Seven Miami cops let go or demoted during purge by fired chief Acevedo to get jobs back
In a sweeping rebuke to a series of controversial moves by fired Police Chief Art Acevedo, Miami’s interim chief has rehired and re-instated seven of the department’s highest ranking officers, most of them to their former designations.
Among them were the agency’s highest-ranked married couple and a sergeant-at-arms who was a popular fixture at City Hall. Also returning to his post as major is the former head of Internal Affairs.
Interim chief Manny Morales confirmed the reinstatements but did not offer details on why he decided to overturn his predecessor, who was fired in October after a series of missteps and an escalating feud with powerful city commissioners.
“They are expected to return some time in the next few weeks,” was all Morales would say,
Little Havana Police Cmdr. Nerly Papier and her husband Ron Papier, the department’s former deputy chief will return as captains — ranks that will enable them to collect lower salaries than their previous pay and receive benefits. The couple’s agreement with the city is also expected to pay them retroactively to the day they were let go.
The Papiers were suspended in April and eventually fired after being accused of misrepresenting and not following the proper chain of command after an April 2 accident in which Nerly Papier crashed her city-issued SUV into a curb on the way to work. Though the Papiers didn’t publicly decry the findings, friends and co-workers weren’t shy about insisting the investigation was flawed.
Ron Papier addressed that briefly Wednesday.
“The evidence they used in the report to fire us was fabricated and full of lies,” Ron Papier said. “There was no just cause for our termination.”
Luis Camacho, suspended in June from his post as sergeant-at-arms at city hall for what Acevedo claimed was “a breach of operational security,” returned to his former post this week after an Internal Affairs investigation did not find any misconduct. The investigation found that Camacho had abandoned his post without proper notification, however, and he is still expected to be disciplined, perhaps with a letter of reprimand.
Also returning to the position of major is one of the department’s most senior Black females, Keandra Simmons, who was demoted to lieutenant by Acevedo. Jose Fernandez, a former major in Internal Affairs who was demoted to captain under the former chief, retained his previous rank.
Several of the demoted officers had indicated they intended to file lawsuits against the city. It wasn’t immediately clear if they agreed to stop pursuing that avenue after the promotions and rehires. Acevedo’s decision to fire and suspend the officers was in keeping with a pledge to reform the department and break up what he viewed as a stagnant power structure.
The Papiers were two of the department’s earliest casualties under Acevedo, a brash but nationally known chief touted as a reformer by Mayor Francis Suarez, who championed his hiring. Acevedo was meeting with Miami police for the first time when Nerly Papier ran into a curb and blew out two tires. During the session, Acevedo stressed accountability and offered a now infamous quote, “You lie, you die,” to staff.
It was the first in a series of suspensions and firings that would land Acevedo in hot water with city commissioners and eventually lead to his firing in October. During the tumultuous months-long quest by commissioners to get rid of Acevedo, he would even be abandoned by Suarez, who once referred to Acevedo as the “Michael Jordan” of police chiefs.
The Papiers — with a combined half-century in the department — were fired in June, Acevedo said, for not being truthful about the accident. Internal Affairs investigators determined Nerly Papier wasn’t completely forthcoming by not telling police there were pedestrians on the sidewalk when she hit the curb and that she blew through two red lights after the accident on her way to work.
Her husband was let go, Acevedo said, because he should have recused himself from the Internal Affairs investigation or informed the chief about a Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office investigation into the incident — a probe that found no criminal wrongdoing.
Camacho’s June suspension — though more curious than the firings of the Papiers, mostly because of the lack of information released by the police department — turned out to be much more contentious and ultimately contributed more to the former chief’s downfall in Miami.
Camacho, well received by the majority of Miami commissioners, was relieved of duty with pay at about the same time an arrest warrant was issued in the Florida Keys for former Miami Police Officer Frank Pichel, for impersonating a police officer.
Pichel was running against Suarez for mayor at the time and Camacho was part of the mayor’s security apparatus in the Keys.
Acevedo, in an eight-page memo that claimed city commissioners were interfering with police investigations, suggested the mayor’s security detail may have been responsible for leaking the mayor’s whereabouts. He wrote that the probe into Camacho was started because of a “breach of operational security involving the sergeant-at-arms detail, which is the detail tasked with providing executive protection to the mayor and city commissioners.”
The IA investigation into that claim later determined it wasn’t the case and that Camacho had only briefly stepped away from his post without informing anyone.
Commissioner Joe Carollo, an Acevedo critic, welcomed the news.
“All those people and others deserve to be put back to their previous ranks and positions,” the commissioner said.
This story was originally published January 12, 2022 at 11:45 AM.
