Three rookie Miami police officers fired two days before Christmas joked in a group chat with other cops about using predominately black neighborhoods for target practice, an internal affairs investigation found this month.
“Anyone know of an indoor shooting range in Miami?” one officer asked.
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“Go to model city they have moving targets,” replied another.
“There’s a range in overtown on 1 and 11. Moving targets and they don’t charge,” added a third.
Officers Kevin Bergnes, Miguel Valdes and Bruce Alcin told an investigator that they were joking, or just commenting on what they’d seen in the city during their training and weren’t trying to offend anyone. Alcin himself is African American, and Valdes has a black grandfather.
Still, their off-the-cuff remarks about two of the city’s historically black communities upset colleagues and supervisors.
Miami’s police union president, however, says the officers should have been reprimanded but not fired, since their “messages were in poor taste, but weren’t in anyway racial.” Their attorney, Stephan Lopez, said the city has taken his clients’ remarks out of context and blown them out of proportion.
According to an internal affairs memo obtained by the Miami Herald, Bergnes, Valdes and Alcin were among a class of about 30 police officers who went through Miami’s police academy together last year and continued to communicate through a WhatsApp chat they called Post-22. For the most part, the young officers-in-training shared department info on the thread.
Some of the comments offended several officers in the chat. The next day, after speaking with a friendly sergeant, Officer Lawanda Lawson warned the trio that even though she didn’t think they were racist, their words were offensive.
