Anonymous Boca Residents Leave Flowers for Local Police

When Broward Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Ian Doriot woke up Sunday morning, he peered out his window to check on his squad car, parked on the swale outside his house – just in case. It’s part of his morning routine.

“I don’t expect anything bad to happen,” Doriot says. “It’s just part of being a cop.”

But this time, he did find something out of the ordinary: a splash of orange and gold on the corner of his windshield. When he went out to investigate, he found a bouquet of flowers and a note from an anonymous neighbor.

“Thank you for risking your life to keep us safe,” the note read. “We love you!”

In the wake of police shootings in Dallas last week and years of rising tensions between cops and communities, the gesture touched Doriot.

The note was signed by residents of Boca Raton. Although Doriot lives in Boca, he works across the county line in Deerfield Beach, and his car is clearly marked as a Broward Sheriff’s Office vehicle.


“I was shocked,” he says. “It’s not that I haven’t gotten thank yous recently for doing my job. But for a Boca resident who I don’t even serve to go out of their way to do that for me without knowing who I am… that’s the reason I became a cop 27 years ago.”

When Doriot called the Boca Raton Police Department to pass the thank you along to the local police, he found out that a Boca officer had also received a bouquet of flowers on his car.


New Times asked Doriot if he had anything he wanted to say to his community in response to recent acts of violence and kindness.

“Considering everything that’s happened, not just last week, but the past couple of years, try to understand that cops are human,” he said. “I feel for the people that have been killed… but understand that all of us want to do the right thing and we always have.”