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‘Oppressive bureaucracy’
Members of Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel complain city has hindered, underfunded probe of police.
by Steve Ellman, Daily Business Review
May 21st, 2004
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Members of the Miami Civilian Investigative
Panel are angrily accusing city officials of hindering their oversight
of police by inadequately funding the panel and imposing overly strict liability insurance requirements on its investigators.
One
member says the resulting delays indicate a “conspiracy” to prevent the
panel from carrying out its mission. The CIP’s first task is to probe
alleged police misconduct during last November’s protests against the
Free Trade Area of the Americas conference.
At its Tuesday
meeting, members of the 13-member CIP, which was established by Miami
voters in a November 2001 referendum, expressed frustration with their
slow start.
More than a year after the panelists were appointed,
staffing and other structural matters have been addressed, FTAA
testimony and documents have been compiled, but no actual investigations
have begun. The CIP only recently hired its own legal counsel, and has
not yet been able to hire investigators.
Friction between the CIP
and city officials has been so severe that panel Chairman Larry
Handfield threatened to resign last month and threatened to urge other
panel members to resign as well.
Handfield blames oppressive
bureaucracy for the problems. “I don’t think it’s deliberate,” he said
in an interview. “I think it’s an insensitive bureaucracy. Nobody did
their homework on budgets or staffing.”
“I
understand [Handfield’s] frustration and I have conveyed it to the
mayor and the city manager,” city budget chief Larry Spring said. “It’s
part of the normal budget process. All city agencies have had to cut
costs. There is no animosity towards the panel.”
Established in
the aftermath of a series of controversial police shootings, the CIP has
subpoena power that makes it, on paper at least, among the strongest
independent police oversight bodies in the nation. But Handfield and
other panel members say disputes with the city have limited the panel’s
first year to little more than jumping through bureaucratic hoops.
As
a result, they say, six months after the anti-FTAA demonstrations and
numerous allegations of police misconduct against protesters, the CIP
has not been able to accomplish very much. It has received 17 individual
complaints of police misconduct during the FTAA conference.
“The
city was forced to create the panel,” said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff,
immediate past president of the Miami ACLU, who was a strong proponent
of the panel’s creation. In an e-mail, she accused city leaders of
trying to “weaken the panel by whipping its members into line” and
questioned whether the panel “will have the courage to take on those who
appointed them.”
At the meeting this week, CIP members expressed
anger over a comment made earlier this month by City Commissioner Tomas
Regalado. He said that the public perceives that “the CIP has done
nothing on the FTAA [and] that the police are going to get away with
whatever they did, if they did something wrong.”
Regalado stood behind that statement in an interview Wednesday. “The commission fought to give the panel teeth,” he said. “As of yet, we haven’t seen anything.”
At
the CIP meeting Tuesday, panel Vice Chair Janet McAliley called
Regalado’s remarks “frustrating” because city commissioners “don’t
understand the bureaucratic hurdles” the panel has faced. “There are
indications that someone [at City Hall] is foot-dragging.”
Panel
member Fred St. Amand went further. “It is time the people know the true
facts,” he said. “I truly believe there must be a conspiracy.”
“Nothing
has gone smoothly for the panel for over a year,” St. Amand said in an
interview Wednesday. “We need the right tools and the city’s
cooperation. Some people felt from the beginning that the panel wouldn’t
work.”
Handfield quelled Tuesday’s conspiracy talk. But he said
it was time to address the City Commission and the general public to
“set the record straight.” To do so, Handfield summarized the CIP’s
complaints in a May 17 letter to city commissioners.
Handfield
told the Daily Business Review that an adequate annual budget for the
panel would be $1 million, rather than the $675,000 that was
appropriated. Even then, he said extra money is needed to properly
investigate police conduct during the FTAA trade talks. He called the
current allocation a “deathly shortfall.”
Handfield said the
budget was hammered out last year in “heated” negotiations with Spring
and City Manager Joe Arriola, then presented to the commission as a done
deal. The panel wanted to hire a full-time independent counsel at an
annual salary of $125,000 but the limited budget made that impossible,
Handfield said.
The CIP recently hired the Miami criminal defense
firm Levine & Finger on a part-time, hourly basis. Until then, the
CIP was receiving legal advice from the city attorney’s office, which
also is legal counsel for the Miami Police Department — an obvious
conflict.
Spring said the city had gone to extra lengths to
accommodate the panel, such as absorbing the health plan costs of its
permanent staff and exempting it from a request made to all other city
agencies to trim current budgets by three percent.
“I don’t get
everything I want and they don’t get everything they want,” Spring said.
“[Fiscal conditions] have been tough on the entire city.”
Regalado
said he did not previously hear complaints from CIP members about the
adequacy of the budget. “[The City Commission] gave the panel what they
requested,” Regalado said. “They never reached out for more funding. If
they ask me, I’ll vote for it.”
Handfield said the panel’s work
also has been hampered by a dispute with the city over the hiring of
four investigators. The city has insisted that they work as independent
contractors and that they carry liability insurance of $1 million — more
than three times the statutory requirement of $300,000 for
investigators in the private sector.
Handfield said the higher insurance premiums for the higher liability coverage would shrink the pool of applicants for the jobs,
which pay about $50,000 annually. He said arguments with the city about
the premiums led him to make his resignation threat last month.
“I told Larry Spring I won’t be a puppet or a fall guy,” Handfield said in an interview.
The
city risk management office told the Review that $1 million is “the
industry standard” and that the panel’s lesser requirement “has not been
approved and is not recommended.”
“The city should not ask for
applicants that are held at a lower standard,” the office said in an
e-mail response to a Review inquiry. “Especially with the high amount of
exposure that these individuals will have working with the CIP.”
Handfield,
however, said that the CIP will proceed with the $300,000 insurance
requirement and hire the investigators at an hourly rate of about $60.
The panel has applications from nine qualified candidates in hand and
will begin the interview process next week.
But according to
budget chief Spring, the city’s risk management department can withhold
approval of the investigators’ contracts. So in effect, the city can
veto the hiring of investigators.
The panel has yet to decide on
the City Commission’s May 6 suggestion that it hold most of its meetings
at City Hall so they can be televised.
At their May 18 meeting,
the CIP members expressed concern that meeting at City Hall would make
the panel seem too close to city officials and the police. They said
they would prefer to hold their meetings in locations throughout the
city’s different communities. The matter is still under discussion.
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