Gables police shake up makes new manager top cop

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Coral Gables City Manager Cathy Swanson-Rivenbark is about to announce a restructuring of the city’s police department in a move that makes her longtime confidant and brand new assistant city manager the top cop.

Frank Fernandez, a retired Miami Police officer who Swanson tapped as her chief and public safety director in Hollywood, followed Swanson’s southbound migration and joined her administration in May. He is technically still an assistant city manager and director of public safety, which oversees not only the police department, but also the fire department and the department of emergency management.

But there won’t be a police chief to report to him. Instead, there will be two — which really means two No. 2 guys.

Interim Police Chief Ed Hudak will be joined by Major Raul Pedroso as co-chiefs of Operations and Criminal Investigations, respectively in what looks like a carbon copy of what Fernandez did in Hollywood. They will each report to Fernandez, who de facto becomes the police chief in the City Beautiful.

In fact, he’s already the contact on the FDLE website directory, where mostly chiefs are listed. Even interim chiefs.

It’s exactly what police officers in the rank and file were afraid of. And it is exactly what the city manager told them she wouldn’t do.

“She lied to us,” said one police officer about Swanson’s visit to the roll calls when it was first leaked that Fernandez would be hired as an assistant manager in charge of public safety. He said she told everybody that Fernandez would be working on major projects — the video cameras program, the building of a new public safety building since the main police and fire department is on the verge of collapse — but not on day to day operations.

Swanson said she didn’t lie, that Fernandez is still taking on the big matters and that operations and investigations will be run by veteran cops. She said the situation in Hollywood was different because the existing police chief resigned and Fernandez took over. “But it was not my original intention to have him as chief,” she said.

In this case, it looks like it was entirely her intention. And she doesn’t have to wait for the chief to resign because Hudak has only been serving as interim chief and, according to inside police sources, crime has decreased about 20 percent since then.

Fernandez is not all bad. When he was hired as police chief, he said he would reform the department. He immediately hired an outside, independent consultant to assess operations. The findings were an embarrassing for the department:  Dozens of forgotten rape kits, $170,000 missing from evidence and signs that officers either under reported use of force incidents or lied about them.

Fernandez quickly drew the ire of red-faced police union leaders. But the electeds and the residents loved him.

Cops outside Coral Gables and Hollywood are also wary of him and raise their eyebrows at his name. He was a Miami Police SWAT lieutenant when he was plucked by then Chief John Timoney to be a deputy chief. Both received a vote of no confidence by the police union members. And he retired just as Timoney was unceremoniously forced out.

Hudak, on the other hand, is a cop’s cop. Most of the rank and file support him and law enforcement officers even outside the city department have a

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  Cathy Swanson-Rivenbark, Coral Gables, Ed Hudak, Frank Fernandez, Frank Quesada