Winners and losers — including you, Mr. Mayor — abound in the ouster of Miami police chief
There’s no such thing as shame in Miami politics, only convenience. “No winners or losers,” says in chicken-scratch handwriting an addendum to a set of talking points that Miami Mayor Francis Suarez mostly read, then left behind on a City Hall press-conference lectern.
Call it karmic payback. The cheat sheet, culled by his spokeswoman, outed the event’s raison d’etre.
It was a public-relations stunt to whitewash the mayor’s lack of leadership on the fate of Police Chief Art Acevedo, the Cuban American billed as a catch and recruited from Houston by Suarez — sidestepping a formal search that was under way.
The same guy whom Suarez then abandoned to the clown car leading the city of Miami.
DIRTY ETHNIC
AND RACIAL POLITICS
Mayor Suarez knew damn well that the case that Miami city commissioners built against the police chief, on the job barely six months, was chock-full of premeditated, dirty ethnic and racial politics.
Suarez supposedly backed the police reforms that Acevedo would bring: relational policing that calls for a visible chief on the streets getting to know the community; merit-based, not friendsand-family, hiring and promotion; and vigilance on police use of force.
Acevedo was delivering on some of that, even becoming the first Miami police chief to join the Black police officers association, I’m told.
But, Black police officers were left being the only ones supporting the chief as commissioners went after his job during an embarrassing inquisition over several meetings that put Miami on the national map for all the wrong reasons.
Absent from those meetings, Suarez chose to stay on the sidelines and leave Acevedo’s fate to the posse of Cuban-American commissioners calling for his head — and when he finally stepped up to the lectern Tuesday, what did the mayor do?
He summed up the sordid affair that he enabled as irreconcilable differences and a personality mismatch between Acevedo and the commissioners. A situation that Acevedo outlined in an eight-page memo alleging interference and corruption.
How convenient for Suarez to throw his support
to another weakling, City Manager Art Noriega, who put the chief on the road to ouster at the behest of commissioners.
Suarez chose political cowardice over valor, over his worth to voters who expected him to be the adult in the room. Wasn’t he supposed to be the young, modern mayor with big-time ideas that would rid the city of its “Banana Republic” rap?
Who goes away and hands over the keys to the police department to the suspect — Commissioner Joe Carollo — accused of using officers to persecute his political foes? And to Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla, caught by a code-enforcement officer at midnight at an illegal bar in Allapattah? And to Commissioner Manolo Reyes, who goes along with the political theater of broadcasting the chief’s tight pants on video as if this were the normal course of city business?
Suarez did, with his absence, with his failure to call them out on all the wrongdoing, especially the commissioners’ use of Cuba and being a Cuban exile as prop for getting their way on shady city matters.
PLENTY OF LOSERS IN CHIEF’S FIRING
A public-relations executive once gave me this unsolicited advice, using body movements to illustrate his point: When you see a blow coming toward you, duck to the side, let it pass.
“You’ll win,” he added. This is exactly what Mayor Suarez did, but he’s not a winner.
Public relations isn’t leadership.
If Suarez can’t deal with the Third World coup d’etat against Acevedo staged by his own political nemesis, Carollo, who and what can the mayor defend us against? Tech talk and cryptocurrency acquisitions don’t make the man. Those are replaceable with a myriad of other trendy things.
Fortitude and standing up for the right things, however, are the stuff of legacy.
After the chief wrongly used the term “Cuban mafia” and profusely apologized, Suarez should’ve urged everyone to turn the page and give him a second chance. Acevedo could’ve been the right chief for Miami had he been given guidance and support.
But he was set up to fail from the beginning, when the man who brought him to town went his merry way.
Carollo is the only winner I see on the spreadsheet of this needless travesty.
But there are plenty of losers, including you, Mr. Mayor.