Take a look inside Fort Lauderdale police’s new $165 million headquarters

Built in 1958, the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s old headquarters was hardly the ideal working environment. The air conditioning was shot, the elevators were unreliable, the basement and parking lot flooded, the roof leaked and the men’s restroom doubled as a storage room.

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Now, FLPD finally has a new home — and it still has that new building smell.

After years of planning and delays, city officials and law enforcement leaders celebrated the completion of the new $165 million police station with a ribbon cutting ceremony Wednesday morning at 1300 W Broward Blvd.

Media members and visitors were given tours of the 191,000-square-foot building, a noticeable upgrade from the police department’s previous station. The old headquarters was demolished earlier this year.

“For decades, this moment was talked about, planned for, hoped for and worked towards. And today, we finally get to officially welcome you,” said Police Chief William Schultz. “This is more than just a structure. This is a symbol of what happens when a community believes in its police department, and when a department never stops believing in its mission.”

Fort Lauderdale voters approved a $100 million bond to build a new police station in 2019, which city officials initially hoped to have completed in 2021.

But then came the pandemic and a host of other issues that complicated construction and raised costs. Inflation and increased labor and construction costs raised the price to $140 million by the time workers broke ground in 2023. During construction in 2024, a major design flaw was discovered: hairline cracks began forming along the entire length of a support beam on the top floor, which have since been fixed, the Sun Sentinel reported. That added up to the final total of $165 million.

“Projects of this magnitude are complicated,” said Mayor Dean Trantalis. “They span years, they cross commissions and administrations. They require difficult decisions, constant coordination, and a lot of people who refuse to let the work stop when challenges arise.”

Completing the new headquarters was a labor of love, said Anthony Fajardo, the city development services department director.

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“The design is just gorgeous, and we’re very proud of it. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but with solid leadership, hard work and a lot of patience, I can’t express that enough, a lot of patience, we now have a safe building that supports the city’s needs for decades to come,” Fajardo said at the event. “Having said that, if you took a picture of me in 2022, I don’t look four years older. I look 10 years older.”

During the rainy morning, officers showed off the three-story headquarters’ bells and whistles as neighborhood ducks waddled through the parking garage and splashed in puddles. Donated murals decorate one hallway, including a painting of law enforcement and first responders helping people and another dedicated to the SWAT unit made of bullets. Chief Schultz surprised officers by hanging up a sign from the 1958 building in the new one: “Thru this door walk the finest police officers in the world.”

The building, designed to withstand a category five hurricane, offers an open-air courtyard, community center and a state-of-the-art crime scene investigations lab, which one officer joked looks like “CSI Miami.”

In the lab, there are “drying” rooms used to safely air-dry evidence like bloody clothes and handguns, a large garage where cars from crime scenes can be rolled into and a digital forensics unit. Police keep devices like cell phones and laptops in the “Faraday room,” a small metal room with virtually no cell signal or WiFi, which prevents someone from remotely wiping evidence from devices.

Officers can now train onsite, something they had to outsource in the last few years at the previous building. Now, officers can enjoy the convenience of the new headquarters’ training facilities, including an armory and a 50-yard gun range with shooting targets that can move around and enough space to bring in cars to train for different scenarios.

“Every part of this building reflects how much law enforcement has evolved,” said Commissioner Steven Glassman.

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