A Grand Theft Auto marketing deal with Miami-Dade has a real-life foe: the sheriff

Is the fictional murder and mayhem of ‘Vice City’ worth real-life marketing dollars for a cash-strapped Miami-Dade County? Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz says no.

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The elected Republican is opposing a potential marketing deal under consideration by the county’s Democratic mayor that would have the maker of the Grand Theft Auto VI video game pay Miami-Dade to transform public places into real-life homages to the game’s digital homebase of Vice City — a stand-in for Miami.

“Grand Theft Auto is a video game franchise built around criminal activity,” Cordero-Stutz said in a statement. “Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office work every single day to prevent.”

In a county marketing proposal first reported by the Miamian news site last week, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s staff floated multiple marketing possibilities for Rockstar Games, the maker of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) to consider ahead of its fall debut of the highly anticipated refresh of the game.

Those included Miami International Airport passengers seeing “Welcome to Vice City” messages when disembarking their planes, county manholes bearing Vice City logos and county Metromover cars being wrapped with Vice City branding.

County officials said Rockstar approached Miami-Dade about the game maker paying for marketing promotions, and the presentation represented some potential ideas that hadn’t yet been cleared as feasible from the county’s standpoint.

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Cordero-Stutz’s pushback on the potential Vice City deal comes as she and Levine Cava are courting votes on the County Commission for competing funding proposals for the Sheriff’s Office in Miami-Dade’s 2027 budget. The county funds the and Levine Cava proposed increasing tax-funding for the independent agency by 6% next year. Cordero-Stutz wants a 12% increase.

The mayor’s budget proposal faces the first of two commission votes Thursday after a public hearing that begins at 5 p.m.

News of Cordero-Stutz’s opposition to a Vice City county promotion came from a news release issued by Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez, a Republican considered a potential candidate to succeed the term-limited Levine Cava as mayor in 2028.

“Miami-Dade County has spent decades building a reputation as a world-class destination for tourism, business, investment, and opportunity,” Bermudez said in the joint statement with the sheriff. “We should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence.”

Read more A Grand Theft Auto marketing deal with Miami-Dade has a real-life foe: the sheriff