Miami City Commission candidate Ralph Rosado sounds 
like an incumbent on the most recent mailer that arrived in some Miami voters’ homes Wednesday.
“Let’s talk about crime and it’s prevention,” it says on the front.
“I have worked to guarantee that our police department can count on the sufficient number of police officers to keep us protected and also
prevent crimes before they are committed. That is why I spearheaded an initiative to hire 100 new officers,” it says on the back.
That may come as a surprise to the mayor and city commissioners.
“It’s a lie,” said Mayor Tomas Regalado.
“I know he is running and he wants to be elected but you can’t get into elected office through fraud. That’s an injustice to the voters,” Regalado said. “It’s also an insult to the administration and the commission who worked hard and had to make many hard decisions to get to this point,” the mayor told Ladra, adding that they are at more than 180 additional officers in the past two years.
Of course, Regalado is supporting another candidate in the District 4 race: Manolo Reyes, an economics teacher who used to work in the city’s and the Miami-Dade School Board’s budget offices. There are a couple of other candidates who have showed an intention to run for the seat vacated by Commissioner Francis Suarez‘s mayoral bid, but, so far anyway, this is really a contest between Rosado and Reyes, who is a perennial candidate — but at least he doesn’t jump from seat to seat (Rosado also ran for state rep) and exaggerate his laurels.
Because Rosado’s role in the police staffing increase was basically going to a budget hearing a couple of Septembers ago and urging the commission to hire more police officers. That’s it. He was the first of two speakers on that item. The second was pollster and radio show host (until last week) Fernand Amandi, whose home had been burglarized. It’s a little disingenuous then to send a mailer where he basically takes credit — “spearheading” the initiative and all.
“I am not a commissioner and I have no power over the police department. But heck yeah, I was there for 11 hours and I met with people for days prior and I did the research,” Rosado told Ladra.
“Can I say only because I spoke did it happen? I can’t say that,” he admitted. “But if nobody brought it up, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
Really? Well then, I say don’t run for office. Just go to every meeting and speak on the issues we need action on. Because, most likely, the new hires would have happened anyway. The shortage had reached a boiling point. And Amandi spoke, too. Maybe it was his words that moved Commissioner Marc Sarnoff to make the motion.
In his email, Rosado also said that he “implemented a program that uses crime data with the goal of trying to prevent crimes before they happen and concentrate police work in the most dangerous areas. We can make our neighborhoods safer and I, as your future City Commissioner, will work harder than anyone to guarantee that we do.”
And that’s at least a little more truthful. But not entirely.
What he did was bring the FIT Zone program used in East Palo Alto, California, to the attention of the city commission, complete with a Power Point presentation on July 14 last year. The program takes data from the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system put in place in 2014 and finds public spaces near hot spots — a time and area where there is consistently a flurry of firearm activity — to then program fitness activities, targetting at risk kids and the people in the surrounding homes. Miami’s pilot program is on Monday nights with a basketball league and other
activities at Overtown’s Reeves Park and it’s a huge success, Commissioner Suarez said.
“He did come up with the idea and the results have been incredible,” Suarez said. “He did discover it. He did study it, flying to Palo Alto to see how it worked there. And he convinced me to execute it here.”
So, why didn’t Rosado send a mail piece just on that? Why not be honest and include more details about the lives the program could be changing, which would be more powerful? Oh, wait, I know. Because Reeves Park is not in District 4. So it’s better to be vague. I would imagine that voters in District 4 who get this mailer could logically think the program benefits “our neighborhoods.” It doesn’t. And it won’t anytime soon. According to Commissioner Suarez, the next two hotspots under consideration for an expansion of the program are in Liberty City.
Kudos to Baby X because he represents the whole city and is not provincial. And kudos to Ralph for going out of his way to bring us FIT Zone.
But it doesn’t make it okay to exaggerate or misrepresent his role on campaign materials, which is what Rosado did with the two crime-fighting claims in this mailer. One’s an outright lie and the other is a half-truth.
Candidate Ralph Rosado exaggerates ‘his’ police initiatives added by Ladra on
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