MIAMI M M MIRROR TRUE E REFLEC CTIONS

IAL MIA AMI BEAC CH POLI ICE UNIT T HAS IT TS HAND DS FULL L SPECI
If f we dont expect e police e activities and a police departments d to have an impact i on cr rime, disorder, and fear, they almost t certainly wont w . (Willia am J. Bratton n)

d Arthur Wa alters By David Novembe er 16, 2013 MIAMI BEACHT The alley between Eucli id and Merid dian Avenue es on 7th Str reet was blo ocked off by a slew of unm marked poli ice cars on the afternoo on of the fir rst day of November. N B Bang! Bang! Bang! the fla ash-bang gre enades boom med. SWAT T officers, their t faces concealed c by ski masks, ganged g up on o the scene e. A drug warrant wa as being ser rved. Two men m in the alley expressed d concern that t their ow wn building might be searched, s an nd hurriedly y departed in n the opposite direction. I contacted Capt. Ma ark Causey at a MBPD for r an intervie ew, and disco overed that decriminaliz d zation of mariju uana in state es like Califo ornia is caus sing small drug d distribut tion busines sses to flouri ish in Miami Beach B via Un nited States Mail. M At 710 Seventh Stree et, for the fir rst time this year, he said d, drug warra ants had bee en served twice at the same place on the e same perso on, arrested both times at a the scene, one Eric Williams, W aka as E. Green, fo or possession n of the gree en medical marijuana m im mported from m California a that he inte ended to sell in his tradema ark plastic cy ylinders.
P 1of8 Page

MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

The rental market is tight with the onset of the winter season. Apparently Mr. Williams could not find another apartment right away to conduct the business he counted on, for the warrants were served only 4 weeks apart. The first search yield about 50 grams, kept in a cabinet, the second yielded 25 grams, found hidden in the underside of an ironing board. The street value of a gram of pharmaceutical marijuana is $50. Williams cottage enterprise was grossing an estimated $2,000 to $3,000 a week. The cost of doing business and living in chic South Beach is high. He did not have many valuables in his apartment to show for his endeavors. His Range Rover was so dilapidated that it was not seized. The raid was conducted by the Special Investigations Squad, formed in April 2013 as a squad within the Special Operations Unit (SOU), created along with other innovations at the behest of Assistant Chief Mark Overton, formerly Hialeahs police chief. He is proud of its accomplishments.

The Special Operations Unit detectives and the Uniform Patrol officers deserve a great deal of credit for the high caliber police work being performed on a daily basis, he said. This unit is the center piece in the departments strategy to control certain types of criminal activity within our city. It directly supports the Uniform Patrol Officers, addressing special problems brought to our attention by the beat and patrol officers on the streets, working with them to address problems with the most effective tactics available. This synergy of operations is the Departments overall goal, not only to deal with issues in the short term, but to find lasting solutions to problems. The SOU is commanded by Capt. Mark Causey. The crimes the SOU addresses were already Captain Causeys forte during his 20 years of service. Chief Raymond Martinez reassigned him in May 2009 to temporarily serve as chief of the citys southern precinct, which includes the hectic South Beach Entertainment District, to implement reforms and to establish closer relationships with businesses and residents, and then he put him in charge of the newly formed SOU.

Page2of8

MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

The SOU has five squads with five officers each. The Special Investigations Squad, led by Sgt. Darrell Prieto, handles narcotics, vice, organized crime, and human trafficking. Sgt. Prieto has 23 years of service, with experience handling all these types of crimes. I met two Prietos at the station, where there is some difference of opinion as to which one is handsomer, the one who looks good, like a smooth business executive, or the one who looks bad, like he has done some serious hard time. The latter Prieto was one of the masked officers who made the arrest at 710 Seventh Street. He told me that the raid I has seen was routine. Business is not slacking off at all, when I asked him if the drug business has declined lately. We are always busy. We make three, four or more drug busts every day. I thought I saw undercover narcs around the dumpster in the alley the other evening. They looked like dealers. We are everywhere. In the alleys, looking out windows, on rooftops, you name it. Capt. Causey pulled up an End of Shift reports on his computer and gave me some Special Investigations Squad arrest numbers for the four days ending the second day of November. 19 Felony Narcotics; 11 Misdemeanor Narcotics; 3 Felony Prostitution; 4 Misdemeanor Prostitution; 7 Arrest Warrants; 2 Felonies; 11 Misdemeanors including battery, theft, etc; 2 Traffic; 5 Miscellaneous offenses. 144.5 grams OF drugs were seized, including cocaine, marijuana, mollies, crystal meth, GHB and mushrooms. He provided me with some photographs taken of a recent raid at an address on the 1200 block of Alton Road, where four persons were arrested with 107.9 grams of crystal meth, 25.45 grams of marijuana, 7 grams of mushrooms, 1 quart of GHB, and multiple pipes and paraphernalia.

The police department does not get credit for more than half of its business, I observed. These arrests are not on the index of the eight major crimes uniformly reported by the FBI as UCR-1,
Page3of8

MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

which is all the city commissioners see unless they make specific requests for incident reports, which have not been readily obtained according to Commissioner Ed Tobin. UCR-1 crimes go down a bit, so the city manager reports that crime is down. It goes up and down and up and down, Causey said matter-of-factly. But dont you think all incidents should be reported, for instance narcotics and prostitution busts? The department has the incidents in its database. It does not have to wait for a countywide system or FBI accreditation to report crimes to the public so the public can recognize what the department does and object to reductions based on only eight categories of major crimes, or call for more men on the force. I dont have knowledge on this subject matter. Because it is political, I offered. It is not political. Budgets are political outcomes, I argued. Every time the media reports on an allegation of police misconduct no matter how minor, it recites a litany of past wrongs, and says the department is in bad trouble, but neglects to recite the last dozen positive things done. The department should get credit for whatever it does. We are not numbers driven, he said. Miami Beach is a rapidly developing tourist and retirement location, so the number of crimes tracks the influx and its character. So statistical reports could be misinterpreted as indicating a crime wave with the influx and its type? I suppose the rate might rise temporarily if the department does a better job enforcing the laws. On the other hand, could a rise could indicate that it is doing a bad job policing? We are not numbers driven. We take the time necessary to make quality arrests that will stick, taking down the worst offenders first, he said, interrupting our conversation to take a call regarding the investigation of a meth lab in South Beach. People think the Miami Herald quashes crime stories because if tourists knew what was going on that would scare them away, I observed when he got off the phone. I do not believe that, said Causey. Miami Beach gets national attention. The search terms, Miami Beach, attracts the most traffic on the Internet in South Florida, so anything about the beach including crime only brings more readers to the media, and they profit on the traffic. I noticed the other day on the Internet, Sgt. Prieto offered, that police events in Hialeah which had nothing to do with Miami Beach were listed under the Miami Beach category. Miami Beach attracts a lot of attention.

Page4of8

MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

I transcribed the brief interview and sent it along to Assistant Chief Overton with a request for a statistical comparison, of arrests during the operations of the new Special Investigations Unit, to the arrests made for the same number of months prior to its formation for the categories of crimes addressed by the SIS, none of which are reported under UCR-1. Consider the most recent Uniform Crime Report statistics on the "Big Three," as I like to refer to them, Overton responded. From January 1st through October 15th of this year, in comparison with the same time frame in 2012, Robbery is down 8.26 percent, Auto Theft is down 25.19 percent, and Burglary is down 9.88 percent. Another important indicator of the success of this strategy that is not tracked by UCR is the fact that we had had 179 less vehicle burglaries to date as compared to the same time frame in 2012. While auto burglaries are considered a minor offense, it is a good measure of what is occurring on the streets. Therefore, having fewer incidents is a good sign that what we are doing is having a positive impact. He referred my request for comparative incident statistics back to Capt. Causey. I got the impression from our interview that generating the report that I wanted would not be the result of a simple database query by him, so I told him not to bother, because statistics on police performance was a subject I would take up at another time. I had already gone around the block for coffee with Overton on the subject in an effort to enlist him to champion regular public reporting of important incidents not on UCR-1, such as narcotics busts. Proactive narcotics investigations can turn up all sorts of criminal activities since narcotics are involved in many other categories of crimes. Overton deserves the benefit of the doubt because he has the broad view on what is actually going on, and Causey is even closer to the work, sometimes taking to the street himself. However that may be, we know that police chiefs throughout the nation will naturally take credit for falling crime rates and will place the blame on rises on circumstances beyond their control. Some academics claim that crime cannot be controlled by policing in the long run, concluding from their studies that criminal activity is a demographic and cultural phenomenon. William J. Bratton famously agreed with the numerical history, but he took exception to the defeatism based on the academic studies. Contemporary criminology maintains a longstanding belief that police activities have little or no appreciable effect on crime, despite the public ideology and political rhetoric periodically mustered to justify larger police budgets and staffing increases. I do not take issue with the empirical validity of any of these studies or with the observation that police activity has historically had little impact on crime. I do question the basic premise that because no credible causal relationship has ever been shown to exist between police activity and reductions in crime, no causal relationship can exist. In the broadest sense, an effective police department cant keep people from becoming criminals or control the social and demographic forces that, according to many criminologists, engender criminal activity. But we can keep people from
Page5of8

MIAMI M M MIRROR TRUE E REFLEC CTIONS

becoming g successful criminals. We can tu urn the table es on the criminal c elem ment. Instea ad of reacting to them, we e can create a sense of police p prese ence and pol lice effectiveness that makes m criminals s react to us. And then, in i a narrower sense, we do d keep people from bec coming crim minals or at lea ast from com mmitting cri iminal acts as they rea alize their ch hances of su uccess are much m smaller. (1) The prob blem with st tatistics is th hat they can n lie through h their teeth, , sometimes with the he elp of police de epartments who w manipu ulate or gam me them wh hen funds an nd continued d employme ent is driven by y the numbe ers. Statistic cs, maam, do d not tell th he whole tru uth and noth hing but the truth about the e events cou unted nor the eir circumsta ances, never r mind the complex c of causes c that led l to the result ts. Given sta atistical amb biguity, it is s no wonder that operati ional comma anders like Capt. Causey would w rather r keep the br roader number of inciden nts close to the t vest rath her than be driven d by them. . Quality sho ould count, but no weig ght is given to quality. Taking a major m crimina al off streets might m have th he same weig ght or positiv ve impact as the arrest of f two-dozen lesser culpr rits. If output numbers on n arrests are be b meaningf ful, then ben neficial socia al outcomes, like feelings that a neighbo orhood is safe and in good order, mu ust be consid dered. If policing custom mers are satis sfied, then the numbers do d not coun nt for much h; but if th he numbers get out of f hand, cust tomer satisfacti ion will fall.

710 Se eventh Street t on 7th and Euclid E Aven nue Residents of the blo ock on whi ich 710 Sev venth Street sits say th here has bee en a tremen ndous improvem ment since three years s ago, when n the block k was overr run by drug gsters and other criminals s. 710 Seven nth was kno own as a no oisy buildin ng with unsa avory people loitering in i the little park king area in front. It did have a good d resident ma anager with a gun permi it for awhile. . Another address, on the same blo ock, with 12 2 studio apar rtments, hou used a pimp, a prostitute, , four drug dea alers, and an n early-morn ning, low-le evel casino that t charged d a fee at th he door and d sold several cases c of beer among other o things s nightly, in ncluding a prostitute p w who serviced d the
P 6of8 Page

MIAMI M M MIRROR TRUE E REFLEC CTIONS

gamblers s, mostly kit tchen worke ers, in the back seat of a car with a temporary y tag in the alley behind th he building. One of the e dealers wo orked for a transportatio t on system th hat linked se everal hotels; hi is mate, a cr rack addict, worked the desk at one of them, an nd would sho ow rooms fo or the purpose of o selling dru ugs.

626 Euclid E Avenu ue

Another dealer on the premises, Francisco, F a Santeria pri iest who had d an interest in a nightclu ub on gton Avenue and who us sed his Eucli id Avenue st tudio as an office, o was an a old memb ber of Washing the Bloods gang. Fra ancisco was visited regu ularly by a nicely n dress sed fellow fr rom Tampa, who sported a pitbull and d a submach hine gun, as clouds of po ot smoke billowed out the t windows s and rap music boomed. Luis, L the alcoholic coke dealer who lived in the studio next door to him m was looking to t buy a gu un, he said, to kill Fran ncisco, who had socked d him in the e face one night. n Francisco o, in turn, ha ad a shovel to t put Luis in i the groun nd if need be e. Six undocu umented wo orkers were squ ueezed into one o studio on n the premis ses, and anot ther was hab bituated by a teenage ga ang at nighta woman fou und naked on the step ps claimed she s had bee en raped wh hen her hus sband u showed up. Inadequa ate policing was blame ed along wi ith horrendo ous real est tate manage ement by gr reedy realtors and a landlord ds, some land dlords enjoy ying cash rec ceipts, going so far as to advertise th hat no backgrou und and cred dit checks were w required. Drug gan ngs marked buildings on the block with tennis sh hoes thrown over the ele ectric wires in i the back alley. a Cars were w stolen from the pa arking th lot of the condomin nium at Euclid Avenue and 6 Stre eetthere were w several l late night gang fights in the lot as well. w An inf flux of undo ocumented workers w from m Guatemal la and Hond duras, allegedly y trafficked by b the mob to t work in re estaurants, included a fe ew very dang gerous crimi inals. Derelicts s slept in par rking spaces and between n buildings, stealing bik kes and other r items durin ng the day. One e immigrant female was stabbed mu ultiple times by her viole ent mate, wh ho was said to be wanted for fo murder so outh of the border, b while e his friend looked l on. Elderly E people feared to go to

P 7of8 Page

MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

the store after dark. A woman was knifed and raped behind Meridian Market one morning. Las Olas Caf on an adjacent corner was burglarized. All this on one block two blocks from famed Ocean Drive, and while former City Manager Jorge Gonzalez was citing UCR-1 statistics that crime was way down on the beach. Effective policing including the cooperation of immigration authorities deserves plenty of credit for the radical improvement of that block. Another factor was the general economic decline that prompted the parasitical element to go back to where they it came from or to find better pickings elsewhere. Effective policing depends in large part on cooperation with residents and businesses. Everyone can have a hand in reducing the crime rates. How reporting numbers can lead to better policing is reserved for another story. ## (1) Bratton, William J. Great Expectations: How Higher Expectations for Police Departments Can Lead to a Decrease in Crime. In Measuring What Matters, Proceedings From the Policing Institute Meetings, Research Report, DOJ: 1999

Page8of8