The City of Miami has introduced Houston’s former Chief of Police Art Acevedo as Miami’s new Chief of Police.
“Our manager, with the help of a commission and with my intervention, brought to Miami the best Chief in America,” said City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez.
“There’s a lot of pain in this nation, and unless we take the time to feel that pain, to process that pain, acknowledge that pain of communities of color that disproportionately impacted by bad policing, we will never get beyond the summer of 2020,” Acevedo said.
Acevedo served as Houston’s Chief of Police for four and a half years, and is a proponent of community policing. Calling it relation policing, it forges a relationship with each person a department member comes in contact with.
“Every contact we make may be our first and only contact with a member of this community, and it is the beginning of a relationship,” he said, “so I expect the men and women of the Miami Police Department to conduct themselves in a manner where they make a friend and not a foe.”
Acevedo takes office in four to eight weeks.
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