BLACK OFFICERS UNHAPPY WITH THE CHIEF

NEW EVIDENCE THAT THE CHIEF LIED TO THE ETHICS COMMISSION, THAT HE MISUSED CITY PROPERTY TO SUCK UP TO MARC ANTHONY, THAT HE ENGAGED IN MISCONDUCT WITH POLICE EXPLORERS BACK IN THE DAY, AND THAT COUNTLESS MURDER INVESTIGAIONS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED BY ALLOWING THE STORAGE CONTAINERS THEY'RE KEPT IN TO DETERIORATE

ARCHIVE

OCTOBER 18, 2016

CHIEF RUDY LLANES

ASST CHIEF JORGE GOMEZ

In approximately 13 months, Tomas Regalado will leave office. Either at the same time, or shortly thereafter it is expected that City Manager Danny Alfonso will also leave, and then shortly after that, when their replacements are announced, so will Rudy Llanes, the Chief of Police and Maurice Kemp, the Fire Chief.

Many view this change at the top as a very good thing, and in fact, depending who becomes Mayor, and the decisions that he makes in their selection to replace these individuals, along with a long list of other department directors and people that will leave along with Regalado, it could indeed represent a new beginning for the City of Miami.

The big problem today however, is not who might replace the individuals named above, but rather what they might, or might not do in the remaining time that they have as city employees.

For both Regalado and Alfonso, the ability to keep "their team" in place till the end has to be seen as a good thing. Continuity and stability of management are important in bureaucratic organizations, and so the decision of Alfonso to extend the contracts of both the Fire Chief and the Police Chief can be seen, from their perspective, as nothing more than his desire not to rock the boat by appointing new people with so little time left.

The bad thing, and in considering the decision making process in the City of Miami, it's always important to consider what bad things can occur, is that when it comes to continuing the leadership of a dysfunctional department, like the Police Department, little good can come from what is essentially a caretaker Chief who is sitting in his office counting the days until he retires.

In the 6 plus years that I've been at this, the stories that I have written that received the biggest readership have been about the police department and about people like Chief Exposito who got fired, the behavior of Chief Orosa, including the time he called his officers "snitches" for providing me with information about what was happening inside the department, Police Thug Javier Ortiz and his pal Edward Lugo, Officer Marcel Jackson who recorded on his personal dash cam pulling over IA Lieutenant Ramras in the traffic stop that got over 3 million You Tube hits, and of course Placido "Pumpkin Head" Diaz, who among other stories pulled out his service revolver at a Bayside restaurant and threatened to kill himself.

And then of course there were the stories about the street narcotics unit and the falsifying of arrest reports and possibly planting a gun on a suspect, and the story about how the children of top brass were allowed to join the force even though they had prior criminal and personal histories that should have automatically disqualified them from ever working in a police department, and then the other stories about mismanagement, lost evidence from the property room, and the anonymous letters written by officers trying to raise attention to the myriad of problems that no one inside the department wanted to address.

Just recently I wrote about current Chief Llanes and Assistant Chief Gomez and the so-called investigation conducted by the Unethical Ethics Commission, and how that had all been little more than a whitewash, once again revealing that when it comes to ethics and government in Miami-Dade County, the last place you should turn for help is the Ethics Commission.

It seems that my story hit a nerve with someone in the police department because yesterday I received an anonymous letter - I get these kinds of letters on a regular basis, and the recent batch of letters have all been about the goings on inside the Police Department.

The letter - which is below, was well written, contained specific details, and confirmed information that I had been receiving from other sources.

In addition, the writer identified himself as the person who had written the original letter about the ticket scalping incident involving  Luis Leon Fernandez, and this time, he provided evidence of just how poorly a job the investigator for the Ethics Commission had done his job.

But that was just the beginning.  The real news in this letter was the revelation - a revelation that I have confirmed from several other sources within the department - about the contamination of the evidence in an unknown number of murder cases.

The evidence has been kept in two shipping containers, and those containers, as they are want to do if they're not properly maintained, rusted out and have allowed insects and rats to invade the boxes and files containing all of this evidence. I will defer to the writer of the letter's description of what this means for the cases against the individuals accused of murder.

There are other allegations in this letter that warrant your attention, and one incident involving the falsification of an accident report is a story that I had already been provided with documentation, and which I will be writing about as a separate story.

In my lead paragraph on the story about the audit of the police department's Off-Duty Office a week and a half ago, I wrote this:

        I don't care what anyone says about how many changes

        have taken place under Chief Rudy Llanes, or how much

        money the department bullshitted the Justice Department

        to give for a "Community Policing" program, because every

        time someone actually spends time looking at the activities

        of the Miami Police Department, it doesn't take much effort

        to discover that the department is chronically mismanaged,

        and that sleazy, self-dealing behavior is easier to find than

        a videotape of Donald Trump talking like a misogynist pig.


The below letter reveals that my claims about the problems within the police department were not only accurate, but raises serious questions about the judgement of Miami City Manager Danny Alfonso, who, in his memo announcing the extension of Chief Llanes contract, wrote this:

        "I am confident that we all agree that Chief Llanes is

          eminently qualified, respected and admired by many

          and will continue to a great job as Chief for the Police

          Department."


The letter below disputes those claims, and does so in a manner that demands an independent investigation.