If the Miami-Dade County Commission approves an upcoming funding request from Miami-Dade Police next month, the amount of money county police spend on guns, ammo, and body armor will have jumped from $6.8 million to $24 million — nearly quadrupling — in just a year.

Lawrence McCoy, a 29-year-old semihomeless man, was shot dead by Miami Beach Police Officer Adam Tavss in 2009. In 2011, a lawyer for McCoy’s family, Gregory Samms, sued the City of Miami Beach for wrongful death and claims McCoy was unarmed when he was shot. But the case remains open to this day. Once or twice a year, Samms drives to the Miami-Dade County Courthouse and files a motion to prevent the case from getting dismissed. But he says he can’t do much more.

Thirty years ago this November, federal agents unsealed a litany of indictments against arguably the most famous drug traffickers in world history: The Medellín Cartel, led by the infamous drug-importing Ochoa crime family and its accomplice, Pablo Escobar. The indictments were billed as the end of Miami’s era of drug-riddled violence. In 1986, crime had skyrocketed to unforeseen levels: There were 12,000 incidents per every 100,000 people. (Turns out arresting Escobar didn’t solve the city’s problems. The crime rate jumped to 13,500 by 1989.)

The details of Miami-Dade County’s proposed plan to surveil poor, black neighborhoods with semipermanent spy planes were grotesque. MDPD had asked for a federal grant for so-called wide-area surveillance (WAS) planes, which can record up to 32 square miles at once and were first used to track Iraqi insurgents.

In 2012, Homeland Security Bureau operatives within Miami-Dade County Police started tracking the social-media accounts of Occupy Miami protesters. The cops tracked Occupy protesters’ every day, sending out “situational awareness” bulletins to specific officers when activists hosted events as innocuous as a “Jazz Night.” Muhammed Malik, a local civil rights…