Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle, on the stump for re-election this fall, addressed the June meeting of the Pinecrest Business Association and promptly noted that statistics indicated a sharp drop in major crime during her administration.

Katherine Fernandez-Rundle

Fernandez-Rundle, a Pinecrest resident, received a long round of applause from the Anacapri Restaurant gathering when she noted that Miami-Dade is no longer the 'crime capital' of the nation.

"In 1992, we were the crime capital, not only of the country, but of the whole world," she said. "The key priority was to focus on reducing violent crime in this community and we have. We have done a tremendous job of working together with the 32 police departments in Miami-Dade County and the end result is that now we are not even on the list of crime capitals throughout the country; we're not even on the chart anymore."

Fernandez-Rundle noted that in the late 1980s the county was averaging 680 to 700 murders a year.
"We were down to 200 last year," she said.

She told the business group that robbery statistics declined by 46 per cent from where they were eight years ago and that her office had been successful in helping to put a stop to the troublesome rash of tourist robberies in the last decade that blunted Miami-Dade's tourist industry growth.

Of the 10-million visitors that came to Miami-Dade County last year, she said, the county recorded only 18 reported tourist crimes. Thus, she said her office had been able to shift its resources to other areas.

"What that means is that we took a lot of those resources - such as homicide detectives - and we moved them into public corruption," she said. "I then took my public corruption unit and increased it by more than 100 percent with prosecutors that are working hand in hand with our task force on public corruption. And, in the last two years alone we have investigated, arrested, prosecuted and convicted 164 public officials."

The state attorney also told the business people that she had changed her office's policy regarding bad checks. She said worthless check charges could be filed regardless of the amount, whereas the state attorney previously would not accept worthless check cases under $500.

Fernandez-Rundle said her office had formed a partnership with a business group to assist in resolving worthless check cases.