Joe Carollo has had his moments with the Miami Police Department, going all the way back to when he was a police cadet, or whatever he was doing in the department back then, and was alleged to have circulated a racist KKK flyer.

Once he got into politics, his run-in's with the police became political fights with various police chiefs over the years, including the time he  was mayor and basically forced his police chief at the time to resign over the actions he took when the feds showed up to take Elian from his Miami relatives.

When Carollo isn't accusing police chiefs of being incompetent or whatever else he dislikes about them, he's railing about individual police officers, like he did in February of this year when he went off on an extended rant about the treatment that he alleged he and his wife received at the hands of separate Miami police officers who he claimed had stopped both of them for traffic ticket violations in Little Havana.

In Carollo's mind these stops were nothing more than part of a larger conspiracy to set them up so that at some point in the future they would be stopped again, and this time carted off to jail.

You just can't make stupid, crazy shit up with Carollo that is crazier than what he makes up on his own.

If you're looking for something to waste time, you can do worse than watch the video of Carollo's going off during the commission meeting, and then the actual videos of both police stops involving him and his wife.

Copyrighted:  2011,2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Since February, when Carollo had this paranoid fit over being stopped, he's had an almost miraculous tranformation. He's become calmer, or at least quieter, which if you believe his third wife Ana Alliegro's allegation that he's bipolar might be because the medicine he takes for his bipolar condition has been changed and has leveled him out.

Then again, it might be because Alex Diaz de la Portilla through a little financial zippy-do-da managed to deliver on one of the parts of the deal he made with Boy-Toy Mayor Francis Suarez, which was to tame Carollo down and get him off his back.

Carollo responds to money, which he's always in need of, and so Diaz de la Portilla arranged for Carollo to cash in on a little side deal. It's chump change, but it's better than no change, and it's a story that I will be writing about very soon.

The important thing for those looking at all of this from the outside is  that ever since Francis Suarez decided that he would rather be a full-time, talking-head mayor on cable TV rather than roll your sleeves up mayor tackling some really hard issues that are coming down the road by allowing Diaz de la Portilla and his hand picked city manager Art "I like to do deals behind closed doors" Noriega to run the city how they see fit, Carollo has backed off all the issues that he spent months plotting and scheming over including wanting to change the mayor's salary, limit him from taking outside employment, and most importantly, accounting for the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that the 24 hour police protection he receives is costing the taxpayers.

All of those issues have been forgotten, as well as Carollo's occasional concern over the way money gets spent by the administration.

In return, this time of peace among the commissioners has allowed a lot of deals to be done behind closed doors because the "emergency powers" that the COVID virus has given to public officials the opportunity to side-step and/or bypass regular procedures.

So while Carollo has been tamed, he's still Carollo, and he requires the occasional opportunity to pose and posture for his political base - especially since he continues to lose the court battles over the Recall effort to remove him from office - so at the July 9th commission meeting he introduced two pocket items to let people know that he hasn't gone completely senile.

The first one was a resolution declaring July 12th thru July 18th, Miami Police Department Appreciation Week, which given his past behavior, and especially his anti-police rant in February could be evidence that either his medication has been changed, or that someone is spiking his Cuban coffee with tranquilizers.

I think that it's a pretty safe bet that none of you who read this - with the exception of folks inside City Hall knew that July 12th thru 18th had been declared Miami Police Department Appreciation Week, because even though it was unanimously approved by the commission, there wasn't a Proclamation issued, the Mayor didn't go out of his way to mention it as part of any of his TV appearances, nor does it seem that there were any official press notifications from the Communications Department to let the public know about this.

In fact, even the Chief of Police didn't cite it when he talked about the public showing appreciation for his officers on July 13th.

Here is the video that the Chief put out on Twitter on July 13th.

The second resolution was more in line with Carollo's so-called law and order attitude, and it was a declaration of, "Zero Tolerance On Any Type Of Vandalism Or Destruction Of City of Miami ("City") Property Or Private Property..." along with doing everything possible to arrest, prosecute and criminally punish anyone who does destroys property.

The behavior of protesters has always been a thorny one in this country because while the protests that led to the creation of our country resulted in the American Revolution, we want to ignore that today, and in the process to also ignore the fact that people who are forced for whatever reason to come into the streets to seek a redress of their grievances are by that point not overly interested in having their oppressors dictate the terms and conditions of how they can express their anger and frustration, as evidenced by how politicians and police departments continue to be quick to demand that the citizens who are upset, angry and/or fed up with the treatment that they've received at their hands - including the questionable murder and beating of hundreds, if not thousands of young Black and Brown men and women over the last few decades - must always behave with decorum and accept their guidelines and parameters on how they can protest.

There comes a point when people, who are titred of being fucked over also get tired of being told how to protest and how to express their anger, especially when as we are seeing so clearly today the people demanding that protesters behave are the same ones who are sanctioning and committing the kind of violence. shown in this video.

By the time these pocket items were introduced, most, if not all of the citizens watching had called it a day, and so the charade of putting off a vote while allowing another agenda item to be considered so as to allow for some time for public comment on this pocket item was really just another rope-a-dope move, that met the letter, but not the spirit of the law.

The resolution passed without any comments from either the public or any of the commissioners, and if you're keeping track of these kinds of things, after all the street protests, all the breast beating and promises by the Mayor and the City Commissioners and the Chief of Police about doing more than just pretending to listen to the concerns of all the people who have expressed outrage at the behavior of the police in the City of Miami, and all of the other issues about racism, inequality, and a general screwing of the residents by the politicians, the only piece of legislation that has been introduced and passed by the city commission is this pocket item that instructs the Chief of Police to go out and arrest any and everyone involved in the least form of vandalism and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the laws.

This was a, FUCK YOU PROTESTERS, Miami, Bitches! moment, hand delivered by a lying, crooked, psychopathic thug named Joe Carollo!

Here's a copy of his pocket item.

Invoking Hitler into comparisons about what goes on in this country aren't necessarily helpful to creating a better understanding of the issues, but it is what it is and the last couple months have produced many, many gruesome and horrific videos and photos of a kind of official violence not witnessed before in this country.  

While Miami has been spared many of those kinds of violent confrontations, we have had our share and the fact of the matter is that while the numbers of local protesters has shrunk significantly, I have in recent days spoken to several folks with first hand knowledge of what is happening on Miami's streets who have informed me that even though there are less than a hundred or so regular protesters showing up there now seems to be a concerted effort on the part of the Miami Police Department to ratchet up the pressure on those few diehards to arrest them at every opportunity as a way to stifle any remaining protests in Miami.

When it comes to Carollo however, nothing seems to have affected him so strongly as the can of red paint poured over the head of the statute of Christopher Columbus.

The statute stands outside the entrance to his office at the Bayfront Park Management Trust where he is chairman, and so instead of introducing a resolution in the normal way, he chose to sneak in a pocket item that no one in the public would know about or have an opportunity to read or provide intelligent comment on until it was introduced late in the meeting.

The use of pocket items to get around the right of the public to know or understand what the city commission is up to has become a real problem not only become the practice has become so regular, but because some of the items are really nasty, underhanded efforts to circumvent both the law and conventions of how the city has done business in the past.

In this case, after the items were introduced, the commission went on to deal with the appointment of citizens to the Civil Service Board where another Carollo scheme was revealed when he nominated Mary Lugo, his partner in crime back in 2018 when they were driving around Little Havana at night looking for dirt on Bill Fuller.

As usual, when asked to provide a background on Lugo, he described her almost 30 years career as a city employee without revealing any of her activities lurking around parking lots at midnight or driving around with Carollo, or that he had nominated her twice to be on his Bayfront Park Management Trust Board.  

Being the lap poodles that they are, his fellow commission members, who all know about Lugo's history with Carollo  - she was even for a time one of the defendants in Fuller's federal case against Carollo - voted her on to the Civil Service Board because if there's one more indiginity and abuse that the city's employees need at this time is having Mary Lugo sit in judgment on their cases.

Anyhow, once that dog and pony show ended, they got back to voting on Carollo's pocket items, and you will see Commissioner "Sellout" Russell, in another of his "never mind" moments indicated when the item was first introduced that he wanted to discuss the Zero Tolerance item when it came up for discussion, and then when it did come up, he pretended to be lost in deep concentration as he looks for some missing documents.

TRo her credit, Grace Solares spotted this behavior early on with this set of commissioners and in 2018 wrote the following email to the commissioners calling them out for this practice.

Grace's comments made no difference, and the thing to pay attention to, not only on these items, but on just about every pocket item that gets introduced is that no one in the public gets any real indication of what the actual language in any of these resolutions is because all that gets mentioned is a brief description of the title of the item.

https://www.crespogramnews.com/july-24th---carollo-pocket-items-come-to-light.html