I look forward to Sunday mornings when one of Derek Hunter’s bi-weekly columns is published.  This writer is intelligent, witty, sarcastic, and always has a common sense perspective on the senseless actions of idiots.

In yesterday’s column, When The Truth Would Do, Hunter wrote about the stupidity of a now former board member of the Colorado ALCU, who posted on Facebook about Trump supporters, “If you are voting for him I’ll have to shoot you before election day.”

Once Hunter saw the post, he took a screen shot.  Others did as well, one of them posting on Twitter, “No fan of Trump, but if you are threatening to shoot his fans … you’re doing it wrong.”

Loring Wirbel, the man who posted, and then deleted, his decidedly uncivil comment, at first tried to deny the post had ever existed.

Unfortunately for him, the internet is forever.

When the screen shots of his Facebook post were presented to him, he accused the three different people who snapped them, and who didn’t even know each other, of conspiracy, which was as equally ludicrous as Wirbel’s denial.

When Wirbel was finally backed into a corner and forced to resign from the ACLU board, he still defiantly claimed, “It was intended totally as a joke.  They are taking that stuff out of context.  It’s smear politics.”

In summary, Derek Hunter wrote:

As for taking him out of context, it was exactly what he’d written in full. It may well have been intended as a joke, and I doubt he ever intended to shoot anyone. The problem is he lied when he denied he’d written it. Once he admitted the truth, his fate was sealed.

You’d think a liberal would be familiar with the lesson of Nixon – that the cover-up is worse than the crime.

If he’d said it was a joke from the start, that sarcasm just doesn’t translate to Facebook posts, especially when read by people who don’t know his sense of humor, the story ends. But he chose to say he hadn’t written it, and now he is off the board of the Colorado ACLU as a result.

Not surprisingly, many people in positions of power have either forgotten, or never learned, the lesson of Nixon.

Take North Miami Police Chief Leonard Burgess, for example.

Ever since he was appointed as permanent chief in June of 2014, the police department has been rife with mismanagement, scandal, and worst of all, cover-ups.

Despite whatever Chief Lenny has said about me, my beef with him has never been personal.

He first caught my ire during the 2014 election in North Miami when I wondered why the North Miami Police Department gave mayoral candidate Kevin Burns a pass for driving his campaign fire truck without a valid license tag.  The Chief has been on my radar ever since.

Not too long afterward I learned about the problem child of the NMPD, Officer Jodlyn Antoine, whom Chief Lenny has refused to fire despite his long “rap sheet” with the Internal Affairs Division.

It only got worse from there.

The more examples of ineptitude I uncovered about Police Chief Leonard Burgess since then, the faster and more furiously he went into damage control mode.  He had various individuals contact me to spin the truth for him.  He tried to put the kibosh on my public records requests.  He flat out lied about his history of a sexual harassment accusation.  He punished employees in the police department whom he suspected of “leaking” information to me.

Aside from those petty antics, which were aimed at me personally, the bigger problem is the impact that Chief Lenny’s incompetence has on the public safety of the residents of North Miami.  While he’s busy fudging stats, playing flag football, handing out participation trophies to officers for showing up, and posing his Executive Command Staff for Facebook photo-ops, Rome is burning.

For one thing, his pet predator Jodlyn Antoine is still roaming the streets of North Miami, trolling for vulnerable women to harass, or worse.

ICYMI* (*In Case You Missed It), just last month the Miami Herald put the spotlight on a South Miami police officer, Lt. Jesus Aguiar, who has a similar history.  The article, Good cop/bad cop: the rapid rise of Lt. Aguiar, describes an officer who, like Antoine, also illegally accessed the police database to stalk a woman, find out where she lives, and show up at her house unannounced.  And, like Antoine, Aguiar received a token discipline.  Aguiar received “a two-day suspension, then allowed him to deduct it from vacation time. And he was barred from working outside the department for three months.”

As a consequence for a sexual harassment complaint filed by a co-worker, Lt. Aguiar was suspended for 20 days without pay, and was “required to take sexual harassment and sensitivity training.”

Aguiar also received a complaint for showing up at an ex-girlfriend’s workplace, where he handcuffed and pepper-sprayed her, and intimidated her boss while “wearing his police uniform and carrying a gun.”

He was also involved in several other incidents, including a bar fight, and was recently the subject of an internal affairs investigation regarding an skirmish at a restaurant.  That investigation was closed when the victim refused to testify.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

Like South Miami Lt. Jesus Aguiar, North Miami Police Officer Jodlyn Antoine also chooses his victims carefully.  Most of the women he’s harassed have either had their own brushes with the law and would rather stay in the shadows, or they’re simply afraid to file a complaint against a cop.

For months now I’ve been warning city officials that it was only a matter of time before there would be serious repercussions for Antoine’s repeat offender behavior.

Trust me.  It’s coming.  Wait for it.

In addition to the Antoine problem, no one has yet held Chief Lenny accountable for downplaying – or altogether hiding – North Miami’s soaring crime rate, random shootings, murders, and at least one armed home invasion.

That we know of.

No one has held the Chief accountable for fudging stats, playing politics, stifling public records, and just outright lying when caught red-handed.

Here’s the thing.

Due to the Chief’s epic failure as a leader, the reputation of the North Miami Police Department has sunk to a new low.  The morale among the rank and file is even worse than the agency’s notoriety.  As long as North Miami leaders allow Chief Leonard Burgess to run the city’s law enforcement agency, the entire department will continue to be run into the ground.

No amount of spin, no amount of cheerleading on the sidelines, no amount of assistance from a wannabe (and much despised) child lobbyist, will change the fact that the NMPD is in desperate need of new leadership.

For one thing, Good Ol’ Charlie Brown Kevin Burns is STILL driving his Little Red Fire Engine around North Miami with a city-issued temporary tag.

This city issued tag has been on Kevin’s truck since at least the summer of 2014.

No one knows how he got it.

More importantly, only Chief Lenny knows why Kevin has never been cited for an illegal license plate.

Even worse, no one at City Hall seems to give a crap.

As I’ve said before, even though he’s the CEO of the entire North Miami Police Department, Chief Lenny will never take responsibility for anything that goes wrong.  Anything at all.

Police Chief Leonard Burgess is one of those individuals who didn’t learn “the lesson of Nixon,” which is that the cover-up is always  worse than the crime.

The problem with a cover-up is that there’s always someone – like me – who’s willing to keep digging until she hits pay dirt.

Like the gun in the lobby incident, for example.

Oh, yeah.  About that.

Stay tuned…

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”