The Experiment That Changed Miami Policing (And What Happened When It Ended)

In 2003, John Timoney walked into one of the most troubled police departments in America. Eleven Miami officers were on trial that week for conspiring to cover up wrongdoing in civilian shootings. The department had a well-documented pattern of force incidents. The Justice Department was involved.

Timoney did something that sounds almost simple in hindsight. He looked at which officers kept showing up in use-of-force incidents, identified a core group with repeated patterns, and reassigned them to roles where they couldn’t cause harm. No lengthy disciplinary process. No public spectacle. Just a clear-eyed recognition that a small number of people were driving a disproportionate share of the problem.

The result: Miami went 21 months without a single officer-involved shooting. Arrests increased 30 percent and crime dropped 8 percent during the same stretch. Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, one of the most respected voices in American policing, called it remarkable.

Then Timoney left. His successor put those same officers back on the street. The shootings came back. The Justice Department returned.

That postscript is the part worth sitting with. The intervention worked. The evidence was clear. And the moment it stopped, the problem resumed exactly where it had been.

What Timoney did manually, by instinct and experience, is exactly the problem Benchmark Analytics® was built to solve systematically. Research across our multi-jurisdictional database consistently shows that roughly 5% of officers generate 66% of injuries and disproportionate use-of-force incidents. The pattern Timoney identified in Miami exists in departments everywhere. The difference today is that you don’t need a Timoney-level talent for pattern recognition to find it. The data finds it for you.

Every chief can be Timoney. The question is whether your tools make that possible.