After 45 years in law enforcement, including 19 years with the University of Miami Police Department and almost 27 years with the City of Miami Police Department, Chief David Rivero is hanging up his uniform for the last time.
“The thing I’m going to miss the most is the people. I tell my cops every day to really make sure all of these kids who go to school here make it, because one of them might have the cure for cancer,” Rivero said, holding back tears.
Rivero is set to be replaced by Lieutenant Trevor Shinn after his retirement in April.
“David always wants to develop his team members,” Shinn said. “Whether it is an officer, a sergeant, or his command staff too.”
Rivero’s time at UM is marked by his personable approach to police work. He even includes his personal phone number on his business card, believing it helps foster a stronger connection with the campus community.
“I had a parent call me one day. He lived on the West Coast, and he goes, ‘Look, can you help my daughter? She lives in a dorm and her room is full of ants.’ And I said, ‘We’ll take care of that.’”
Rivero came to UMPD as a major from the City of Miami in 2006 with the goal of making campus safer.
“When I first started, we had over 300, sometimes 400 crimes a year, to now having 70 or 80 crimes a year,” Rivero said. “We’ve broken the record for the lowest crime year four times in the last six or seven years.”
He’s also responsible for coining UMPD with their name. When he first arrived, the police department was actually called the public safety department, “so it really didn’t have that ‘police’ image [he] was looking for.”
He advocated for use of the iconic ‘U’ logo, which was previously reserved for athletics, and was granted use by former president Donna E. Shalala. From there, Rivero helped the department rebrand, changing everything from its badges and logos to its cars and forms of communication.
Even though being a police officer makes up so much of his life now, it was not Rivero’s original plan. He graduated from Miami Beach High School and received a full scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis to play baseball and pursue a degree to become a doctor, which was his dream for years.
After a year of struggling through his chemistry class, he eventually gave up his scholarship and moved closer to home to continue his studies at Florida International University. While he was at FIU, his sister started dating a police officer at the Miami-Dade Police Department. Rivero joined his sister’s boyfriend for a ride-along, and immediately fell in love with it.
“That was it. In that one day we got into a chase, a bar fight and a shoot out. I came home and told my mom ‘I’m going to be a cop,’” he said.
“She didn’t talk to me for like six months.”
His mom quickly became his biggest supporter. She pinned his badge when he celebrated his promotions from sergeant to lieutenant, captain to commander and finally to major at the City of Miami Police Department.
When he began working in the 1980s, Miami was considered the murder capital of the world. Drugs, riots and corruption were rampant in the city. The fast-paced, adrenaline-filled days made him fall in love with being a cop, and he knew then he would never get tired of it.
“It never crossed my mind, being a cop. But once I got into it, it was an addiction. I couldn’t get enough of it,” Rivero said.
He considers the greatest case he has worked on to be Operation Greenpalm, a 1996 political corruption investigation into elected officials in the City of Miami. He spent 15 months investigating a $20 million bribe between Manohar Surana, the city budget director and a computer salesman with the FBI.
Rivero recalls that his team wore wires, hid cameras, broke into offices, disabled alarms and executed search warrants in the middle of the night for this investigation. They were able to successfully arrest the budget director, the city manager, a city commissioner, two lobbyists, a county commissioner and the seaport director through the investigation.
“The sad part was that everybody pled guilty to the crimes, so we never got to show all the work we did in a trial,” Rivero joked.
The decision to retire didn’t come easy for Rivero. It was a job he felt he could do forever. But the draw of spending time with his wife traveling and with his three grown children pushed him to transition the role to someone new.
“We’re in the fourth quarter, two-minute warning of our life, and we need to enjoy those last two minutes,” he said.
His advice for the new leadership of UMPD is to embrace change, particularly when it comes to technological and creative advancements.