Jacksonville Democratic Rep. Kimberly Daniels might literally be the craziest person in the Florida Legislature right now. She is a former “exorcist” who called herself the “Demonbuster.” Though she holds multiple theological degrees from a Christian seminary and has written 13 books about Christian spirituality, some of those volumes cover…
Former Miami State Senator Daphne Campbell, one of the most ethically challenged people to ever hold office in the entire state of Florida, has filed to run for office once again. She did so in the most characteristically “Daphne” way possible: by kinda-sorta admitting that she was not living in…
Florida law prohibits police departments from using drones to surveil citizens. So Miami Beach cops instead got a small blimp. On December 28, MBPD flew a tiny, helium-filled dirigible, or “tethered aerostat,” over an Orange Bowl party called the Capital One Beach Bash. A camera attached to the balloon monitored…
Newly elected Sen. Rick Scott is not, it seems, capable of empathy. If there’s one thing Floridians learned about Scott after eight years as their governor, it’s there is no amount of shameless, Rich Uncle Pennybags-style money-grubbing that is beneath him. Well, now he’s bringing his own, special brand of avarice to Washington…
Given Florida’s reputation as the National Rifle Association-dominated “Gunshine State,” many political observers were surprised state lawmakers passed a relatively long list of gun-safety restrictions after the February 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. For example, legislators approved a “red-flag” law that lets cops temporarily confiscate guns…
In October 2017, the Associated Press published an audio recording of what the U.S. government, at the time, claimed was a “sonic attack” launched at American diplomats stationed in Havana, Cuba. The recording included a few seconds of a high-pitched, mechanical-sounding, squealing noise, which American officials stressed was some type of nefarious, secret brain onslaught…
The First Amendment protects Americans from being punished by the state for the things they say. The “state” part here is key: You are not being censored, for example, if you’re fired from your job as a newspaper columnist because you got caught hanging out with a neo-Nazi biker gang…
Look: If you’re going to take a bribe, at least take a cool bribe. Don’t end up on a list like this one because you illegally funneled a ton of taxpayer subsidies to a local gumball vending-machine magnate. Don’t, for example, fly to America to receive a boatload of illegal cash…
Quite a lot of people in Miami are, sadly, poor. If Miami City Commissioner “Loco Joe” Carollo is to be believed, he is apparently one of those people: According to the City of Miami’s latest commission agenda, Carollo is currently asking the city to transfer $65,000 earmarked for city “anti-poverty”…
In most states, it’s legal for property owners to sell home-generated solar power to other people or to tenants living in their homes. This is usually called a “power-purchase agreement” — your landlord, for example, might put some solar panels on top of your apartment building and charge…
Investors say Frost engaged in more schemes than the SEC said he did.
Luis Gustavo Moreno Rivera, the man formerly in charge of weeding crooked people out of Colombia’s very corrupt government, was sentenced yesterday to four years in federal prison for accepting an envelope full of bribery cash inside a Dolphin Mall bathroom. The case is as wild as Miami crimes get. While…
New rail, no mall, and let ’em smoke pot.
Look, every city is full of trash people. American culture reinforces the terrible behavior patterns of cretins and psychos. But there’s simply a higher bar to seem like a huge asshole in Miami than, say, Des Moines, Iowa. Our police chiefs waterboard people here. With that in mind, allow New Times to list the five biggest asshats in the Magic City (and the surrounding area) this year.
If Florida’s new Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis is to be believed, immigrants are flooding into Florida, taking our jobs at gunpoint, crashing busloads of sick children into our emergency rooms to get free healthcare, and driving around town lopping people’s heads off with axes. Florida’s retirees are trembling…
Hey, uh, a neo-Nazi was stopped within minutes of burning down a Miami Beach apartment complex and causing an international mass-death incident. It would be pretty hard to argue that a crime in Miami this year was more insane than that one. Or maybe not. Crime in this town is so utterly bizarre and inexplicable that the public tends to forget bonkers events mere days after they happen.
Frost is the namesake of Miami’s Frost Museum of Science.
On one hand, some Miami-area law-enforcement agencies are transparently corrupt, averse to public accountability, and face virtually zero consequences when they do racist stuff. On the other hand: Some Aventura cops just went viral for dancing at the mall! All is clearly well, good, and supernormal in Miami cop-land…
Smartphones in 2018 are necessary, ubiquitous devices that function as GPS location trackers, cameras that follow us into the bathroom, private-communication-logging devices, business computers, and, let’s be honest, porn-streaming screens. Yet there are still bizarrely few laws banning cops from swiping highly personal phone data without your consent or just cause.
Cops across the state have been repeatedly accused of misusing Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID), which logs motorists’ addresses, driver’s license photos, plate numbers, and other personal info. Sometimes they stalk ex-lovers. Other times, they just bother people they don’t like.
Few, if any, stores should be open on major federal holidays, including Christmas Day. Retail and food-service chains don’t pay workers nearly enough to justify ripping them from friends and families on, say, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve, or Christmas. If you’ve ever worked food service on a holiday — or sat through holiday gatherings while a loved one was gone working — you know how much this sucks.
Here’s an age-old question: Is Miami actually more corrupt than other cities, or do Florida’s fantastic public-records laws just let people find out more about their elected officials? We’re still not sure about that one. But 2018 wound up being yet another year in which Magic City politics drove us…
