WHO YOU GONNA CALL

In my Monday story I referenced Chief Llanes’s claim that he has ordered a “third party audit of how evidence is stored,” and that “the Miami Police Department will be evaluated by the Industry of Standards Certification Organization to ensure that we meet the most rigorous accepted standards and best practices in the law enforcement community.”

After reviewing the “audit” that CALEA did, it’s obvious that, based on their handwork in December of 2014, they are not up to the job of conducting any kind of investigation lor “audit” leading to imposing “the most rigorous accepted standards and best practices in the law enforcement community.”

If they were, they’d have done so the last time they were here.

My suggestion therefore, given that what were talking about here involves the City of Miami, is that if anyone is called, it ought to be the gang from Ghostbusters, because at least they’ll be good for a few laughs while they’re picking the taxpayers pocket, which is pretty much what CALEA did the last time they showed up.

It’s Miami, Bitches!

Obviously the “auditors” were never made privy to the emails that sources tell me were written before the December 2014 on-site visit by officers complaining about the glaring problems that were evident in the operation of the Property Room – problems with Police Department Property Rooms are not just the result of occasional screw-ups, they are for the most part  baked into the the various police departments who use assignments to the Property Room as either punishment, or a dead end for staff who have fallen out of political favor.

The claim in the report that the “agency maintains, stores, and catalogs over 1 million pieces of property and evidence in this secure location that is controlled by key card access, alarm systems, and video cameras that are located internally and externally throughout the facility,” makes you want to laugh, when you look at the below photos of the area where the shipping container was kept.

Open to the elements, easily accessable to anyone who might really want to get into the fenced-in area, and guarded most nights not by sophisticated video cameras and alarm systems but by homeless people using the Overpass to protect them from inclement weather.

In my last story about the destruction of evidence that the Miami Police Department had stored for years in a shipping container under the I-95 Overpass across the streets from headquarters, I cited an article that the Department had featured in it’s 2014 Annual Report about how CALEA, the Commission of Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, had undergone a “comprehensive in-depth inspection to determine compliance with all of the 1,330 individual elements contained in 483 CALEA standards. The accreditation process also included an inspection of our buildings and facilities.”

Contrary to what you might be led to believe about this organization, CALEA, which sells itself as “The Gold Standard In Public Safety”, is really a membership dues driven organization dependent on “contractors” to conduct it’s audits and that as the report at the bottom of this story reveals, is obviously biased in support of, and easily bamboozled by minders from the department being audited who escort the “auditors,” around and make sure that they only see and hear the sanitized version of how their department operates, followed by a few drinks and a fancy meal paid for by the taxpayers.

As the now too familiar saying goes, when garbage goes in, garbage comes out, and when it came to the CALEA Accreditation Report about the operation of the Miami Police Department, the report that came out was absolute crap.

It took the department 15 days to provide me with the 30 page audit report, and it then took me about 15 minutes to discover that this so-called independent audit was just a hackneyed piece of self-serving and ass-kissing, boiler-plate nonsense that among it’s revelations, revealed that the auditors never knew, were told, or inspected the shipping container where the destroyed evidence was housed in unsafe conditions.

The proof of that was on page 23, that describes the auditor’s review of the Property Room. (The entire report is at the bottom of this story.)

Of course, this tern as a government witness does not show up in the Orosa’s biography that the CALEA “auditors” included as part of their report.

Now, it’s obvious that in December of 2014, the shipping container above did not look as bad as it does in the above photo taken approximately a month or so ago, but none the less, no one who claims to be a professional in law enforcement, and entrusted with evaluating the safety and security involved in safeguarding evidence in criminal cases would ever tell you that keeping evidence in a shipping container, under a freeway would be a smart thing to do.

So the fact that this report contains not a single word or mention of this practice, or even an expression of concern clearly supports my claim that the “auditors” either by commission or omission, were kept completely in the dark about this practice, and that, in and of itself makes this so-called “audit” little more than a waste of taxpayer money.

Also bear in mind that this supposedly “well guarded and secure Property Room” is the same place where 9 revolvers disappeared last month, and where my sources tell me that if a real independent audit was ever conducted, more guns, drugs and money would also be found to have disappeared.

Regardless of how much delusional self-promotional bullshit the Miami Police Department attempts to put out as whitewash, the department is in terrible shape, and not just because of these latest revelations about the destruction of evidence, or the missing guns, or even the other stories that I’m currently working on which will reveal a level of deviousness and corruption at almost every level of the department, but first and foremost because during the time that Tomas Regalado has been mayor, he has gone out of his way to undermine the character and morale of the department though the kind of political interference that would make a real Banana Republic dictator look like an amateur

THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EVIDENCE BEING KEPT IN THE SHIPPING CONTAINER WAS FORMER POLICE CHIEF MANNY OROSA, AKA, THE SNITCH IN CHIEF, WHO WAS ALSO THE CHIEF AT THE TIME OF THIS “AUDIT”

Orosa, like current Chief Rudy Llanes, joined the force in the early 80’s as part of the effort to increase minority hiring – especially Cubans – by drastically reducing the department’s professional standards.

This rush to add police officers was the result of the criticism of the department in the aftermath of the Mcduffie riots in 1980 and the Mariel Boatlift, and eventually resulted in the department being transformed into one that over time became commanded and controlled by Cuban exiles and their children.

In the early years however, the lowered standards resulted in hundreds of officers being arrested or forced to resign over their involvement in countless drug cases, including the infamous River Cops Case.

Orosa, from the beginning was tagged as a guy willing to look the other way or to do favors, either for criminals like his alleged association with a Bolita Kingpin named Valdez, or for politicians like Regalado, who he early on became close to by providing him with inside information.

In a video interview done in 2011, days after Orosa had been appointed interim Chief after Chief Miguel Exposito had been fired, former Mayor Joe Carollo told me how he first learned of the connection between Orosa and Regalado.

Orosa’s biggest claim to infamy as a bad cop occurred in 1991 when he faced the possibility of being indicted as part of the coverup of the notorious murder of small time drug pusher Leonardo Mercardo by the members of his undercover street narcotics unit. When faced with possible arrest, Orosa  took “Use Immunity” from the US Attorney, and not only evaded prosecution, but managed to stay on the force.

Orosa was not the first, nor the last Miami cop, to take advantage of enhancing his resume at taxpayers expense by attending various law enforcement programs, but none of these programs was able to undue the fact that Orosa was always a snake and always willing to denigrate his officers.

He was a terrible Chief, and contrary to the stories that have been manufactured about how he reduced crime – like the crap in the CALEA report – the real story about what has been going on inside the Miami Police Department, which also involves current Chief Llanes, will reveal that contrary to that claim, what has been reduced has not been crime, but  the department’s efforts to make arrests under the guise of community policing. There is a huge, and significant difference between reducing arrests and reducing crime, and one claim does not necessary support the other.

In fact, as the current Heroin/Fentanyl crisis reveals, real crime inside the city limits of Miami is growing, not receding, and I will be doing a story soon that will reveal how this slight-of-hand charade has been taking place under everyone’s nose.

Manny Orosa is responsible for so many bad things occurring inside the police department that I would be doing a disservice to my new readers if I did not  retell the story of what happened when City Commissioner Frank Carollo, after being stopped for a traffic violation called Orosa from his cell phone in an effort to get the cop to back off.

Orosa, who in spite of managing to become Chief was never a rocket scientist, contacted the Police Dispatch Department and had them send out a request on an open channel instructing the officer who had made the stop to call the Chief’s Office.

Within minutes of that happening, I got my first call from one of several officers tipping me off that something had happened, and that eventually led, after I was able to fill in the blanks to my filing an ethics complaint against Carollo for abusing the power of his office.

In the lead up to the hearing by the Ethics Commission, Orosa was deposed, and during that deposition he was asked if he had any idea how I was able to find out about this incident.