What should on paper be a win for activists has instead brought about a sense of deja-vu and the potential that the discussion was much ado about nothing.
The Miami-Dade County Commission passed an item Wednesday to reinstate the Independent Civilian Panel, which existed from 1980 through 2009, when the financial crisis cut funding for the panel. Calls to bring the panel back to life came amid widespread anti-police violence protests in South Florida following the police-invovled murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.
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The vote passed by a margin of 8-5, meaning Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez could still veto it in the coming days. That would put things right back at square one, with the county lacking an oversight panel.
In comments, Gimenez said some aspects of the legislation trouble him, leaving the door open for a veto. The prospect of the panel having the authority to issue subpoenas was a sticking point for the mayor.
“I am vehemently against the power to subpoena because it could be used for political purposes,” said Gimenez. “I really would like that to be struck from the legislation."
It was not.
The mayor said nothing would stop the panel from issuing subpoenas to sitting commissioners or a future mayor, legally forcing them to comply with an investigation. The panel would have to reach a majority vote to issue any subpoena.
A similar vote passed in 2018, but Gimenez vetoed the item.
“When I vetoed that it wasn’t because I was against the Civilian Investigative Panel, I was against how the panel was gonna be comprised,” he said in a recent press conference. “I wanted the commissioners to be able to name their own representatives.”
However, in the letter he wrote explaining the 2018 veto, Gimenez said he vetoed the panel because he was “not entirely convinced that there is a need” for an independent oversight panel in the first place.
Gimenez also wrote that subpoena powers in the 2018 version were “unnecessary” in his veto message.
Commissioner Barbara Jordan brought the item back up to vote after protests, and after a letter from Gimenez and Audrey Edmondson — chair of the county commission — urged her to do so. The letter was spurred by the demands of the protest movement that first swept the nation in May and June.
The version of the ordinance that passed included provisions allowing each county commissioner to name their own representatives, an explicit request from Gimenez.
Some commissioners questioned where the roughly $800,000 to fund the panel for its first year would come from. Commissioner Joe Martinez, a former police officer, questioned the cap of two appointed members of the panel being from the same profession.
He said limiting the number of police officers appointed to serve on the panel would be “arbitrary discriminatory” and could be ripe for a lawsuit. The cap on people from the same profession applies to all professions, theoretically blocking the panel from having three doctors or accountants as well.
The sharpest rebuke of the proposed panel came from Commissioner Esteban Bovo, who is running for county mayor. He said the very idea is “anti-cop” and that it “feeds into hyperliberal” versions of the nation that want the U.S. to “bend the knee.”
Speaking of the protests that pushed for bringing the panel back, he said they included many people who “hate democracy, hate capitalism and hate freedom.”
When Mayor Gimenez brought up the subpoena issue as his one area of concern with the legislation, Commissioner Jordan asked a county attorney to provide a list of other county panels and boards that have subpoena power.
The list of entities she listed went on for more than two minutes, ranging from the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission to the Board of Rules and Appeal and the Consumer Services Department.
“And yet we are so afraid of this board having subpoena power,” said Jordan. “Please stop doing the smoke and mirrors and be real with the people. You don’t want it. You don’t want it, period.”
GImenez responded and said that the he supported an early version of the bringing back the panel that Jordan submitted in 2016.
“I was happy to submit what you put before, and I wrote it in a letter and I’d be happy to do it again, but you changed it. That’s the problem,” said Gimenez.
“Every version I submitted had subpoena power. Every single one. The very first one to the last,” said Jordan.
