Round Two

Ambrose Sims had a bad experience at Beach Towing a couple of years back. In December of 1995, the seventeen-year veteran Miami Beach cop got into a scuffle at the Dade Boulevard tow yard and suffered minor cuts while attempting to make an arrest.

The case made headlines when well-known defense attorney Joel Hirschhorn countered charges of battery on a police officer by brazenly asserting that Sims's bosses had endangered the public by allowing an HIV-positive officer to serve on active duty. (Sims, the department's official liaison to Miami Beach's gay and lesbian community, is openly homosexual and an outspoken advocate for gay rights.) The charges against Hirschhorn's client, Miami Beach resident Wyn Morris, were eventually dropped after she agreed to attend anger-management classes. And though Morris had threatened to sue the city, no such lawsuit has been filed.

To Sims, this past April 20 must have seemed like deja vu. That evening 22-year-old Candace McIntosh of North Miami was arrested by Miami Beach police for aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer -- Sims again -- after she went to Beach Towing to retrieve her car.

McIntosh, along with her one-year-old daughter and two friends, Rudy Innocent and Triniqua Harris, had spent that Sunday at the beach. Late in the afternoon, when they returned to the cul-de-sac east of Collins Avenue where McIntosh had parked, they discovered that her Geo Metro had been towed.

When she arrived at Beach Towing, McIntosh recalls, her car was still hooked to a truck. She approached the driver and began complaining -- profanely, she admits -- that the vehicle had been wrongly towed; a friend of hers who worked at a hotel near where she'd parked had given her an employee parking card, which she had placed on the dashboard.

That Sunday also happened to be Ofcr. Ambrose Sims's first day moonlighting at the yard. Having responded over the years to numerous calls at Beach Towing, Sims knew well that police presence is often a necessity at a tow yard, given the general ire of unwilling "patrons." Sims declined to comment in detail about the incident for this story, citing department policy, but he gave an account of the events in his arrest report and also in a sworn deposition. "The defendant came onto the premises shouting profanities because she felt her car had been wrongfully towed," Sims wrote in his arrest report. "Defendant shouted, 'Motherfuckers, you had no goddamn business towing my car, I don't give a shit what kind of kind of tow sign was posted.' I told the defendant she should try to calm down."

What McIntosh remembers Sims telling her was: "Why does it always have to be a bunch of ignorant niggers?" (McIntosh and her companions are black, as is Sims.)

From there the situation escalated. McIntosh says Sims and Rudy Innocent got into a bout of "childlike name-calling," with Sims saying, "Niggers always gotta be stupid." In his deposition Sims states that McIntosh's friends referred to him as "an ignorant nigger with a badge."

McIntosh finally paid the $95 fine and towing charge and retrieved her car. But when she stopped in the driveway at the entrance for her friends to climb in, Sims told her she couldn't park there.

"I didn't want the entrance to be blocked," Sims stated when asked under oath why he had not simply allowed McIntosh to pick up her friends and drive away, "because they were obviously going to continue to do things to disrespect me and deliberately not obey my lawful order."

When McIntosh failed to heed three warnings that he would arrest her if she didn't comply with his instructions, Sims said in his deposition, he reached through her window and attempted to remove the key from the ignition. Then, he says, the car began to move.

"When I could see that she was going to try to cause me either great bodily injury or death, I believe I punched her and tried to grab her out of the car," he said under oath. At that point McIntosh accelerated, dragging Sims 50 feet down the street and running over the toe of his boot. Sims disentangled himself from the car and McIntosh sped away, only to be arrested soon after by Miami Beach officers responding to Sims's call for backup.

Sims wasn't injured in the incident, but he evidently feared for his life. "[R]eplaying the incident in my mind ... the next person who tries that will be shot, and I wish I had done it this time," he told McIntosh's attorney under oath. "You wish that you had shot her?" the attorney responded. "Yes," Sims replied, "because that was the kind of fear that I was in with my life. I would not take the chance again."

McIntosh relates a different sequence of events: She says she did move her car away from the driveway as instructed, but that Sims followed her. He punched her repeatedly in the face through her open window, she alleges, then opened the door, put his knee on her chest, grabbed her by the collar, and said, "Bitch, you're under arrest."