A person’s right to make fun of elected officials on the internet is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. So Miami Beach Police have quite a high bar to clear if they want to prove that resident Ernesto Orsetti was illegally “impersonating a cop” when he created a fake Twitter profile purporting to be Miami Beach Police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez.
After evading any sort of criminal consequences for Tasing an 18-year-old skateboarder to death, the City of Miami Beach will pay a comparatively paltry $100,000 to settle the final wrongful-death lawsuit stemming from the case. On Friday, the Florida Bulldog reported that the city has finally settled a suit filed by Israel…
Miami Beach is two very different towns for two very different groups of people. The large class of wealthy residents lives in glitzy towers along the beach and casually drinks chablis at five-star restaurants the rest of us can’t afford. Many Miami Beach tourists, however, are poor or middle-class…
Ballard Partners is a powerhouse lobbying firm in Tallahassee, Miami, and other major Florida cities. Before this year, the firm had never lobbied anyone at the federal level, but Ballard did have one important client: It was the Trump Organization’s go-to lobbying wing when it needed to make deals in Florida. After Donald Trump’s election, the firm swiftly opened New York and D.C. offices.
A few months ago, Miami Beach Police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez joked over the phone with a New Times reporter that someone had made a parody Twitter account pretending to be him. At the time, the page seemed like a gag.
Thanks to sea-level rise, Florida’s unique topography, and poor city planning, areas of Miami-Dade County look like a hurricane hit them today. But there’s not even a tropical storm in town. Instead, mere weeks after a real hurricane did damage major parts of South Florida, the Miami area is massively flooding thanks to a combination of some moderate storms hitting during king tides, when the sea is at its highest point all year.
The Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is built directly on the waterfront in Homestead — a location that has exposed the plant to serious natural disasters in the past. The reactor survived Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but the storm’s 175-mph winds did knocked out the plant’s communication lines, disable the emergency…
For 12 Miami-area police officers, killing an allegedly drunk driver in a hail of 116 bullets, shooting four innocent bystanders, costing city taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements, refusing to speak to local prosecutors, and drawing national scorn and embarrassment were not fireable offenses.
When Miami SWAT Officer George Diaz fired eight shots into a moving car outside Club Space in 2011, his case should have been clear-cut for internal affairs investigators: Miami cops aren’t allowed to shoot into moving cars because they could cause an accident or hit innocent people inside the vehicle.
Despite what the National Rifle Association claims, gun laws influence gun deaths. For example, it’s completely legal in Las Vegas to walk around town holding a loaded, military-style rifle. No one can stop you, which is likely one reason terrorist Stephen Paddock was able to carry an arsenal of assault weapons into a Mandalay Bay hotel room and use them to murder 59 people and wound more than 500 others over the weekend.
In June 2015, a 17-year-old girl told multiple news outlets that Hialeah Police Sgt. Jesus “Jesse” Mercado Jr. threatened to sexually assault her while he was on-duty. The teen told multiple TV stations that Mercado arrested her for making an illegal U-turn, cornered her in a Hialeah Police station, and…
So many terrible ideas come out of Tallahassee every year that it’s often hard to guess whether a random law was enacted in Florida or Saudi Arabia. Case in point: One of those two states passed a law in March 2016 forcing anyone giving “advice” about abortion — from a…
A lot of smart journalistic voices are writing about sports right now. But for every thought-provoking, boundary-pushing thinker, there’s an Armando Salguero, the Miami Herald Dolphins columnist who once told a war veteran he “sucked as a soldier” and now has the gall to lecture black athletes on how to respect the flag.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to believe that Jim Larrañaga, the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes Men’s Basketball team, doesn’t know the identity of the anonymous UM coach named in FBI corruption documents this week. Larrañaga is something of a folk hero in South Florida — he’s taken an upstart…
In the view of the Miami-Dade County Commission, uttering the word “damn” is more damaging than plans to defund public transportation, cut bus routes, or jack up police spending. At a public meeting over the county’s $7 billion taxpayer budget last night, a man was kicked out — and escorted away…
Miami-Dade County Police arrested Lazaro Rodriguez before dawn December 15, 2015, for allegedly arguing with cops and “stiffening his body” during a routine traffic stop. That move apparently frightened the officers enough to arrest the North Miami resident on misdemeanor charges of resisting an officer without violence and one felony count of threatening a public servant.
Florida finally has a champion to fight for the most unfairly treated group of people in America — white, Christian conservatives. Florida Rep. Joe Gruters filed a bill today that would add discrimination against “political affiliation” to the list of infractions Florida classifies as hate crimes, and though he insists the law would apply to both liberals and conservatives, Gruters’ social media posts make it pretty clear which side he’s worried about.
More than 60 years after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that desegregated American education, schools are still so racially divided that experts use terms like “apartheid” to describe the situation. Over the last 20 years, Florida — like the nation as a whole — has managed to…
The FBI today arrested 10 people including a top Adidas exec on charges that the company illegally funneled cash to high-school athletes in exchange for pledges to attend Adidas-sponsored universities. The University of Miami isn’t named in the complaint, but details strongly suggest the feds have tied the school to…
Florida’s state minimum wage is just $8.15 per hour, and it’s illegal for individual cities to raise their own minimum wages independently. (Miami Beach tried and the governor sued.) In general, the city’s wage-rates are staggeringly low compared to other areas of its size — the city’s two main industries…
There are 21 million people in Florida. Sen. Marco Rubio is almost certainly about to vote for an Obamacare repeal bill that, according to a study released yesterday, would likely cut health coverage from 3.2 million of them. That’s roughly 15 percent of the state.
When Florida’s anti-pot lobby, the Drug Free Florida Committee, tried to scare Floridians away from legalizing medical marijuana for cancer and AIDS patients, the group warned that pot patients would be forced to buy their weed from unshowered “budtenders” with Bob Marley tattoos.
