After 45 years in regulation enforcement, together with 19 years with the College of Miami Police Division and virtually 27 years with the Metropolis of Miami Police Division, Chief David Rivero is hanging up his uniform for the final time.
“The factor I’m going to overlook probably the most is the folks. I inform my cops day by day to essentially make certain all of those children who go to high school right here make it, as a result of one in all them may need the remedy for most cancers,” Rivero stated, holding again tears.
Rivero is about to get replaced by Lieutenant Trevor Shinn after his retirement in April.
“David at all times desires to develop his workforce members,” Shinn stated. “Whether or not it’s an officer, a sergeant, or his command employees too.”
Rivero’s time at UM is marked by his personable strategy to police work. He even consists of his private telephone quantity on his enterprise card, believing it helps foster a stronger reference to the campus group.
“I had a dad or mum name me someday. He lived on the West Coast, and he goes, ‘Look, are you able to assist my daughter? She lives in a dorm and her room is filled with ants.’ And I stated, ‘We’ll care for that.’”
Rivero got here to UMPD as a serious from the Metropolis of Miami in 2006 with the objective of creating campus safer.
“After I first began, we had over 300, generally 400 crimes a yr, to now having 70 or 80 crimes a yr,” Rivero stated. “We’ve damaged the report for the bottom crime yr 4 instances within the final six or seven years.”
He’s additionally accountable for coining UMPD with their title. When he first arrived, the police division was really known as the general public security division, “so it actually didn’t have that ‘police’ picture [he] was on the lookout for.”
He advocated to be used of the enduring ‘U’ brand, which was beforehand reserved for athletics, and was granted use by former president Donna E. Shalala. From there, Rivero helped the division rebrand, altering all the things from its badges and logos to its automobiles and types of communication.
Regardless that being a police officer makes up a lot of his life now, it was not Rivero’s unique plan. He graduated from Miami Seashore Excessive College and obtained a full scholarship from Washington College in St. Louis to play baseball and pursue a level to grow to be a physician, which was his dream for years.
After a yr of struggling via his chemistry class, he ultimately gave up his scholarship and moved nearer to dwelling to proceed his research at Florida Worldwide College. Whereas he was at FIU, his sister began courting a police officer on the Miami-Dade Police Division. Rivero joined his sister’s boyfriend for a ride-along, and instantly fell in love with it.
“That was it. In that someday we bought right into a chase, a bar combat and a shoot out. I got here dwelling and informed my mother ‘I’m going to be a cop,’” he stated.
“She didn’t discuss to me for like six months.”
His mother shortly turned his largest supporter. She pinned his badge when he celebrated his promotions from sergeant to lieutenant, captain to commander and at last to main on the Metropolis of Miami Police Division.
When he started working within the Nineteen Eighties, Miami was thought of the homicide capital of the world. Medicine, riots and corruption had been rampant within the metropolis. The fast-paced, adrenaline-filled days made him fall in love with being a cop, and he knew then he would by no means get uninterested in it.
“It by no means crossed my thoughts, being a cop. However as soon as I bought into it, it was an dependancy. I couldn’t get sufficient of it,” Rivero stated.
He considers the best case he has labored on to be Operation Greenpalm, a 1996 political corruption investigation into elected officers within the Metropolis of Miami. He spent 15 months investigating a $20 million bribe between Manohar Surana, town finances director and a pc salesman with the FBI.
Rivero recollects that his workforce wore wires, hid cameras, broke into workplaces, disabled alarms and executed search warrants in the midst of the night time for this investigation. They had been capable of efficiently arrest the finances director, town supervisor, a metropolis commissioner, two lobbyists, a county commissioner and the seaport director via the investigation.
“The unhappy half was that everyone pled responsible to the crimes, so we by no means bought to point out all of the work we did in a trial,” Rivero joked.
The choice to retire didn’t come straightforward for Rivero. It was a job he felt he might do endlessly. However the draw of spending time along with his spouse touring and along with his three grown youngsters pushed him to transition the position to somebody new.
“We’re within the fourth quarter, two-minute warning of our life, and we have to take pleasure in these final two minutes,” he stated.
His recommendation for the brand new management of UMPD is to embrace change, notably on the subject of technological and artistic developments.