Crime was down 3.6% in Coconut Grove last year. Ignore that number, Miami Police Commander Daniel Kerr told an audience last week. It doesn’t matter.
You’ve heard the news, right? Crime was down 3.6% in Coconut Grove last year.
Daniel Kerr, the Miami Police commander responsible for crime in Coconut Grove, has shared that statistic at least twice this month during community forums.
He also thinks it doesn’t matter.
“I don’t care that I’m down 3%,” Kerr told a small crowd gathered last week at City Hall for a public safety forum.
“That number is very relevant to the bosses, by the way, (but) it’s completely irrelevant to me,” Kerr added. “What’s relevant to me is, how do you feel?
“Do you feel safe in your home? When you come home at night and you walk up to your door, do you feel safe? The moment you don’t, I have to do better.”
Not surprisingly, Kerr didn’t dwell on statistics during last week’s meeting. He did share his philosophy about how best to fight crime, however, and his priorities.
About 20 people attended the Thursday evening session. For those who missed it, here are some insights into how Kerr thinks about his job, and police work in general.
Know Your Priorities
“Last year, we had 673 crimes. This year, we had 649 crimes. Is that a success? I don’t know. Maybe. What kind of crimes? We had three murders last year. That’s really, really high,” Kerr said. “We had a justifiable murder, we had one that was an immediate arrest, and we had one that is still outstanding.
“Those things consume me. I think about them all the time, because that’s an act of violence against somebody in the area that I am tasked with protecting. If somebody was killed, it has to be my obsession. That comes first.”
What he doesn’t obsess over: retail theft. Retail theft was up last year.
“To be honest with you, it’s not my highest priority, as much as I love Home Depot and CVS,” Kerr said. “I don’t know how much resources I want to exhaust there, in fighting that crime, as opposed to someone breaking into a car.”
“I’m not too concerned about that. I don’t wake up every day wondering am I up or down in crime. I wake up every day saying did someone get hurt last night.”
Don’t Look at Arrest Numbers
“If my officers are making arrests, I have failed and they have failed because there are seven or eight different steps before the arrest that we could have addressed” to resolve the situation, Kerr said.
“When I was a young cop, it was how many arrests did you make, how many tickets did you write, not what effect did you have on anybody, what crime did you prevent, how much outreach did you do. Those things are so, so important and they are very hard to quantify.”
“You know what’s easy to quantify? How many arrests you’ve made and how many tickets you wrote. So, it’s one of my bigger fights with my bosses – advocating for their (his officers) success by their lack of arrests.”
All Crime is Personal
“I can show you that crime is down, burglary of motor vehicles, one of the big ones that everybody is worried about, is really, really down. That means nothing to you if your car got broken into, right? You’re at 100% at your house.
“So, I never like coming in and resting on our laurels – look at how well we’ve done. You have to listen to the individual person. That’s the thing I’m trying to accomplish the most, to humanize the victim to my officer, and the flip side of that, I’m trying to humanize the officers to the citizens out there.”
Go Ahead: Harass a Police Officer
“If you live in the Grove and you don’t know who your beat officer is, they are not doing a good enough job,” Kerr said.
“So, if you ever see a cop slow rolling through (your neighborhood), harass them. Say hello. Because you talking to them is going to break that barrier down.”
Talk to Your Neighbors
“Probably our biggest asset in the Grove is the neighborhood, the fact that they (neighbors) talk to each other and communicate,” Kerr said. “Sometimes a little too much,” he quipped.
“It’s a really, really valuable crime prevention tool because we know what’s normal for our neighborhood,” he added. “You know when something is not right.”
“If a burglary happens in Coconut Grove, the whole neighborhood should freak out.”
When in Doubt, Make the Call
Those neighbors Kerr described, the ones who talk to each other…
“I want them to call the police and say, hey, I’ve got a guy looking really weird and wearing this, this and this. I would rather get 100 of those calls and it turns out to be nobody and not to be a crime, than to miss one.”
Miami Police Commander Daniel Kerr can be reached by phone at 305-929-3671, by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @KERR_MPD.