11-06-2009, 10:43 PM
The letter below gives Chief John Timoney plenty of well deserved credit for his many achievements here but it fails to point out that in the course of those achievements our own Chief has broken the very rules he forces his own officers to obey. The Lexus being one of these incidents. Any other officer would have been suspended until the outcome of the investigation but, not the Chief. If you are suppose to lead by example then the correct thing to do was to resign but we did not. There are some very good officers here that for smaller mistakes or lapse of judgement, like some would say, have been suspended without pay. However, here our Chief pedals his bicycle through our streets with the most minimal penalty for an act by someone who should have know better since he is the one forcing these rules upon the very officers he leads. You may want to defend his actions but all the good that is done can not take away from the error. With the later said I rest my case.
Mr. Timoney, sometimes the individuals that work for you need to be rewarded with commendations in thier personal files for a job well done and not solely reprimanded for mistakes made. If you fail to do this with the people you lead do you really expect them to see the GOOD YOU HAVE DONE.
Why Police Chief John Timoney deserves to stay
by Guest on 11/04/09 12:26:31
http://www.poder360.com/article_detail. ... ticle=2969 (http://www.poder360.com/article_detail.php?id_article=2969)
Miami City Blues
Why Police Chief John Timoney deserves to stay on as Miami’s top cop
By Vytenis Didziulis
AP
When John Timoney took over at Miami’s police department he arrived with a mission: Clean up a corrupt police force, reduce controversial police shootings, and make Miami a safer city.
He arrived to much fanfare—after all he was proclaimed “America’s Best Cop” by Esquire magazine in 2000, and had powerful friends, including New York’s former cardinal, John J. O’Connor, Bonfire of the Vanities author Tom Wolfe, and then-senator and now Vice President Joe Biden. Timoney had also survived through tough battles in New York’s police department as a deputy chief and then as the top cop in Philadelphia.
Almost seven years after arriving in Miami, Timoney has largely fulfilled his goals. Yet his tenure has also come with controversy, scandal, divisiveness and his own ethical lapses. Ironically for a cop’s cop like Timoney, who lives off the adrenaline of an arrest, most of his battles in Miami have been with other officers, politicians, and civil rights groups—not criminals.
It now appears Timoney’s job depends on who is elected Miami’s new mayor this month. City commissioner and candidate Tomas Regalado has publicly declared he would sack Timoney if elected. Joe Sanchez, another commissioner and candidate, has vowed to keep him on. All this in spite of the fact that Miami’s police chiefs were supposed to be spared from such posturing when the city manager was entrusted with sole authority over the position in order to protect the department from messy politics.
“I think it’s dangerous if we go back to the days when the police chief’s job is based on politics and whether he gets along with the mayor, instead of by the confidence of a city manager,” says Howard Simon, who as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida has battled many times with Timoney. “We had that in Miami for too long and I’m not sure we want to go back there.”
Timoney’s performance since taking over Miami’s department in early 2003 is an extension of the successful police career he built in New York and Philadelphia. Miami has perhaps been his toughest assignment, however, and as such, fraught with turbulence.
Timoney inherited a department whose previous chief quit after The Miami Herald published a series exposing reckless police shootings. And the week Timoney officially took over in January 2003, 11 officers went to trial in federal court on charges of planting weapons on unarmed victims of police shootings.
It was the type of department Timoney—an Irish-born cop from the Bronx—had seen before. Miami seemed to have the same type of rogue policing that moved Timoney to ban the term “stakeout” in Philadelphia because that’s what cops called it when “you hide in the back of a bodega and when the bad guy comes, you blow his head off,” as he told Esquire. That was the type of policing that made Timoney, a lifelong cop, declare: “I just don’t trust cops.”
Timoney wasted little time shaking up a Miami police department riddled with a cabal of rogue officers accustomed to lax oversight. Even before his arrival, several senior members of the previous administration retired, and Timoney fired two others. To fill the leadership void, he promoted Frank Fernandez to deputy chief and brought in his own loyal New York top brass to run the administrative division and internal affairs.
Although it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, Timoney largely avoided the significant confrontations that his famed arrogance and no-nonsense bravado tended to cause. That is until the summer of 2003, when The Miami Herald revealed that detectives had bungled the search for a serial rapist by repeatedly leaving critical evidence in the property room instead of sending it to the lab for DNA analysis. The Shenandoah rapist ultimately assaulted seven women, including three young girls and a 79-year-old woman.
Regalado represents some of the communities where the attacks occurred and his criticism of the department, and especially Timoney, was swift and pronounced. It was one of Regalado’s first public criticisms of the new chief and a sign of things to come.
Timoney simmered over the lapses and ordered police to gather DNA samples from people who matched the physical description of the primary suspect. The ACLU complained about police methods for obtaining these samples and the storage of innocent people’s DNA in databases. “That was a form of Hispanic profiling,” Simon recalls. “It was outrageous.” It would be the first of many battles between them.
After the capture of the Shenandoah rapist, Timoney could be spotted on morning bike patrols or attending regular community meetings. Not a year had passed since he had taken charge, and Timoney’s reforms were already yielding dividends. In fact, the first three months he was in office, Timoney made 120 policy and procedural decisions, says Brenda Shapiro, a member and past president of the Civilian Investigative Panel, a voter-created, civilian police oversight body. “Those changes strengthened the department,” Shapiro recalls.
Miami Mayor Manny Diaz agrees. “Through a greater emphasis on training and after instituting perhaps the most progressive policy on the use of deadly physical force in America, not a single officer fired a weapon at a civilian during the first 20 months of Chief Timoney’s tenure, and two years later, our police department went another 12 months without firing a single round at a civilian,” Miami Mayor Manny Diaz noted recently in a written statement to PODER.
Police shootings under Timoney, in fact, never exceeded more than eight a year. That’s down from an average of 21 shootings a year in the early 90s. The genesis for that streak could have been, as Diaz and Shapiro contend, the re-engineering of the Internal Affairs department and its extraction from the central headquarters building; or the creation of a discipline system with clear rules; or the changes made in the way shootings are investigated; or maybe it was replacing guns with Tasers so cops didn’t have to shoot the homeless if they got rowdy. Of course, the Magic City’s police chief could not lead on paper alone, so Timoney tased himself three times to prove they worked.
Tomas Regalado was not impressed. “I had very high hopes, but I have not seen any changes at all,” Regalado told the Sun-Sentinel at the time.
Timoney, the media’s iconoclast-of-police-reform, would soon suffer one of the biggest stains on his otherwise clean civil liberties record. It was late November 2003 and a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas conference was in town. Fearing destructive rioting, the city deployed 2,500 police officers armed with riot gear, concussion grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets. The massive use of force was vintage Timoney. He had proposed a similar plan during riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in 1991, and in Philadelphia he was commended for the way police dealt with protesters at the 2000 Republican convention— although he was personally involved in a fisticuff with protesters that ended with his bike being smashed over him.
In Miami, a few hundred protesters clashed with police, while thousands marched peacefully against the free trade summit. Mayor Diaz and trade officials hailed the police response as an extraordinary success. The ACLU and protest organizations didn’t see it that way: they characterized the action as heavy-handed (about 200 protesters were arrested and more than 130 were treated for injuries) and as an excessive use of force. The ACLU filed seven lawsuits against the city of Miami and the police department, Simon says. In one of those lawsuits Timoney was accused of setting the tone by personally participating in police operations downtown and illegally detaining and searching one protester’s backpack. Miami city commissioners would later approve a $166,000 payment to 21 FTAA protesters who alleged widespread police aggression and unconstitutional crowd control tactics. Another $180,000 settlement was paid to Miami filmmaker Carl Kesser, who suffered partial paralysis of his face when a beanbag fired by police pierced the skin near his eye. Other lawsuits are still pending.
Timoney would close the FTAA chapter only to fall into a series of scandals two years later. In August 2007, CBS4 revealed Timoney had been driving a free Lexus SUV given to him by a Kendall auto dealer for more than a year. City commissioners Tomas Regalado and Marc Sarnoff called for Timoney’s resignation, but the chief shrugged off those calls with the backing of Diaz. As pressure grew Timoney ended up paying for the SUV—sticker price $54,000— and apologized, calling his acceptance of the car “boneheaded” and “stupid.”
Fallout from Lexus-gate, which was leaked by police union chief Armando Aguilar, prompted the Fraternal Order of Police to hold a vote of no confidence against Timoney and his deputy, Fernandez. Of the 1,100 police officers eligible to vote, 650 cast a ballot; 80 percent of those voted against Timoney. “When you have a person who doesn’t lead by example, does things the wrong way and then tries to discipline others for doing similar things, that lowers morale,” says Aguilar, one of Timoney’s most vehement critics.
Retorts Joe Arriola, a former city manager and Timoney’s former boss: “Of course when you’re tough the unions don’t like you. Nobody likes to be disciplined.”
Smelling blood, the union then accused Timoney and his administration of sugarcoating crime statistics by pressuring commanders to report serious crimes as lesser offenses. Timoney responded by asking the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the claims. The FBI would eventually clear more than 95 percent of Miami’s crime statistics. The FDLE investigation found no evidence of systematic whitewashing but says mid-level officers did sometimes feel pressure to cover up their incident reports in order to improve their district’s statistics.
Diaz says Timoney’s leadership is reflected in the 30 percent drop in overall crime during his eight–year tenure, while the city’s population grew by more than 46,000. Diaz also says during the first six months of 2009, overall crime is down 15 percent (violent crime down 16 percent and property crime down 14 percent) from a year ago.
Timoney’s positive influence in reducing crime and improving police conduct are widely validated, even by his opponents. His record on civil rights, although considered schizophrenic, is also positive: For instance, he has publicly opposed working with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce federal immigration laws in order to preserve the trust between police and immigrant communities. “He says over and over again, ‘Let me be clear, we don’t have any gigs with ICE,” says Subhash Kateel, a community organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “If that’s true that’s very positive.”
Timoney is not the only police chief who is not going along with police enforcement of immigration. But it’s easier to take that position when you’re sought out by Vice President Joe Biden and other Democratic legislators to endorse Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. And especially in times of economic and budgetary collapse, a city can use connections to major policy makers. These connections, after all, may be one reason Miami received $11 million in federal stimulus money in July and another $2.5 million in March. In comparison, Miami-Dade County, Houston, Seattle and New York City received nothing. When announcing Miami’s allotment, Timoney was asked whether his relationship with Biden had helped Miami win out over other departments. “It’s like chicken soup,” he quipped. “It can’t hurt.”
Even if Timoney is asked to step down, he will leave Miami with more than a reduced crime rate and a disciplined police force. A long-time proponent of higher education for officers—he holds two masters degrees, in American history and urban planning—Timoney helped jumpstart the Miami Police College and Law Enforcement Officers’ Memorial High School. This police-training center is Timoney’s legacy, as he himself says privately. Inaugurated in October and operated in partnership with Miami-Dade’s public schools, it houses new police recruit training facilities, a high school for future police and forensic scientists, and a democratic policing institute for officers from Latin America.
Taken as a whole, it is not hard to see why a Regalado supporter like billionaire automobile mogul Norman Braman vociferously backs Timoney. “He has no patience for corruption and he is the most professional police officer I’ve know in all my years,” says Braman, who has not sought out Regalado on the issue. “I hope [if] Tomas Regalado becomes mayor he looks at the whole city and makes good decisions for the whole city.”
If Regalado does win he should not let his long-time opposition to Diaz affect a balanced approach to chief Timoney – even if it means alienating the police union. If not, Timoney will most likely return to higher paying private-sector jobs or, potentially more embarrassing for Miami, to a national law enforcement position.Guest
Mr. Timoney, sometimes the individuals that work for you need to be rewarded with commendations in thier personal files for a job well done and not solely reprimanded for mistakes made. If you fail to do this with the people you lead do you really expect them to see the GOOD YOU HAVE DONE.
Why Police Chief John Timoney deserves to stay
by Guest on 11/04/09 12:26:31
http://www.poder360.com/article_detail. ... ticle=2969 (http://www.poder360.com/article_detail.php?id_article=2969)
Miami City Blues
Why Police Chief John Timoney deserves to stay on as Miami’s top cop
By Vytenis Didziulis
AP
When John Timoney took over at Miami’s police department he arrived with a mission: Clean up a corrupt police force, reduce controversial police shootings, and make Miami a safer city.
He arrived to much fanfare—after all he was proclaimed “America’s Best Cop” by Esquire magazine in 2000, and had powerful friends, including New York’s former cardinal, John J. O’Connor, Bonfire of the Vanities author Tom Wolfe, and then-senator and now Vice President Joe Biden. Timoney had also survived through tough battles in New York’s police department as a deputy chief and then as the top cop in Philadelphia.
Almost seven years after arriving in Miami, Timoney has largely fulfilled his goals. Yet his tenure has also come with controversy, scandal, divisiveness and his own ethical lapses. Ironically for a cop’s cop like Timoney, who lives off the adrenaline of an arrest, most of his battles in Miami have been with other officers, politicians, and civil rights groups—not criminals.
It now appears Timoney’s job depends on who is elected Miami’s new mayor this month. City commissioner and candidate Tomas Regalado has publicly declared he would sack Timoney if elected. Joe Sanchez, another commissioner and candidate, has vowed to keep him on. All this in spite of the fact that Miami’s police chiefs were supposed to be spared from such posturing when the city manager was entrusted with sole authority over the position in order to protect the department from messy politics.
“I think it’s dangerous if we go back to the days when the police chief’s job is based on politics and whether he gets along with the mayor, instead of by the confidence of a city manager,” says Howard Simon, who as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida has battled many times with Timoney. “We had that in Miami for too long and I’m not sure we want to go back there.”
Timoney’s performance since taking over Miami’s department in early 2003 is an extension of the successful police career he built in New York and Philadelphia. Miami has perhaps been his toughest assignment, however, and as such, fraught with turbulence.
Timoney inherited a department whose previous chief quit after The Miami Herald published a series exposing reckless police shootings. And the week Timoney officially took over in January 2003, 11 officers went to trial in federal court on charges of planting weapons on unarmed victims of police shootings.
It was the type of department Timoney—an Irish-born cop from the Bronx—had seen before. Miami seemed to have the same type of rogue policing that moved Timoney to ban the term “stakeout” in Philadelphia because that’s what cops called it when “you hide in the back of a bodega and when the bad guy comes, you blow his head off,” as he told Esquire. That was the type of policing that made Timoney, a lifelong cop, declare: “I just don’t trust cops.”
Timoney wasted little time shaking up a Miami police department riddled with a cabal of rogue officers accustomed to lax oversight. Even before his arrival, several senior members of the previous administration retired, and Timoney fired two others. To fill the leadership void, he promoted Frank Fernandez to deputy chief and brought in his own loyal New York top brass to run the administrative division and internal affairs.
Although it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, Timoney largely avoided the significant confrontations that his famed arrogance and no-nonsense bravado tended to cause. That is until the summer of 2003, when The Miami Herald revealed that detectives had bungled the search for a serial rapist by repeatedly leaving critical evidence in the property room instead of sending it to the lab for DNA analysis. The Shenandoah rapist ultimately assaulted seven women, including three young girls and a 79-year-old woman.
Regalado represents some of the communities where the attacks occurred and his criticism of the department, and especially Timoney, was swift and pronounced. It was one of Regalado’s first public criticisms of the new chief and a sign of things to come.
Timoney simmered over the lapses and ordered police to gather DNA samples from people who matched the physical description of the primary suspect. The ACLU complained about police methods for obtaining these samples and the storage of innocent people’s DNA in databases. “That was a form of Hispanic profiling,” Simon recalls. “It was outrageous.” It would be the first of many battles between them.
After the capture of the Shenandoah rapist, Timoney could be spotted on morning bike patrols or attending regular community meetings. Not a year had passed since he had taken charge, and Timoney’s reforms were already yielding dividends. In fact, the first three months he was in office, Timoney made 120 policy and procedural decisions, says Brenda Shapiro, a member and past president of the Civilian Investigative Panel, a voter-created, civilian police oversight body. “Those changes strengthened the department,” Shapiro recalls.
Miami Mayor Manny Diaz agrees. “Through a greater emphasis on training and after instituting perhaps the most progressive policy on the use of deadly physical force in America, not a single officer fired a weapon at a civilian during the first 20 months of Chief Timoney’s tenure, and two years later, our police department went another 12 months without firing a single round at a civilian,” Miami Mayor Manny Diaz noted recently in a written statement to PODER.
Police shootings under Timoney, in fact, never exceeded more than eight a year. That’s down from an average of 21 shootings a year in the early 90s. The genesis for that streak could have been, as Diaz and Shapiro contend, the re-engineering of the Internal Affairs department and its extraction from the central headquarters building; or the creation of a discipline system with clear rules; or the changes made in the way shootings are investigated; or maybe it was replacing guns with Tasers so cops didn’t have to shoot the homeless if they got rowdy. Of course, the Magic City’s police chief could not lead on paper alone, so Timoney tased himself three times to prove they worked.
Tomas Regalado was not impressed. “I had very high hopes, but I have not seen any changes at all,” Regalado told the Sun-Sentinel at the time.
Timoney, the media’s iconoclast-of-police-reform, would soon suffer one of the biggest stains on his otherwise clean civil liberties record. It was late November 2003 and a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas conference was in town. Fearing destructive rioting, the city deployed 2,500 police officers armed with riot gear, concussion grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets. The massive use of force was vintage Timoney. He had proposed a similar plan during riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in 1991, and in Philadelphia he was commended for the way police dealt with protesters at the 2000 Republican convention— although he was personally involved in a fisticuff with protesters that ended with his bike being smashed over him.
In Miami, a few hundred protesters clashed with police, while thousands marched peacefully against the free trade summit. Mayor Diaz and trade officials hailed the police response as an extraordinary success. The ACLU and protest organizations didn’t see it that way: they characterized the action as heavy-handed (about 200 protesters were arrested and more than 130 were treated for injuries) and as an excessive use of force. The ACLU filed seven lawsuits against the city of Miami and the police department, Simon says. In one of those lawsuits Timoney was accused of setting the tone by personally participating in police operations downtown and illegally detaining and searching one protester’s backpack. Miami city commissioners would later approve a $166,000 payment to 21 FTAA protesters who alleged widespread police aggression and unconstitutional crowd control tactics. Another $180,000 settlement was paid to Miami filmmaker Carl Kesser, who suffered partial paralysis of his face when a beanbag fired by police pierced the skin near his eye. Other lawsuits are still pending.
Timoney would close the FTAA chapter only to fall into a series of scandals two years later. In August 2007, CBS4 revealed Timoney had been driving a free Lexus SUV given to him by a Kendall auto dealer for more than a year. City commissioners Tomas Regalado and Marc Sarnoff called for Timoney’s resignation, but the chief shrugged off those calls with the backing of Diaz. As pressure grew Timoney ended up paying for the SUV—sticker price $54,000— and apologized, calling his acceptance of the car “boneheaded” and “stupid.”
Fallout from Lexus-gate, which was leaked by police union chief Armando Aguilar, prompted the Fraternal Order of Police to hold a vote of no confidence against Timoney and his deputy, Fernandez. Of the 1,100 police officers eligible to vote, 650 cast a ballot; 80 percent of those voted against Timoney. “When you have a person who doesn’t lead by example, does things the wrong way and then tries to discipline others for doing similar things, that lowers morale,” says Aguilar, one of Timoney’s most vehement critics.
Retorts Joe Arriola, a former city manager and Timoney’s former boss: “Of course when you’re tough the unions don’t like you. Nobody likes to be disciplined.”
Smelling blood, the union then accused Timoney and his administration of sugarcoating crime statistics by pressuring commanders to report serious crimes as lesser offenses. Timoney responded by asking the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the claims. The FBI would eventually clear more than 95 percent of Miami’s crime statistics. The FDLE investigation found no evidence of systematic whitewashing but says mid-level officers did sometimes feel pressure to cover up their incident reports in order to improve their district’s statistics.
Diaz says Timoney’s leadership is reflected in the 30 percent drop in overall crime during his eight–year tenure, while the city’s population grew by more than 46,000. Diaz also says during the first six months of 2009, overall crime is down 15 percent (violent crime down 16 percent and property crime down 14 percent) from a year ago.
Timoney’s positive influence in reducing crime and improving police conduct are widely validated, even by his opponents. His record on civil rights, although considered schizophrenic, is also positive: For instance, he has publicly opposed working with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce federal immigration laws in order to preserve the trust between police and immigrant communities. “He says over and over again, ‘Let me be clear, we don’t have any gigs with ICE,” says Subhash Kateel, a community organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “If that’s true that’s very positive.”
Timoney is not the only police chief who is not going along with police enforcement of immigration. But it’s easier to take that position when you’re sought out by Vice President Joe Biden and other Democratic legislators to endorse Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. And especially in times of economic and budgetary collapse, a city can use connections to major policy makers. These connections, after all, may be one reason Miami received $11 million in federal stimulus money in July and another $2.5 million in March. In comparison, Miami-Dade County, Houston, Seattle and New York City received nothing. When announcing Miami’s allotment, Timoney was asked whether his relationship with Biden had helped Miami win out over other departments. “It’s like chicken soup,” he quipped. “It can’t hurt.”
Even if Timoney is asked to step down, he will leave Miami with more than a reduced crime rate and a disciplined police force. A long-time proponent of higher education for officers—he holds two masters degrees, in American history and urban planning—Timoney helped jumpstart the Miami Police College and Law Enforcement Officers’ Memorial High School. This police-training center is Timoney’s legacy, as he himself says privately. Inaugurated in October and operated in partnership with Miami-Dade’s public schools, it houses new police recruit training facilities, a high school for future police and forensic scientists, and a democratic policing institute for officers from Latin America.
Taken as a whole, it is not hard to see why a Regalado supporter like billionaire automobile mogul Norman Braman vociferously backs Timoney. “He has no patience for corruption and he is the most professional police officer I’ve know in all my years,” says Braman, who has not sought out Regalado on the issue. “I hope [if] Tomas Regalado becomes mayor he looks at the whole city and makes good decisions for the whole city.”
If Regalado does win he should not let his long-time opposition to Diaz affect a balanced approach to chief Timoney – even if it means alienating the police union. If not, Timoney will most likely return to higher paying private-sector jobs or, potentially more embarrassing for Miami, to a national law enforcement position.Guest