Illustration by Mark Poutenis
A week before Christmas, Dante Level stands near the vibrant avocado tree that towers above his grandmother's cream-colored house on NW 52nd Street. The lanky 30-year-old sports thick dreadlocks past his shoulders and a thin goatee. He swigs a Corona. Two friends and a neighbor do the same and pass around a cigar. Nearby, Dante's 1-year-old daughter and another baby play on the floor.
Mark Poutenis
Mark Poutenis
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Dante's younger brother Khalid, a slim guy with short-cropped hair, leans against the family's maroon minivan. Inside the house, their older sister Alexis tends to her 13-year-old paraplegic daughter. Amid the preholiday revelry, no one notices the silver Chrysler 300 with tinted windows cruising the tree-lined block.
Suddenly, flashing lights bathe the front lawn in red and blue. More than a dozen cops in light-gray polos, dark-gray cargo pants, and black vests flood out of the Chrysler and other unmarked cars, storming through the front gate with guns drawn. Dante drops his beer. Before he can react, a beefy cop tackles him, knocking down his 1-year-old, who screams in terror.
The police, all members of an elite Miami-Dade unit called the Tactical Narcotics Team — TNT for short — arrest Dante and his friends, and haul Khalid and Alexis off to jail as well.
The Levels were just three of the 112 people in Liberty City booked that weekend as part of a TNT operation cheekily dubbed "Santa's Helper," which the Miami Herald and local TV stations ate up as a feel-good story about cops keeping the inner city safe — an especially juicy tale when coupled with video of the widow of a slain officer handing out 500 toys to poor children. The Levels' arrest led the 6 p.m. telecasts, with CBS 4 reporter Peter D'Oench hailing the MDPD for "getting kids in the neighborhood to see... the human side of the officers who love to interact with the children." A Herald story, meanwhile, offered that the "streets of northwest Miami-Dade [will be] safe for when Santa comes to town."
However, a two-month investigation by New Times has found that Santa's Helper was a colossal waste of police resources. Of the 112 suspects arrested, 73 people were charged only with misdemeanor pot possession. The vast majority of the busted pot smokers were either released within 24 hours or avoided jail by promising to show up in court. Of the 73 alleged tokers, 68 of them — including Dante Level and his siblings — had no violent criminal record. If they were guilty of anything, it was smoking a joint on their own front porch.
Police say TNT, a 31-officer team that focuses on aggressive, low-level drug busts such as Santa's Helper, is vital because their work prevents more serious drug and gang violence. Even as other units specializing in cargo and auto theft were disbanded last month to save money for the cash-strapped department, the brass left TNT and its $3 million budget untouched.
"This is a great way to capture a cross section of robbers, burglars, thieves, and dopers who shoot kids and cops and will openly spray a corner with bullets," says Maj. Charles Nanney, head of the Miami-Dade Narcotics Bureau. "Cocaine, marijuana, and heroin availability at the street level poses the greatest threat."
But neighborhood activists and some criminologists say letting an aggressive unit loose on small-time users does more to alienate black neighborhoods than it does to end violent crime. Santa's Helper, they say, is a perfect illustration of how a unit with a history of corruption — and a mound of complaints about excessive force — has lost the War on Drugs. In recent years, three officers who worked with TNT, but not assigned to the unit full-time, were busted in public corruption probes. Meanwhile, 14 current squad members have combined for 40-plus internal affairs probes.
As Florida's black communities roil in the aftermath of the police inaction over the Trayvon Martin killing, some observers say cops should rethink the philosophy behind units such as TNT. The story of the Levels, whose lives were turned upside down by the drug bust, offers a counterpoint to the boilerplate narrative that busting pot smokers in the inner city somehow makes Miami safer.
"That kind of strategy just gets everybody in the neighborhood pissed off at the police," says Roger Dunham, a University of Miami sociology professor who has studied the unit's techniques. "The last thing we need is to arrest a bunch of people on drug possession charges to simply fill up the jail."
In 1990, after the embers of the last major riot in Miami were tamped down and there were few cocaine cowboys left to chase, county police began concentrating on a new front in the War on Drugs. Inner-city neighborhoods such as Overtown and Liberty City and rural cities like Homestead and Florida City faced a new deadly epidemic: crack cocaine.
Following the lead of police in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., Miami-Dade created its own tactical narcotics unit. Its acronym, TNT, didn't come by accident. The point of the unit was to use shock-and-awe tactics to overwhelm violent criminals in the drug game. The department tapped Daniel Flynn, at the time a major assigned to the Northside District, which includes Liberty City, to put together Miami-Dade's TNT. Its mission: Eradicate street-level drug crimes in every ghetto from Homestead to Opa-locka.
