Guest Columnist Karin Kimball on Crime in North Miami Beach

EXPLOSION OF GANG AND GUN VIOLENCE IN NORTH MIAMI BEACH

I would bet you did not know that there were 25 SHOOTINGS in North Miami Beach between October 1, 2012 and January 31, 2013. TEN of those shootings were GANG related. In eleven of the 25 shootings, a bullet struck at least one person.  In two cases, the person struck died from his injuries.  EIGHT of the TEN GANG related shootings resulted in a bullet striking a person. EIGHT of TEN! I would suggest that you take all precautions to stay out of the way of the GANG shootings because they have good aim. One of the GANG related shootings (the one that resulted in a HOMICIDE) took place in close proximity to a tot lot. Maybe you should stay away from the parks too!

Just in case you are curious, weapons used in these shootings included:  45, .38, .22, 9mm, .380, and .223 assault rifle.

Just in case you are curious, these are the locations of the shootings:

 

Map of Shootings

As a result of the shooting spree, 10 – 12 NMB police officers worked from 6pm -2am for about two to three weeks. This overtime detail resulted in 52 arrests (44 misdemeanors and 8 felonies) and 4 guns were taken off of the street.  After this special detail, shootings all but stopped.

Seventeen police officers were laid off in September 2011. This resulted in the elimination of our GANG unit and our CRIME SUPPRESSION units. Our city is left with a meager 5 detectives and one supervisor in the STREET CRIMES unit.  Our STREET CRIMES unit is busy dealing with – other things. Let me give you a sample of some crime statistics for the one-month period of 2/18/13 to 3/17/13:

Crime Statistics

The NMBPD conducts a Holiday Task force from Black Friday to New Years Day. In 2011, as a result of this special detail, 1 gun was impounded. In 2012, as a result of this same detail, 14 guns were impounded (6 of those 14 guns were STOLEN).  See a pattern here folks?

We cannot expect our STREET CRIMES unit – 5 detectives – to be able to deal with 27 residential burglaries, 4 armed robberies, 1 car jacking, 8 strong armed robberies, 9 auto thefts, 10 business burglaries, & 4 apartment burglaries, in a one month period while simultaneously combating GANG and GUN violence in our city.

We cannot expect a limited number of police officers to deal with a crime index of 7 in North Miami Beach. Let’s put the number “7” into perspective: 100 is safest – do the math. North Miami Beach is “safer than 7% of the cities in the US” (http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/fl/north-miami-beach/crime/).  Chicago’s crime index is 8 (http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/chicago/crime/). Do the math again folks: Chicago is safer than NMB!

I gave a presentation about GANG and GUN violence in NMB at the City Council Meeting of April 16, 2013. That was a Tuesday. There was another shooting on April 20, 2013; the Saturday after my presentation.  Oh, and there was another shooting a week later on April 28, 2013. – I happened upon the crime scene of that drive-by shooting– it looked like there were 20 evidence markers in the street – what were they markers for? I wonder if they were for casings. Twenty casings? Twenty bullets? Do the math again folks.  How sad that I am out for a Saturday drive and come upon a shooting scene? It is an ominous sign folks – just an every day, “ordinary” occurrence in NMB?

Obviously, the elimination of our specialized units was a mistake. GANG and GUN violence is a real problem in our city – it is destroying our city. Our city leadership must take accountability to address the poisoning of our streets. We need more police. We cannot fight crime if we do not have enough crime fighters. Do the math again.

The Superintendent of Schools and The Mayor of Miami Dade County recently implemented an action plan to address Gun violence. The City of Miami is hiring more police officers to address Gun violence. Our city leadership must also take accountability to address the Gun violence in our city.  Police protection must be our city government’s FIRST PRIORITY. Otherwise, we all need to sell our houses and move. Oh, wait, who can sell a house in a city with a crime index of 7?

Karin Kimball

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22 thoughts on “Guest Columnist Karin Kimball on Crime in North Miami Beach

  1. Good work Karin Kimball. The problem stems from the Mayor & Council laying off 17 Officers and the continued vendetta seeking benefit cuts this Mayor & Council are trying to implement. This mayor showed his colors before he was even mayor standing up before a previous council stating how he feels he needs to wear a bullet proof vest to protect him from NMB police officers. WTF!!!!
    Even if they started to hire more officers, it would take 1-2 years before 17 officers would be on their own as full functioning officers. We were looking to hire reserve officers and it took the dept 6 months just to find 1. Thats right, 1. No one wants to work at this agency anymore because the way the Mayor & Council treats the officers and the unnecessary benefit cuts. They even treat the Chief of Police like shit. When they have City Staff meetings they have officially told the Chief of Police that he’s no longer welcome. WTF!!!!
    Do you see a pattern here. If the city no longer wants a police dept they should hand the torch over to the county. If they do, they need to wise up and see that police services can make or break a city. The Mayor and Council are more worried about taking away our day off on our birthday then they are with the crime trends. Of course they’ll say in public that their concerned but they don’t give a rats a–. You mentioned 5 detectives to combat the gang problems but really its 3, 2 of those detectives just handle frauds. The city had arbitration with the general employees and the hearing officer ruled in favor of the general employees, thats because the hearing officer made mention several times that this city is going above and beyond what they need to do to strip away benefits. The same will probably be said with the police department. The police Union is expecting its ruling in a few weeks and if you made it to the hearing, the police union made our city attorneys and administrators look like a bunch of clowns.
    So even if they try and hire more officers, getting kicked in the balls by city staffers every day and hearing another benefit their looking at cutting when you come in to work won’t help much with proactivity.

  2. I know that our Mayor and (most of) Council read this blog, and I would like to read what they have to say about this. It was most certainly a campaign promise of Beth S. during this last election, I still have the flyer. Actually she is the only one willing to put in writing our need for more officers, let’s just hope it was not just something said to get elected and then forgotten. And to “Trying To Help”: Please stop saying that it will take 1-2 years before an officer hired today is fully functional; You have said it before, and I’m afraid this could be used as an excuse to not do anything.

    1. Any elected officials care to respond? Anyone? The silence is more telling than anything you could have said. Now I know what to do with Beth’s flyer, although I’m not sure how absorbent it is…

  3. I’ll clarify. It could take 1-2 years to get all 17 hired back. If their already certified It could be quicker. But out of the last bunch, we found 1 and that took 6 months so imagine 17.

  4. Karen, I appreciate the time you took to put together the stats that you did. I agree with you that we do need more entry level police officers that will go out and actually fight crime. Unfortunately, we lost some of our best last year as a result of the failed pension negotiations that caused many to be laid off.

    The problem with fighting crime on our streets is that we first have to deal with the problem of excessive salary and pension costs. Due to the extra-lucrative police pension contract, it costs the taxpayers of the city over $150,000 per police officer employed by the City. That means that every 6 2/3 police officers cost us over $1 million annually. The taxpayers cannot sustain that cost. As it is now, every dollar collected in property taxes in NMB goes just to pay salaries and pensions, leaving little left over for other city requirments such as our aging underground water system.

    After years of negiotiations, our City Council is on the verge of establishing a reasonable compensation and pension reform that the taxpayers can afford. Once this in place, due to the lower overall cost of a new police officer, there will be new hires to add to our PD. Unfortunately, there are some in our current PD that want our crime to escalate so that the current shortfall we are dealing with will be a self-fulfilling issue for them.

    All of us want a safer city, however gang violence is a complex issue, and requires resources beyond our own local PD. The state attorney’s office plays a key roll in prosecuting the gang members the police arrest so if they don’t do their job at getting those that commit violent crime encarcerated, then all the arrests our own cops make is for naught. These guys are back on the street doing the same thing over and over.

    1. How much does an officer cost the taxpayers of Aventura or Coral Gables? I suspect about the same. Why should my protection be cheaper than that of residents of Aventura or the Gables?

    2. Oh Bob White, a constant source of bad information. Here’s your chance to prove your credibility.

      1) You mentioned the “best” officers in the dept were laid off. Why would you label them the “best”? Have you pulled the stats for each officer, those working and those laid off to prove that? If so please provide.

      2) You mentioned fighting crimes first starts with officer benefits and salaries. Ok, so what is the cost for an Officer from the county, Aventura, Coral Gables, North Miami? Are their costs so much less per officer and crime so much lower? Please provide the comprison and relation.

      3) “After years of negotiating”. Have you been to the negotiations? Unless your Charles Lobe I doubt it. The city isn’t negotiating anything. Their saying we better take xyz or their gonna impose it anyways. I’m sure your okay with a city imposing on it’s officers thus destroying moral worse than it already is.

      4) I now understand from your last paragraph your now a gang and crime expert. If you don’t have enough officers to even have a gang unit, then whats the use. It all comes back to a major political blunder our Mayor & Council made. Laying off 17 Officers!!!!!

    3. Bob,

      I welcome your opinion and your input, but you sometimes let your bias cloud your objectivity and what you then bring to the table is a smidgen of truth combined with a mountain of false, inaccurate and misleading statements that you purport to be fact. The result is that your contributions often end up causing the dialog to devolve into name calling and petty attacks. To steal a phrase…I’m just sayin’.

      Now, for one, the layoffs did not result from “failed pension reform”. At the time, the city and union were trying to avoid the layoffs by cutting operational costs and the pension was not even an issue of discussion. Talk of pension reform came later; after the layoffs.

      Now, it is a fact the union did offer concessions in a failed attempt to avoid the layoffs. Perhaps they did not offer as much as the city wanted, but an offer was made and it is worth noting that at the time the officers offered these concessions they were working under a contract that had been signed and agreed upon by the city and therefore had no legal duty to agree to give back a dime…and yet they did. They offered to give back almost 10% of their pay and benefits. And the city could have and should have accepted whatever concessions they could get, but they did not. They refused the concessions they were offered and opted instead to layoff police officers. That was their choice. Now I am clearly on record as saying that a city laying off (aka firing) its police officers is akin to Washington DC firing soldiers, and such decisions should only be made as a matter of absolute last resort. Soldiers provide a nation strength and security just as police officers provide you and your family with strength and security. Now, with a smaller police department, North Miami Beach is weaker and less safe as the gun violence chronicled by Karin Kimball has now proven.

      Karin should know that there have been a half dozen more shootings in North Miami Beach since she made this presentation to the city council. Shootings are becoming a regular occurrence in North Miami Beach. That is what happens when you fire 15% of your first line of defense against crime and violence.

      You say the salaries and pension costs of NMB police officers are “excessive”, but if you actually set aside your bias and look at the situation calmly and factually then you would realize this is not true. Our pay and benefits are not out-of-line with surrounding agencies. You seem to make the same mistake our mayor and council make, which is, you establish in your own mind a completely arbitrary figure that you feel represents what an officer should get paid and then anything that exceeds that figure in your head is deemed by you to be “excessive”…but the free and fair market establishes what an officer should earn and not you or the mayor and council. NMB is competing with other agencies for available talent, and talent (like water) always finds its own level. In short, you get what you pay for. If you (and the mayor and council have decided that a police officer should only be able to earn $100 dollars, then go ahead and pay us $100 dollars…but if Miami-Dade County is paying its officers $200 dollars (twice as much) then you will get what you pay for. NMB will be forced to settle for the recruits that MDPD would not hire, so they settled for NMB. That is already starting to be the case. One of our most promising recruits recently had to be let go because we learned she was using drugs (ecstasy and cocaine) in the academy. Why would someone using hard drugs feel that NMB would be likely to either miss or overlook that? What would it mean to you and the rest of the community to hire a cop who snorts cocaine? Imagine the problems you could expect down the road.

      And one final note…I have been a police officer for a long, long time. Given your clear and obvious bias against senior officers, I suppose that means you feel that I am lazy, unproductive and you would just as soon fire me and replace me with a rookie. On the one hand I understand how you feel because I kind of felt the same way when I was a rookie just starting out with your police department. I used to look at the “old-timers” as being lazy and perhaps even cowardly…but as time progressed and I watched them work I learned just how wrong I had been. They taught me a lot. I learned a lot from those who came before me. I learned how to treat people. I learned how to listen to people. I learned patience. I learned to work smarter, not harder, and these lessons made me a better and more effective police officer. And the citizens benefit from having senior police officers; fewer car crashes, lawsuits, uses of force, allegations of rudeness and misconduct. I learned to appreciate what an experienced police officer brings to the table, and so should you. Rookies are an integral part of the equation, don’t get me wrong, but to say that you would be best served by having a police force populated by as many rookies as possible is misguided at best, stupid at worst.

      In closing, the mayor and council can choose to pay their police officers like Wackenhut security guards if they want…that is their prerogative, but in the end you always get what you pay for. Wackenhut guard salaries means less professional police officers, more acts of corruption, more police-involved shootings, more civil lawsuits, more incidents of rudeness and ultimately it means that your family is less safe and your homes are worth less money and your quality of life is diminished. But hey, who needs safety and security when you are saving so much on the cost of your police department. Right, Bob? Isn’t that what matter most?

  5. To this day it still amazes me that a mayor and council could be allowed to get away with choosing to fire 15% of their police officers. Their decision to fire 15% of the officers meant they were forced to eliminate the Motors, Gang, CP and Tactical Street Crimes units to fill the holes they created. These specialized services proactively and successfully combated crime trends in the city for decades, yet now they were cast aside and by conscious decision?

    Before our federal government chooses to fire 15% of our soldiers, wouldn’t we expect them to absolutely exhaust all other possible options, no matter how unorthodox or seemingly unconventional? Would not the same be true of any government, be it federal or state or local? Cops protect citizens the same way soldiers protect our nation.

    That means before firing your NMB “soldiers”, the mayor and council should’ve done anything and everything they could to avoid it. That means they should’ve accepted union concessions, implemented a red light camera system, enacted furlough days, cut discretionary overtime, trim salaries and incentives from managerial positions, cut the health insurance benefits of the mayor and council, reduced the personal expense accounts for all politicians, eliminated all car allowances for managers, implement a fee for all police take-home cars while eliminating any and all other needless costs (like the 900% raises the mayor and council voted to grant themselves) and then…after any and all other cost cutting/revenue-enhancing ideas were 100% exhausted….then and only then should they fire a single “soldier” whose job is to protect and serve the voter and taxpayer.

    But the mayor and council did none of those things. They just fired 15% of their cops…and now we see the stupidity and short-sightedness of their decision. I submit to you the decision to fire “soldiers” was more petty and personal than business, but that is another discussion for another blog.

    Karin and Stephanie…thanks to you both for bringing to light this deadly serious matter. Hopefully someone decides to hold some feet to the fire and get to the bottom of why these firings were deemed necessary and unavoidable, because from where I stand that was not the case. There was a lot of other areas we could have (and should have) trimmed fat from our budget. Cutting away the muscle of the fire or police department is never recommended where safety and security are concerned.

    1. Dear Mr. NMB Cop,
      Can you please post the shooting stats for May 2013?
      I heard there have been quite a few.

      1. Karin,

        I will send you the latest information. As I said, there have been several more shootings just in the last week or two. Things have gone from bad to worse.

  6. I do NOT want entry level police officers. This is not Walmart we are talking about. I also do not feel that $150,000 per year is excessive if you are paying for the best. I am also curious to know how much other cities are paying for their experienced officers. And, I beg to differ on the fang control issue. We had one of the best, if not the best gang units in the country before it went on the chopping block. I don’t want Walmart. I want top cops. If we compromise on our basic, we are all screwed. You get what you pay for. This city has gone to shit. I respectfully dare you, Mr. White, to take an unarmed walk around 19th and 163rd. Then come back and tell me we need more entry level cops. Until then, I will not budge on my opinion. This city is almost beyond no return and if that is not taken into consideration, we are all fu?!ed!

    1. And, Mr. White, did you know that there were 27 rapes in this city in 2012? That is messed up. I have two daughters that live in this city. I would like to know that they are safe. How can that happen if we have a skeleton crew of police on the street?

    2. Sorry about the typos. Typing on the phone…..too pissed off to wait to get home to type a response!

  7. And, one more thing Mr. White, with all due respect, which side if the city do you live in? The East side or the West side?

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