you wait for somebody else to build this part, nobody does. Foreseeable does not mean the owner knew what was coming. It means that, given what was already known about this property, violence was something to plan for. No statute defines the word, so a court reads the record instead.
That answer comes out of the record, not out of argument. Police calls to the property and the blocks around it. Earlier shootings, assaults and break-ins. The owner’s own emails too. For our client we built a crime grid, which is a map of every reported crime at and around the community over time. It showed years of violent crime and break-ins at the same address. That pattern is what shows a jury the owner should have expected trouble.
What our security expert found at that complex was not a small oversight. The vehicle gate had been out of order so long that management had stopped handing out access cards to new tenants. The fence was torn open in several places, so it kept nobody out. The cameras had stopped working and nobody fixed them, and we argued the money had gone into marketing instead. No gate stops every crime, and the law does not expect one to. But this company knew the security it advertised was not really there. It spent the money on attracting new tenants instead. That is a choice.
What Florida’s 2023 law changed
House Bill 837 rewrote Florida’s premises rules. The bill, known as HB 837, became law on March 24, 2023, and it reshaped every negligent security claim in the state. The shorter filing deadline covers claims that arose after that date, and the rest of the act covers lawsuits filed after it. Our client was shot before March 24, 2023, so the old rules decided that case. Anyone hurt today gets the new ones.
The biggest change is who shares the blame. A jury now weighs the fault of everyone who contributed, the attacker included, and each defendant pays only its own share. Put 80 percent on the gunman and 20 on the complex, and the complex pays 20. The gunman has no money, so that 80 percent is never paid to anybody.
The second change can end a claim outright. Under Florida’s comparative fault rule, a jury that finds you more than 50 percent to blame awards you nothing at all. Below that line, your award is cut by your share. The third change is the deadline: two years now, not four. People lose good claims because nobody told them about it.
Where that comes from: Florida Statutes 768.0701, 768.81(6) and 95.11(5)(a), plus sections 28 and 30 of the enrolled bill.
The apartment checklist, and the properties it never reaches
The same act also put a limit on a landlord’s responsibility for a tenant’s safety. A community of at least five units on one lot now gets a presumption against liability. That covers a crime committed by somebody else. A presumption is a head start. The court starts out assuming the community is not to blame, and you have to show otherwise. A community only gets that head start if it has put every item on the state’s list in place. And the owner has to prove it did, not you.
| Measure | What the statute asks for |
|---|---|
| Cameras | At every entry and exit, with footage kept and retrievable for at least a month |
| Lighting | Parking lots, walkways, laundry rooms, common areas and porches, lit from dusk until dawn |
| Door and window locks | A one-inch deadbolt on every unit door, locks on windows and exterior sliding doors, and locked pool gates |
| A safety survey | A crime prevention survey of the property, no more than 3 years old, done by police or a state-certified practitioner |
| Staff training | Crime deterrence and safety training, given to every new employee within 60 days of hire |
Look at that list the way a resident would and it does not protect much. Take a community with cameras nobody checked, a gate stuck open and no survey. It has not done what the list asks. The complex our client lived in would have failed on the first line of it. The law gives you no new reason to sue. It only gives the owner something to defend with.
Where that comes from: Florida Statute 768.0706, which set January 1, 2025 as the deadline for the survey and the training.
That list does not tell you which properties it leaves out. An apartment complex negligence claim is the only kind it covers. The presumption applies to housing and nothing else. A hotel, a nightclub, a gas station, a parking garage and a shopping center are all outside it, and so is a building of four units. If you were hurt at one of those, the ordinary premises liability rules apply and no checklist stands in your way.
Why these cases are hard, and when there is no case at all
Hear this before you decide anything. These claims are among the hardest injury cases in Florida to win. Plenty of them fail. There are four situations that usually end a claim before it starts. A random crime at a property with no history is outside the owner’s duty. Nothing had warned the owner. A targeted attack by somebody the victim already knew usually fails too, because a working gate would not have stopped it. An attack out on the public sidewalk happened off the property. And where an owner leased the site to a tenant who handles security, the duty can belong to that tenant.
In fairness, the law should not make a landlord answer for a crime it had no reason to expect. That is why these cases are won or lost on evidence. It takes the records, a security expert who can say what a reasonable owner should have put in, and work that starts early.
How we work a negligent security case
Here is the order we do it in. That written demand, called a preservation letter, goes out inside 7 days. It freezes video, access logs and repair records before the company’s own system deletes them. Next we map police calls for the property and the blocks around it. That turns foreseeability into a fact, not an argument. Then a security expert measures the property against what others like it do.
Our client had just finished high school and sat the ASVAB, which is the test you take to enlist. The trip out to the bin took about a minute. The bullet went through the upper thigh, an injury that can change how a person walks and works for the rest of their life. The family picked that community because it was affordable, and because they were told it was safe. It ended in a significant confidential settlement shortly before trial.
Questions people ask after a crime on someone else’s property
The police never arrested anybody, so can I still bring a claim?
A negligent security claim is brought against the property owner. It does not depend on anyone being caught or convicted, and your case runs separately from the police one.
What is a negligent security case worth?
Nobody can answer what the case is worth from a web page, and Florida bar rules stop a firm quoting a figure. Damages cover medical bills, lost earnings, future care and pain and suffering. Negligent security settlements are paid by the property’s insurer, so how much cover it carries matters as much as the injuries.
The complex blames the shooter rather than itself, so is that the end of it?
That is not the end of it. Since 2023 a jury does give the attacker a share, and that share lowers what the owner pays. It does not take the owner out of the case. A jury that sees a broken gate and a stack of ignored complaints can still put real fault on the company.
Find out if the property owner is responsible
Wolf & Pravato represents people hurt by violent crime on someone else’s property. We work out of 5 offices across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
Request a free case review and we will tell you honestly whether the property owner may be responsible. No fee unless we win. Here is how the claim works.
This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and every case turns on its own facts. Negligent security claims depend on the property, its history and the law in force when the crime happened. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
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