Miami mayor makes bold move naming Art Acevedo police chief — but the process was a problem | Editorial

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez went big and recruited Art Acevedo to be the city’s next police chief. It’s a bold move, it’s a sign of expansive thinking — and it’s a problem.

Bringing in Acevedo is not the problem. In fact, it’s a good thing. He’s the accomplished police chief of Houston, known nationwide from his appearances on CNN as a law-enforcement expert. Miami is lucky to have an outsider of this caliber.

“Chief Acevedo is a true change agent,” is how an excited Suarez described the city’s new chief to the Editorial Board on Monday morning.

But Acevedo’s selection was a total surprise to Miamians, a hire made public only Sunday night, after weeks of public interviews with candidates who put themselves out there to apply for the job. The city scrapped that whole process, and that’s unfair to the people who were following the rules. There were eight final candidates — five of them internal — waiting, along with Miami residents, for Miami City Manager Art Noriega to make a selection, as is his job.

Instead, Suarez reeled in a big fish from Texas. The secret negotiation began when Suarez and Acevedo spoke. The chief wanted to come to Miami. Acevedo, Houston’s popular police chief and a Cuban American, has made a name for himself demonstrating with Black Lives Matter protesters following George Floyd’s death. Floyd, who was killed at the hands of Minneapolis police last May, hailed from Houston and was buried there. In placing himself amid protesters, Acevedo made an heartening show of empathy with those sick of — and sickened by — police violence against African Americans.

But it has to have been more than performance art. Many of Miami’s Black residents have been crying out for such a change within a department that has promoted its last few chiefs from within, a move viewed by many, fairly or not, as a continuation of the same culture that once put the department under Department of Justice oversight for the killing of several Black suspects. That oversight ended just a few weeks ago as Chief Jorge Colina was retiring.

The deal to land Acevedo was the work of Mayor Suarez, whose aggressive approach toward raising Miami’s profile during a crippling pandemic has included working to attract Silicon Valley stars and high-profile innovators like Elon Musk.

Yes, Acevedo is an outside-the-box candidate, a strong and transformative hire.

At his news conference, Acevedo said: “There is a lot of pain in this country . . . impacted by bad policing.” For Acevedo, a top law-enforcement officer working in the belly of the beast, to publicly move the conversation from the tepid “a few bad apples” to “bad policing” already signals a new, and we hope, better day in which he pushes officers back from excessive force.

Unfortunately, the residents, city leaders and local activists, who have made police reform a monumental issue, did not get to watch Acevedo be interviewed by the search committee members as the other candidates were, on YouTube — because he wasn’t.

Acevedo’s selection seems on the mark. But if doing an end-run around the public selection process becomes the standard — and it shouldn’t — a wholly unacceptable candidate could be selected next time. What if a Joe Arpaio wannabe shows up?

There is a process in place for good reason.

The mayor told the Editorial Board that secrecy was essential to close the deal and to avoid embarrassing Acevedo or the mayor of Houston if things didn’t work out. Currently, the Florida Legislature is considering legislation to keep secret candidates for university presidencies. We don’t like that, either. That might be how corporate America works, but taxpayers should be assured of a public process.

A police chief has extraordinary powers, supervising men and women who carry badges and guns, and who have the ability to deprive people of liberty — and to kill them.

Suarez said he brought the parties together, then stepped aside to allow Noriega to do the hiring.

On Monday, many activists and organizations awaiting the naming of a new chief were trying to catch up.

“I’m OK with the outsider point from the standpoint of creating a culture shift in the department, but it really bothers me that of the nearly six hours of YouTube footage that the public had available to watch the candidates, there was no mention of this candidate, and the public did not have a chance to learn more about his qualifications or weigh in on the process,” said Melba Pearson, the director of policy and programs for Florida International University’s Center for the Administration of Justice.

Pearson, who lost her bid for Miami-Dade state attorney last year, said the city made “a mockery of the hard work of the people who interviewed all the candidates, the folks that took the time to watch, and [that] seems like a colossal waste of time if they knew what the outcome was eventually going to be based on a recruitment call in the middle of the night.”

In the next few weeks, it will be up to Acevedo to calm these concerns from community stakeholders about the lack of diverse input in his selection. Despite this rough start, from what we know, he stands a good chance at succeeding and building trust.