“I’d be at lunch, and someone would say, ‘Miranda
will pick up the check. He’s making a half-million
bucks,’” said Miranda, who since October 2012 has
been acting police chief of Bell – a title awaiting
formal approval from a City Council still reeling
from the departure, under a cloud, of several city
officials.
In a recent chat with CalChiefsNews, Miranda,
46, in his 23rd year with the Bell PD, discussed
the challenges of moving beyond the scandal and
lessons learned at an agency still continuing on the
road to recovery.
“It was an extreme
challenge on multiple
levels,” said Miranda,
whose staff during this
same time period has
been reduced from 42
to 32 sworn officers.
During the nearly
yearlong investigation
into the scandal the
department had to
continue running its
daily operations and
I became the point
person for almost every
investigator who came to
town.”
This included
investigators from the
Los Angeles County
District Attorney’s Office,
the IRS, the FBI and the
Department of Justice
and PERS, among others. After the resignation of the
highly paid former chief, Miranda assumed the de
facto position of acting police chief as his position
as captain was the highest-rank in the department.
For Miranda, a family man who as a cop has always
prided himself on forging friendly and close ties
to members of the Bell community, it was a time
of stress and long hours. For weeks, his cell phone
would ring day and night.
“It was like a roller-coaster ride with no safety belt,”
he says.
Miranda said his solid ties to the community helped
him weather the storm.
16
|
Behind The Badge
Miranda said he never envisioned something like
this when at 23, married and working at a carpet
cleaning business in 1991, he met a Bell police
sergeant. The sergeant was moonlighting at the time
to make some extra money suggested he consider
police work.
corruption was limited to only the highest levels of
government, giving the officers and staff (including
Miranda) a clean bill of health. He was quoted
at one point saying that the BPD included a hard
working group of employees trying to do a difficult
job under very challenging circumstances.
He took the sergeant’s advice and joined the Bell
PD. Over the next seven years he found his niche in
narcotics investigations and drug interdiction and
community based policing while continuing his
education. He began advancing through the ranks,
spending seven years as
a sergeant, two years as
a lieutenant and six as a
captain before the storm
hit and he stepped in to
the lead role.
After a lengthy chief’s testing process Miranda was
once again handed the reins of the department in
October of 2012.
Miranda said that
throughout his career,
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