Miami police chief Manuel Orosa says he plans to discipline 36 Miami police officers who were named in a South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigation as being habitual speeders.
From the Sun-Sentinel's Sally Kestin: "The Sun Sentinel's investigative series, published in February, used SunPass toll records to determine how fast cops [from various South Florida police agencies] were driving and found almost 800 hit speeds above 90 mph in a 13-month period. Miami officers were among the worst speeders, driving up to 55 mph over the speed limit outside city limits."
Kestin reports:
Read the entire Sun-Sentinel story by clicking here.In the most sweeping crackdown on police speeding yet, Miami's top cop announced on Monday that he is taking action against 36 of his officers for driving off duty at speeds sometimes exceeding 100 mph.
Fausto Lopez
The first wave of disciplinary action includes South Florida's most notorious speeder in uniform, Officer Fausto Lopez. The six-year police veteran is being suspended for a month and will lose his take-home car for three months for leading a state trooper on a high-speed chase through Broward County in October.
Lopez's headline-generating traffic stop prompted a Sun Sentinel investigation that found widespread off-duty speeding by officers at a dozen South Florida departments. All began internal investigations.
"What the Sun Sentinel has done is a service to all police agencies because if they did not know they had a speeding problem, now they do," said Miami police Chief Manuel Orosa. "I, like most chiefs around, if you ask them everybody's going to tell you, 'We didn't know it was this bad.'"
The chief said he plans to fire one or more officers identified by the newspaper as habitual speeders and is equipping 40 police vehicles with GPS devices to make sure the worst offenders slow down. "The individuals that are in your report will be the first ones to get them," Orosa said.
[...]
Asked if Lopez will lose his job over the speeding, the police chief said, "Stay tuned."
I spotted this in the Miami Hurled this morning (which shares the Sun/Sentinel's local news reporting -- competition being so last decade ago). What struck me even more than the event reported on is the self-congratulatory tone of the article itself. It was all about how the S/S exposed this and got results, as though this is something rare and marvelous for a newspaper to achieve, as opposed to its basic mission. So sad on so many levels.
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