Art Acevedo Out As Miami Police Chief
To his fans, he’s “the Michael Jordan of Police Chiefs.” To his enemies, he’s “the LeBron James of performative self-promotion.” Whatever you prefer to call him, Art Acevedo is no longer the Chief of Police in Miami.
Yesterday, Miami City Manager Arthur Noriega handed Acevedo his walking papers, saying that the relationship between Acevedo, the Miami Police Department, and the community had “deteriorated beyond repair” and become “untenable.”
The decision to terminate Acevedo comes in the wake of a brutal public excavation of his history as a police chief in both Houston and Austin, and as a member of the California Highway Patrol. More recently, as Miami’s police chief, Acevedo distastefully joked that the “Cuban mafia” ran the police department.
Here’s a backgrounder on Acevedo’s troubling record that city commissioners read in its entirety at a special hearing on Acevedo that began two weeks ago.
And here are billboards, which “were seen in Coconut Grove” near Acevedo’s $1,750,000 home in the swanky Coconut Grove neighborhood and again outside of City Hall and the Police Department on the day of the hearing.
While a lot of Acevedo’s dirty laundry was aired over the past few weeks in Miami, one aspect of his character received less attention than it deserved:
Art Acevedo is a poser, a con-man, a charlatan.
He is the guy who took a knee with Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, but still fights tooth and nail to keep mothers and fathers locked in jail simply because their bank accounts are not big enough to pay for their bail.
He’s the guy who mouths the words police reform and accountability, but then stans for bad cops, including the police officers who killed two people and a dog in a botched drug raid, calling them heroes despite video that contradicts the officers’ version of events and a guilty plea from one of the officers for falsifying records.
He’s the guy who speaks on a panel on criminal justice reform at the Aspen Institute, but mocks the idea that children should be treated differently in the criminal justice system because they have less developed brains than adults.
He’s the guy who fails to solve murders, but then gets up and blames prosecutors, judges and county commissioners for crime.
And he’s the guy who conned his way into Miami, wooing both the mayor and the city manager without even formally applying for the job. He’s the Michael Jordan of policing after all. But future mayors and city managers have no excuse now for burying their heads in the sand.
