The story of Miami Police Captain Javier Ortiz shows why it’s so hard for big cities to get rid of their most troublesome cops
that, “many people are afraid to say that the police officers involved in the Stirling [sic] shooting were MORE THAN JUSTIFIED.”
The complaints of his own colleagues, however, proved harder to brush off, especially after he gave up his city union perch in 2017. That year, Ortiz became one of the department’s five captains and voluntarily stepped down as president of the Miami lodge, although he continued to serve as the national FOP’s South Florida regional representative.
Robert Buschel, an FOP lawyer who once represented Ortiz, called the investigation into Ortiz “a political hit job. They looked at all these old, unsubstantiated allegations and still found nothing. But they slow-walked it to drag it on as long as possible. This was a systemwide effort — Miami-Dade state attorney, FDLE, FBI — and there was nothing. He got the colonoscopy and the endoscopy at the same time and they couldn’t find anything.
Palacio says Ortiz stands up for “officers day in and day out wearing bulletproof vests in 95-degree weather trying to stop the wolves from getting to the sheep … Sometimes you feel, especially in the course of the past couple of years, you feel alone. You don’t feel like you have backup.”fight pediatric cancerBut one national FOP official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Ortiz, offered a different opinion.
As an extreme example of the pitfalls of arbitration, Colina points to the time he fired an officer who refused to cooperate in the investigation of a murder in which he might have been involved before joining the force. An arbitrator gave the officer his job back. Colina thenIn another case, two officers accused of falsifying police reports were. One arbitrator gave one cop his job back; another arbitrator let the firing against the other officer stand.
“I am being retaliated against because of my position in the FOP. This is a form of union busting and it effects [sic] my terms and conditions of employment for executing union business,” Ortiz wrote in an evaluation form in 2014.
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