Opa Locka
Calvin Godfrey writes:
January, 2013
Welcome to Opa-Locka!
I spent about three months hanging out in the town and writing about it back when I was 23 years old.
I rode around wearing a bulletproof with Officer Pedro Rojas—a man who seemed trapped in the Opa Locka Police Department by a number of major mistakes, including a failed attempt to impersonate his father, Deputy Pedro Rojas Sr. during his mandatory fitness test at the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Department.
Despite the bleakness of his professional future, Rojas was funny and eager for exposure. I clearly suffered from what Rolling Stone Editor Matt Taibbi called “access drift’ – when you really, really love the drama of the story you're hearing [and] you start leaning in the direction of your sources even if the truth doesn't quite cooperate.”
I still stand by much of what I said in this story, which was published in the Miami New Times on [DATE?]. But there is much that I did not say.
I did not mention the breakfasts Rojas had, every morning, with his closest friend on the force: Officer German Bosque a man that reporters as far away as London have dubbed the “worst cop in America.”
Bosque’s personnel file contains a mountain of complaints and disciplinary actions for crimes and
infractions that included, among so many things, brutalizing suspects in handcuffs.
Last October, Bosque was fired for the sixth time—in this case, for giving his body armor and department-issued AR-15 to his girlfriend’s dad.
Bosque’s first short-lived termination (which Rojas went down for as well) came about after the pair called in sick together to take a trip to Cancun.
They were both re-hired and have been tight ever since.
Naturally, I was shocked when Rojas landed a job in a small, safe municipality known as South Miami. From that point on, I was left to ride along with Bosque—an awful character, even on his best behavior.
At one point, after spending an afternoon of writing out traffic tickets for him (“Just fill in all the boxes,” he’d say after tossing me a license and registration) Bosque told me he believed that everyone in the city of Opa Locka was using drugs. To illustrate his point, he pushed a mentally challenged pedestrian up against a chain link fence and went through his pockets.
Bosque produced a charred wad of steel wool (crack paraphernalia, he said) and then sent the man on his way.
I spent two months riding around with arguably the most corrupt and incompetent police in the United States and that fact is hardly reflected in the story
you’re about to read because it didn’t fit within the drama that I’d fallen in love with.
As a white rich kid, my only insights into a place like Opa Locka had come from rap videos and the early episodes of The Wire, in which a bunch of earnest police officers do their best to dismantle a drug syndicate in spite of the shortsightedness of their higher-ups.
I wanted to tell a similar story about the Opa Locka Police Department—framed as an underfunded, outmanned frontier force, struggling to clean up the mean streets.
But the reality of what was going on in Opa Locka was quite different.
During my time touring the infamous Back Blue apartment complex, I was placed in the care of an officer Balom, who recently pleaded guilty to federal charges of selling bulletproof vests and information to the violent drug gang that operated the federally funded complex as a kind of fortress from which to sell crack.
I would later expose Chief James Wright (written about in the pages to follow as a kind of tough new sheriff) as a Napoleonic pervert—a man whose bizarre sexual ego compelled him to bully and harass seemingly all of his female subordinates, including those who had been given plum jobs in his department by relatives in city hall.
At the time, I felt it would be cheap to expose the failures of the people who had become trapped in the worst law enforcement job in the country. I didn’t really consider how much worse it would be to be a person trapped under their authority.
I didn’t understand the longer narrative of the Wire, which illustrates how the War on Drugs destroys both the lives of the people prosecuting it and the communities it purports to serve and protect.
In these places, the proverbial American dream seems almost as darkly absurd as the notion of an Arab-themed American ghetto.
The United States is in love with the notion that tough cops can “clean up” “bad neighborhoods”—that the whole country can simply go to war with abstract concepts and, against all evidence, make the world a better place through violence.
Opa Locka is enduring proof that it cannot.
--Calvin Godfrey
calvintgodfrey@gmail.com
Ho Chi Minh City
Read MoreJanuary, 2013
Welcome to Opa-Locka!
I spent about three months hanging out in the town and writing about it back when I was 23 years old.
I rode around wearing a bulletproof with Officer Pedro Rojas—a man who seemed trapped in the Opa Locka Police Department by a number of major mistakes, including a failed attempt to impersonate his father, Deputy Pedro Rojas Sr. during his mandatory fitness test at the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Department.
Despite the bleakness of his professional future, Rojas was funny and eager for exposure. I clearly suffered from what Rolling Stone Editor Matt Taibbi called “access drift’ – when you really, really love the drama of the story you're hearing [and] you start leaning in the direction of your sources even if the truth doesn't quite cooperate.”
I still stand by much of what I said in this story, which was published in the Miami New Times on [DATE?]. But there is much that I did not say.
I did not mention the breakfasts Rojas had, every morning, with his closest friend on the force: Officer German Bosque a man that reporters as far away as London have dubbed the “worst cop in America.”
Bosque’s personnel file contains a mountain of complaints and disciplinary actions for crimes and
infractions that included, among so many things, brutalizing suspects in handcuffs.
Last October, Bosque was fired for the sixth time—in this case, for giving his body armor and department-issued AR-15 to his girlfriend’s dad.
Bosque’s first short-lived termination (which Rojas went down for as well) came about after the pair called in sick together to take a trip to Cancun.
They were both re-hired and have been tight ever since.
Naturally, I was shocked when Rojas landed a job in a small, safe municipality known as South Miami. From that point on, I was left to ride along with Bosque—an awful character, even on his best behavior.
At one point, after spending an afternoon of writing out traffic tickets for him (“Just fill in all the boxes,” he’d say after tossing me a license and registration) Bosque told me he believed that everyone in the city of Opa Locka was using drugs. To illustrate his point, he pushed a mentally challenged pedestrian up against a chain link fence and went through his pockets.
Bosque produced a charred wad of steel wool (crack paraphernalia, he said) and then sent the man on his way.
I spent two months riding around with arguably the most corrupt and incompetent police in the United States and that fact is hardly reflected in the story
you’re about to read because it didn’t fit within the drama that I’d fallen in love with.
As a white rich kid, my only insights into a place like Opa Locka had come from rap videos and the early episodes of The Wire, in which a bunch of earnest police officers do their best to dismantle a drug syndicate in spite of the shortsightedness of their higher-ups.
I wanted to tell a similar story about the Opa Locka Police Department—framed as an underfunded, outmanned frontier force, struggling to clean up the mean streets.
But the reality of what was going on in Opa Locka was quite different.
During my time touring the infamous Back Blue apartment complex, I was placed in the care of an officer Balom, who recently pleaded guilty to federal charges of selling bulletproof vests and information to the violent drug gang that operated the federally funded complex as a kind of fortress from which to sell crack.
I would later expose Chief James Wright (written about in the pages to follow as a kind of tough new sheriff) as a Napoleonic pervert—a man whose bizarre sexual ego compelled him to bully and harass seemingly all of his female subordinates, including those who had been given plum jobs in his department by relatives in city hall.
At the time, I felt it would be cheap to expose the failures of the people who had become trapped in the worst law enforcement job in the country. I didn’t really consider how much worse it would be to be a person trapped under their authority.
I didn’t understand the longer narrative of the Wire, which illustrates how the War on Drugs destroys both the lives of the people prosecuting it and the communities it purports to serve and protect.
In these places, the proverbial American dream seems almost as darkly absurd as the notion of an Arab-themed American ghetto.
The United States is in love with the notion that tough cops can “clean up” “bad neighborhoods”—that the whole country can simply go to war with abstract concepts and, against all evidence, make the world a better place through violence.
Opa Locka is enduring proof that it cannot.
--Calvin Godfrey
calvintgodfrey@gmail.com
Ho Chi Minh City
