Chief Blom drops the hammer on 4 cops

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/01/3 ... -blom.html

Alfaro was qru. I wonder what happened

Carlos Alfaro was a good commanding officer. Big Guy is just doing Joe Corollo's dirty work.

"BIG GUY" DROPS THE BOMB!!!! :lol:

Maybe since one of them and his wife were ECA'ed for Medicaid Fraud, Richie and Joe decided to clean things up?????

Let's see, the guy who was acting chief and was upset because he wasn't named chief was fired. No big deal. Alfaro never did anyone any favors when he was in Miami and Gulla delighted sticking it to cops when he worked in Internal Affairs. He was in charge of IA at Doral. No great loss.

Alfaro never hurt anyone. Gulla did.

Alfaro never hurt anyone. Gulla did.

I heard Alfaro was asleep at the wheel.

Doral police chief aims to fix sloppy gun-keeping


Organization was one of Chief Richard Blom’s first concerns when he took command of the Doral Police Department in February.

He gave himself 60 days to do a complete inventory of the department, along with a self-imposed April?15 deadline.

“I dealt with the most important things first: guns, money and drugs,” Blom said. “Those are the things that can get you in trouble — missing drugs, missing money and missing guns.”

So far, all confiscated money and drugs are accounted for, but as for the weapons — that’s another story.

A review of the department’s weapons list said that 21 department-owned Smith & Wesson M&P AR-15 rifles were being stored at an off-site public storage facility — under the care and control of a private citizen.

Blom said he doesn’t know how long the weapons were kept at the facility, but said they were removed within 24 hours of him learning of their location. Although the department did have a key to get to the weapons, Blom said he doesn’t believe that the police had full-time access to the weapons.

“I wasn’t interested in the details, I just cared about getting them back,” said Blom, who has since brought the semi-automatic weapons from the storage facility to the department, where they are stored. “No matter how many locks and bolts you have, if it’s not under your care, it’s not secure.”

“I find this information with great concern. We are talking about 21 military-type weapons,” City Manager Joe Carollo said. “These are AR-15s that the military uses.”

Blom also said that he found the storage of the weapons concerning.

“It’s a common-sense thing,” Blom said. “I am looking into writing our own policy, which will say: ‘Weapons must be stored in an armory under our lock and key.’ The common-sense approach wasn’t being used before.”

In addition to weapons being stored off-site, the inventory also revealed “serial-number recording errors, a shotgun which was never recorded on the master inventory spreadsheet, and the improper documentation of the precise make of numerous .45-caliber pistols,” according to Capt. Jose Seiglie in a memo to Blom.

City documents show that the city received 18 Colt .45 pistols as federal government surplus in 2011, when in fact, five of those are .45-caliber Ithaca guns and eight are Remington guns.

Documents also showed that the department had four M16-A1s — they really have six. However, the older documents correctly showed that the Doral police own six M14s.

The only catch is: “Less than a handful are trained to use these weapons,” Seiglie said about the M16s and M14s.

Steps are ongoing to transfer all non-essential government surplus weapons to other law enforcement agencies with the assistance of the Florida Department of Management Services’ Federal Property Assistance program, according to Seiglie’s memo.

The department still has to sort through the weapons issued to officers to make sure that they are all accounted for.

“We have around 90 cops who have to bring in their weapons,” Blom said.

All officers with the department are assigned two weapons — an off-duty and an on-duty gun — but some do have shotguns and rifles.

“The gas masks, I am working with the state to get those for free,” Blom said. “They should have gotten those a long time ago; apparently, that wasn’t a priority here.”

He said the department doesn’t have gas masks, shields, helmets for each of 90 sworn officers — “yet we have machine guns.”

Blom took over the police department about two months after former interim city manager Merrett Stierheim fired former chief Ricardo “Ricky” Gomez.

Blom said that officers’ safety was his main concern when he took over the department.

“There’s something wrong with this picture — where are our priorities?” Blom said. “They have the weapons they need to be offensive. Now, to be defensive, what do I have? I have nothing.”

Was Alfaro in charge of weapons storage?