Vice, October 29, 2018: These dirty cops framed random black people to pad crime stats
Guillermo Ravelo stepped up to the podium in a Miami federal courtroom last week and did something rare: He admitted to being a dirty cop.The 37-year-old said he made false arrests and pinned unsolved crimes on innocent individuals while on patrol in nearby Biscayne Park.
Ravelo’s mea culpa capped off a week in which two other former Biscayne Park cops, Charlie Dayoub and Raul Fernandez, were also sent to prison for their roles in an egregious police misconduct case that reached the tippy-top of the local police department. Both men pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights for falsely arresting a 16-year-old boy for a series of unsolved burglaries in 2013.
The three officers, who agreed to cooperate with the feds as part of their plea deals, were under marching orders from Raimundo Atesiano. Among other things, Atesiano instructed cops to falsely arrest individuals for burglaries in the village, and, in at least one case, provided Ravelo with specific falsehoods to put in a report used as the basis to make an arrest, according to court documents and federal prosecutor Harry Wallace.
Atesiano and his boys in blue were just the latest crew of corrupt cops to get put on blast in America. Early this year, an elite street unit of the Baltimore Police was exposed for carrying toy guns to plant on suspects and targeting drug dealers so as to rob and resell their weight. Several task force members pleaded guilty and testified against two other former colleagues who were found guilty at trial.
What made the Biscayne Park case particularly galling is that the cops seemed to settle on a concerted, top-down strategy of selecting random people of color to pin unsolved crimes on.
According to Atesiano’s indictment, he manufactured an artificial clearance rate of 100 percent for burglaries because he was motivated by a desire to “gain favor” from Biscayne Park’s elected officials and residents. He was accused of directly participating in the framing of three individuals, including the 16-year-old boy, for burglaries they did not commit between 2013 and 2014. All of them were black.
In another case that was part of Ravelo’s guilty plea, Atesiano ordered him to frame a black man identified as “EB” who was in their custody on an unrelated charge. In court documents, Ravelo said Atesiano instructed him to falsely arrest and charge EB with five unsolved vehicle burglaries.
Jackie Azis, staff attorney for the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued the modern criminal justice system continues to makes it easy for corrupt law-enforcement officials to set people up. “Unfortunately, a lot of times these actions go unnoticed,” she said. “Because the way the criminal justice works, people claiming innocence still plead guilty and it may never come out that they were framed in this way.”
Still, even Azis said she was taken aback by the actions of the Biscayne Park cops. She said,“What happened here is so horrific, it strikes at the core of injustice.”
