The Orlando Police Department is out of control

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The Orlando Police Department is spinning out of control.

And the timing couldn’t be worse for OPD Chief John Mina who is seeking election to replace Jerry Demings as the next Orange County Sheriff. Demings, a former OPD chief, is leaving the Sheriff’s Office and seeking election as the next Orange County Mayor. Jerry Demings has endorsed Mina to become the next sheriff.

Mina either doesn’t know what’s going on within OPD, or he has been caught in flagrant lies regarding departmental operations and the behavior of officers.

During a press conference Thursday, Mina admitted that OPD is testing highly controversial high-tech facial-recognition cameras in downtown Orlando. This technology is designed to record and track the comings and goings and actions of individual people. The ACLU and other civil liberties groups object to the deployment of this technology that is being developed by Amazon.

A day earlier Mina insisted to reporters that the technology testing was limited to inside the walls of OPD headquarters on South Street.

After being confronted by reporters Mina admitted that the facial recognition software had been installed on cameras in downtown Orlando. During the press conference, he said he would tell reporters the locations of those cameras. Later Mina said due to security concerns he couldn’t disclose the camera locations.

Residents in downtown’s Parramore community have long been wary of the cameras that have been deployed in their neighborhood.

Earlier this month Mina told reporters that officers shot and killed an unarmed man at Colonial Plaza because the man tried to run over the cops with his van. A video shot by a bystander clearly showed that the officers were never in front of the van or in danger of being run over.


It turns out that even though body cameras have been distributed to all OPD patrol officers there is no police video of the shooting because the battery had run out in the camera worn by one officer. the other officer, who is a trainee, did not have a body camera. During a TV interview, Mina admitted that the camera batteries only last about 4 hours so they have to be replaced three times during an officer's 12-hour shift.

OPD officers charged two women in the van with felony murder for the death of the man killed by officers. The women had been accused of shoplifting several hundred dollars of merchandise from a store. Under the law, if someone does during a felony the others involved in that crime may be charged with felony murder.

Thursday the state attorney’s office dropped the felony murder charges.

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