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As Mayor Daniella Levine Cava begins her term, she is confronting several issues. Some, like climate change and sea level rise, are beyond her ability to solve or even effect. Carbon that was removed from our atmosphere over millions of years has been pumped back out in the form of waste gasses. No amount of conservation ordered by the County itself will solve this problem.
There are, however, some problems that can directly addressed by the Cava administration. One of those is policing. This summer, in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, protesters called for the creation of a panel to review charges of police misconduct. The American Civil Liberties Union also told Miami-Dade commissioners that 7,700 residents had signed a petition supporting the panel.
Then Mayor Carlos Gimenez vetoed two proposals for the creation of just such a panel this summer. A new proposal was put forward which Gimenez allowed to become law. Now it will be called Independent Civilian Panel and its main duty is to investigate citizen complaints of excessive force and other types of misconduct by county police officers.
The 13-member panel will have permission to inspect all closed Miami-Dade Police Department internal-affair files and make suggestions regarding police department policies, procedures, training and recruitment in addition to investigating citizen complaints. The Panel will have jurisdiction to review actions of the Miami-Dade Police in the unincorporated areas, as well as in municipalities like Palmetto Bay and Doral that “lease” police officers from the County.
As this panel begins its work, it should be mindful of the statistics concerning policing in Miami-Dade County. In 2019, there were 689,594 calls for service that came into the MDPD, amounting to about 78 calls per hour. There were some small categories, like 140 incidents of intoxicated persons and 40 reports of an explosion. The big categories included 50,592 calls about traffic incidents and 52,615 calls about burglar alarms that went off.
Calls about police conduct were broken out into separate categories. There were 24, 402 arrests that year, but only 29 of those involved arrests with difficulty. Last year, 46 officers fired a weapon. Twelve people were hit and five were killed. There were 820 allegations of a police officer being discourteous during 2019.
This is not meant to downplay that there are rogue officers who fail to follow the law. Each bad police officer needs to be disciplined or fired. However, we should never forget that the people do not have negative experience when they call the police. In fact, a negative outcome is the exception rather than the rule.
The Independent Civilian Panel should review every case referred to them. Newspapers, TV anchors, columnists, and elected officials have the First Amendment right to comment on police wrongdoing. But they must be mindful of the numbers that show that the Miami-Dade County Police Department has done a phenomenal job when dealing with the public.
The Civilian panel is needed because your analysis is macro, looking at the overall stats for policing. But if you looked closer at the micro – example zip codes in largely Black n Brown communities you would see a very different picture. Policing in Liberty City is very different from policing in Davis Harbor or any largely Anglo neighborhood. Police protect Anglo neighborhoods and ‘police’ Black and Brown neighborhoods, there is a difference.
Independent civilian Panel..a much needed and important creation.. thank you.