It doesn’t take a rocket scientist at this point to realize that the continuing stories of incompetence, misbehavior, theft, retaliation and outright lying by Rudy Llanes, the Chief of Police is becoming a scandal of magnitude different that many other examples of malfeasance and misbehavior that I have written about during the last 6 plus years of covering the Regalado administration.

The fact that the Chief had to concede that, as I revealed through a collection of damning documents that he had known for over 4 years that the shipping container where homicide evidence was being kept was not only falling apart, but worse, had become a feeding ground for rats, raccoons and possums, who were eating through the evidence as fast as Joey Chestnut goes through Nathan’s hot dogs on the 4th of July, should, and would in many communities have been enough to prompt not only widespread condemnation but also immediate demands for an investigation and removal of the Chief.

Unfortunately, when it came to how the Miami City Commission viewed the situation, this is how the Miami Herald reported their response:

     “For now, it appears Miami’s elected officials are reserving

     judgment at least until they learn the extent of the consequences.

     The problem did not come up during last week’s City Commission

     meeting, and several commissioners told the Miami Herald they

     hadn’t spoken to Llanes and didn’t know enough about the

     contents of the container to condemn the department.

     Miami City Manager Daniel Alfonso, who appointed Llanes as

     chief, finds the incident embarrassing but continues to support

     Miami’s top cop. “I trust that we have a chief that knows what

     he’s doing,” he said. “I’m solidly supporting him.”

Even worse, the Herald quoted the Chairman of the Miami Civilian Investigative Panel as saying:

     “I don’t need an investigation to tell me there was malpractice

     in the storage of valuable documents and evidence,” said

     Horacio Stuart Aguirre, chairman of Miami’s Civilian Investigative

     Panel, while adding: “If I were the families of the deceased and

     the evidence was in those shipping containers … I’d be furious.”

Obviously he wasn’t “furious enough” to declare that his agency would conduct an investigation to determine who should be held accountable for the “malpractice.”

The fact of the matter is that even a cursory reading of all of the documents that I have so far published would allow anyone to understand that a very serious and disastrous set of circumstances caused by gross incompetence and mismanagement resulted in the destruction of the homicide evidence in the shipping container under the I-95 Overpass.

The documents came from the files of the Miami Police Department, and were provided to me by a growing number of police officers who are livid  not only over the way in which this evidence was allowed to be damaged and destroyed through the flagrant disregard and incompetence of both Chief Manny Orosa AND Rudy Llanes, but also because of the behavior of senior command officers who chose to ignore the warnings of lower ranking officers, like the below email from Sergeant Robert Marana, warning about the inflated cost of the shipping containers that the department finally decided to buy after 4 years of hemming and hawing. (Trust me when I tell you I still have dozens of documents to publish about the levels of incompetence and mismanagement within the police department.)

When it comes to public money being wasted, the higher ups are always ready to shrug their shoulders and move on, and that was the response of Major Orestes Chavez, to Marana’s email.

Of course, and I will continue to point out that retired Major Orestes Chavez, is the person alleged to have walked out of the Property Room with the 9 missing revolvers, which is another story that the City Commissioners better start paying attention to because now that a number of witnesses have not only supposedly come forward to point the finger at Chavez, which has prompted several of those officers to be advised to “lawyer up” to protect themselves against efforts to attack them – including in at least two instances the transfer of these officers from the Property Room in what is being seen as retaliation – this now is becoming a case where these officers are in effect being punished for speaking up, and given that what they’re talking about is the theft of 9 guns from a police property room, then that could itself become a crime, because when it comes to morons like Llanes and his pals, “Stupid is, as stupid does.”

Here is Chavez’s response to Marana.

The biggest weasel among the City Commission unwilling to deal with the misbehavior of the Chief appears to be Francis Suarez, who should just wear a big sign that says,

     “I’ve sold my ass to every lobbyist and developer in Miami

     to be the next Mayor, and that means I’m going to ignore any,

     and everything controversial, so that I don’t piss off anyone

     off because that’s what my Daddy has told me to do.”

Five days after Francis Suarez went to my site twice to read the story that contained the documents that detailed how Chief Rudy Llanes had had personal knowledge about the rotting shipping container housing the homicide evidence, he retweeted a photo of him and the Chief passing out turkeys to people in his District, which I then retweet with my own comment about the Chief.

I use Twitter a lot, and never bite my tongue about the subjects or people I tweet about, but it only took about 5 minutes after I sent this retweet  before I got a call from Suarez, who told me that he had debated engaging in a little twitter exchange over my comment, but decided instead to call me.

I replied that had he done so I’d have cleaned his clock, and would always welcome a little game of Twitter bitch slapping with him.  I followed that up by giving him an earful about the goings on with the shipping container, the destroyed evidence and the missing guns. I then suggested that we meet so I could provide him with even more information, but he begged off claiming that he hadn’t read my stories in detail and wanted to do that.

We ended up setting a date on Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but he called me on Monday to tell me that something else had come up and wanted to reset the meeting. In addition to something else coming up, he also admitted that he still hadn’t gotten around to reading my stories.

I happen to know what that something else that came up was, and while important, it did not compare in importance to a Police Chief who failed to do his job, and got caught lying in the process.

The next day when I read in the Herald the claim that several commissioners made about not having spoken to Llanes, or shown enough interest to start collecting information on an issue that I had by then been writing and publishing documents about for 32 days, I realized that, like a half dozen other incidents in the past, the members of the City Commission with Suarez at the front, were once again in a situation where they had one thumb stuck up their ass, and the other one in their mouth, and were looking around hoping that they could switch thumbs without anyone catching them in the act.

As policy makers, the City Commission’s concern is not necessarily one that should be focused on the contents of the container – although that’s certainly a concern, but that concern is really a law enforcement issue to be sorted out by the State Attorney’s office and the lawyers for defendants, the family of the murder victims and the police department.

The concern of policy makers is the complete breakdown in the management and supervision within the police department. That’s what you expect policy makers to focus on, not pieces of destroyed evidence, because you don’t need to know about how many pieces of evidence were destroyed before dealing with the core issue that involves the operation of the police department and the public safety of the citizens of Miami.

It was that issue, and the the manner in which the City Manager decided to extend the contract of the Chief for one more year for completely political reasons that should have triggered the attention, concern and action of the City Commission weeks ago.

The citizens of Miami should not be left wondering why, when presented  with overwhelming evidence of gross incompetence, malfeasance and arrogance by the current Police Chief and City Manager, that either should be allowed to remain in office for another year as a reward for their behavior because of the abject political cowardice and/or self-interest of the Commissioners. Their responsibility is standing up and looking out for the interests of the citizens who elected them.

But then again, they’ve ducked that responsibility before because,

It’s Miami. Bitches!