In a letter sent October 11, 2021, Miami City Manager Art Noriega suspended the chief of the city’s police department, Art Acevedo, and said he would be fired. The move comes just months after Acevedo’s March 2021 hiring, when Mayor Francis Suarez called the former head of police departments in Houston and Austin “the best chief in America.”

Acevedo responded with a memo to members of the Miami Police Department (“MPD”) in which he vowed to fight the dismissal and “to rid the MPD of the political interference from city hall that unfortunately continues to negatively impact this organization.”

Suarez—a registered Republican whose office is non-partisan—acknowledged that Acevedo would dispute the planned termination at an upcoming meeting of city commissioners. Three of those five commissioners have been gunning for Acevedo’s job since the chief held a morning roll call meeting in August 2021, during which he joked that the people running MPD were a “Cuban mafia.” All three commissioners are Cuban-American, as is Suarez and Acevedo, too.

Acevedo apologized for that gaffe, saying that because he grew up in Los Angeles, he didn’t know that Fidel Castro once used the term to deride the Cuban exile community in Miami. But at least one of the three commissioners wasn’t buying it.

“He wants the press to believe that he is a great reformer that came ... to get rid of the Cuban Mafia, the bad guys. Because we’re the corrupt ones, right?” said Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla. “We’re supposed to take the hit? I’m not going to allow that to happen.”

Troubles also dogged Acevedo’s arrival in Miami from his stint at the Houston Police Department (“HPD”), where he presided over a botched 2019 no-knock drug raid in which five cops were injured during a shootout with an innocent couple in their own home in the city’s Pecan Park neighborhood. The couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, both died.

Despite Acevedo’s public assurances that the couple lived in a “notorious drug house” and that his officers were “heroes,” investigators eventually determined that the no-knock warrant for the raid had been fraudulently obtained. One of them, now-fired HPD Det. Gerald Goines faces federal civil rights charges, while his former partner, Steven Bryant, pleaded guilty in June 2021 to evidence tampering in helping to invent a fictitious criminal informant whose made-up testimony was used to obtain the warrant.

Further investigation of Goines’ 34-year career has revealed that his lies in the Pecan Park raid were not the first. After Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg began reviewing 40 convictions won based on evidence supplied solely by Goines, her office determined that the convictions of two brothers, Otis and Steven Mallet, had been based on the detective’s false testimony. The D.A. then guided public defenders through the steps leading to the exoneration of both men in 2020.

More recently, on October 5, 2021, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles found that Goines’ false testimony led to a 2004 drug arrest and recommended a posthumous pardon for the convicted man. That man was George Floyd, whose 2020 death at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman ignited a nationwide wave of protests demanding police reform.

Meanwhile, one of Goines’ staunchest defenders, Acevedo, moved on to Miami—a much smaller city with a much smaller police force—where his missteps included unwittingly posing for a photo with a local leader of the right-wing Proud Boys and appearing at a fundraiser dressed in a tight Elvis Presley jumpsuit.

Even those trivial problems took on added significance, leading Noriega to conclude that “the relationship between the chief and the police department he leads—as well as with the community—has deteriorated beyond repair.”

Sources: NPR, Reason, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post

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