A former Florida police chief will serve a three-year jail sentence for a ministry plot to inculcate blacks for crimes they did not commit.

A federal judge in Miami on Tuesday sentenced former 53-year-old Biscayne Park chief Raimundo Atesiano, who pleaded guilty to ordering police officers. False arrest of blacks for unresolved burglaries.

Three former officers also pleaded guilty in this case, focusing on Atesiano's efforts to improve the department's crime resolution rate. The village of Miami-Dade County has 3,000 inhabitants.

The three arrests without legal basis encouraged by Atesiano created a 100% release rate for home and vehicle burglaries.

"Putting a statistic on arrests over the rights of an innocent man instead of protecting all of our citizens undermines the security objectives of every Miami-Dade police department," said prosecutor Katherine Fernandez Rundle. in a press release. "The people of Miami-Dade deserve honesty and integrity, qualities that Raimundo Atesiano has deliberately not respected."

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Atesiano incurs a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment for conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights. His lawyer said the victims were not chosen at random, but that the police knew them to have a criminal record.

Charlie Dayoub and Raul Fernandez, two former officers, were each sentenced to one year in prison for falsely arresting a 16-year-old miner for four burglaries. The third, Guillermo Ravelo, will serve 27 months for two separate incidents: arresting falsely an individual with two residential burglaries and another with five vehicle thefts, both without probable cause.

"When I took the job, I was not prepared," Atesiano told a federal judge on Tuesday, the Miami Herald reported. "I made very, very bad decisions."

Contribute: The Associated Press

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