Anti-Corruption Unit Should Not Be Controlled By Mayor — or Any Other County Official

A real question we should be asking: Why wasn’t this done sooner?

As many predicted, the boneheaded, arrogant and anti-democratic moves of the Miami-Dade County Commission assured the ascent of Carlos Alvarez to true strong-mayor status, one with the power to hire and fire department heads and the responsibility of overseeing the day-to-day affairs of county government.

On the heels of that victory, the County Commission is moving forward with legislation proposed by Commissioner Carlos Gimenez to establish the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as the “lead agency” in public corruption cases.

Alvarez, who created the Miami-Dade Police Department’s anti-corruption unit when he was the department’s director, has promised to veto the code and even fight it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. “No agency is better” for the task than the MDPD, the mayor argued to the Miami Herald.

Alvarez’s anger would definitely be justified if the language in Gimenez’s ordinance effectively killed the anti-corruption unit. Indeed, an earlier draft of Gimenez’s law would have done just that, eliminating another watchdog against county corruption. That would have been wrong.

Yet in its current incarnation, all the code does is shift oversight away from the police director, who is now, because the strong-mayor initiative has passed, controlled by the mayor. Without Gimenez’s ordinance, a future county mayor could use the anti-corruption unit as his or her own private Gestapo — hounding political enemies on the County Commission or those who deal with the government. Or, at the very least, people being investigated could accuse the mayor of such things — unnecessarily jeopardizing the inquiry process.

A real question we should be asking: Why wasn’t Gimenez’s law enacted sooner? The not-so-old system placed the anti-corruption unit under the jurisdiction of the police director, who in turn was controlled by the county manager whose political existence, back then, depended on how well he pleased the commission majority.

If nothing else, Gimenez’s code eliminates the appearance of impropriety and insulates corruption investigations conducted by Miami-Dade’s detectives from political meddling within the county.

It’s a good move. And Mayor Alvarez should realize that.