Video After The Jump
Report via Washington Post -- The officer listened to speeches vaunting his heroism, accepted a certificate naming him deputy of the month and posed for a group photo with city leaders before returning to the back of the Tamarac, Fla., commission chambers amid polite applause.
But one city official still had something he wanted to say.
“Joshua Gallardo, will you come down for a second?” asked Elberg Mike Gelin, a Tamarac city commissioner who goes by his middle name. “It’s good to see you again.”
As other elected officials stood by, frozen in disbelief, Gelin tore into the Broward County Sheriff’s Office deputy, interrupting the nonpartisan commission’s Wednesday morning meeting with what may go down as the most awkward 30 seconds in the South Florida city’s history.
“You probably don’t remember me, but you’re the police officer who falsely arrested me four years ago,” he told Gallardo, who nodded silently, still clutching his award. “You lied on the police report. I believe you’re a rogue police officer, you’re a bad police officer and you don’t deserve to be here.”
The room went silent. Gallardo gave the commissioner a thumbs up and walked away, as Tamarac Mayor Michelle J. Gomez took back the microphone and reminded everyone present that the city appreciated the work of the sheriff’s office.
The tense exchange, which in recent days has led to an outpouring of support for the commissioner but also left him facing potential censure and the loss of a crucial police union endorsement, stemmed from an incident that took place in July 2015. At the time, Gelin did not hold elected office.
As Gelin tells it, he was at a Starbucks in Tamarac, a suburban community roughly 15 miles from Fort Lauderdale, when he noticed that two homeless men were fighting outside and tried to intervene. Three officers showed up, he told local blog Tamarac Talk, and Gallardo was among them.
“For some reason, he came over to me, told me to stop recording with my phone,” Gelin told the site. “I asked him why I needed to stop recording, and he gave me an answer, and then he told me that I needed to back up.”
By then, a crowd of bystanders had gathered, and Gelin, who is black, asked the deputy why he was the only one being asked to move. At that point, he said, Gallardo placed him under arrest. He told Tamarac Talk that the experience was traumatizing.
“I was disrespected, humiliated, embarrassed and spent nine hours in jail,” he said. “I spent a significant amount of time and money finding a good attorney and dealing with the court system.”
In the arrest report, Gallardo described the confrontation differently. Gelin approached him from behind, he wrote, and repeatedly ignored commands to move away from the crime scene. “He advised he was recording the incident and that he did not have to move,” the deputy wrote, adding that he told Gelin he would need to stand behind some nearby bushes “to provide space for when rescue comes.”
Court records show that Gelin was jailed for resisting an officer without violence, but prosecutors declined to press charges. A memo obtained by CBS Miami said that the state attorney’s office reviewed the footage from Gelin’s cellphone and concluded that “a strong likelihood of conviction is not present as images in the video do not support conviction.”
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