According to a City of Miami Police arrest report, Ryan Gellineau was booked June 2, 2013, on charges of resisting an officer with violence, a third-degree felony. Officer Stanley Mike, who wrote the arrest affidavit, says he and another cop were set to arrest Gellineau’s girlfriend when Gellineau “charged” at the officers…
How malicious and dumb is Donald Trump? He not only pulled out of the historic Paris Agreement to fight climate change this week, but he also announced he’ll hold a “Pittsburgh, Not Paris” rally to stress that he somehow is fighting for Americans instead of global climate scientists.
The Miami-Dade Police Department has already applied for a $500,000 Department of Justice grant to fly planes over the county that can record and track the movements of the city’s population. These “wide-area surveillance” systems were originally developed to track insurgents planting car bombs during the Iraq War — but now the technology is being used on American civilians.
In the last year, Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez positioned herself as a liberal fighting for the rights of disadvantaged black and brown Americans. At a protest against Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s decision to comply with President Trump’s sanctuary-city ban, Rosen Gonzalez swore to protect the city’s massive…
The Miami Beach Police Department’s basic mission statement tells officers to conduct themselves with “honor, courage, integrity.” The slogan is routinely plastered on official city and department documents. But when Lori Freedline, a civilian employee at MBPD, hung signs in her office that encouraged employees to act with “integrity” and to beware of “karma,” her boss wasn’t happy.
After the Freddie Gray riots in 2015, Baltimore residents began noticing small planes circling the city. As reporters later uncovered, Baltimore Police had quietly employed a “wide-area surveillance” system, which uses Cessna planes to constantly record the movements of an entire city. Police never bothered to tell the public they was using the invasive technology…
When State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office decided this past March not to charge four prison guards who oversaw the death of Darren Rainey — a black, schizophrenic prisoner scalded to death inside a locked shower — she announced the move in a late-Friday news dump without a press conference. But the decision caused national outrage, with critics noting that in her 24 years in office, Rundle has never charged a guard or cop for an on-duty death.
In June 2009, Miami Beach Police Officer Adam Tavss fatally shot two people in four days. Tavss resigned the next year after testing positive for marijuana and was later caught running a marijuana growhouse. In 2011, he was cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting of the first victim, an unarmed tourist named Husein Shehada.
Given the building industry’s outsize role in the local ecosystem, you might assume Miami’s construction workers are able to earn a solid living from the profession. But a study released earlier this month shows 44 percent of Miami’s construction workers have trouble paying for basic necessities such as rent, food, hospital bills, utility payments, and items for their children.
Roger Stone has been at the heart of three of the objectively worst things to happen in the Sunshine State in the 21st Century: When a group of angry white folks protested in 2000 to stop the Bush v. Gore recount, Stone later admitted he staged the whole thing to get Bush elected. When Scott Rothstein’s record-setting Ponzi scheme fell to pieces, it turned out Stone had an office at Rothstein’s law firm.
In a nation where literally zero of the thousands of athletes currently playing in the big four professional sports — football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey — are openly gay, the fact that Miami Beach was hosting the 2017 World OutGames, the Olympics for LGBTQ athletes, was a huge societal…
Some very rich people would like Gov. Rick Scott to sign HB 7069, a hastily passed school funding bill that provides huge incentives to charter schools at the expense of public ones. And those billionaires — namely the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos, and a slew of other wealthy right-wingers — are willing to mobilize their shell corporations and think tanks to ensure HB 7069 becomes law.
A warming climate means warmer oceans. And increasingly, research suggests that warmer oceans mean more hurricanes — and more powerful ones, too. So not only is Miami set to flood thanks to climate change by the year 2100, the city’s skirmishes with hurricanes are likely to become more frequent…
Last November, Miami resident Mario Javier Cordoba sued the City of Miami and two of its cops, Reynaldo Irias and Yesid Ortiz, for false arrest, battery, and civil-rights violations. Cordoba says the two MPD officers chucked him in the back of a cop car just for trying to record his…
Virtually all 2.5 million Miami-Dade residents live on land that’s less than ten feet above sea level. In terms of real-estate assets vulnerable to flooding, Miami is the second most exposed city on Earth, behind only Guangzhou, China. And Miami is basically the poster child for the effects of climate change, because the city has already begun flooding on sunny days.
This past March 23, singer Alicia Keys headlined the grand-opening party for the Porsche Design Tower, an ultraluxury condominium complex in Sunny Isles Beach built by father-and-son Miami developers (and former Trump business partners) Michael and Gil Dezer. The event was a spectacular display of wealth at the Porsche Tower, a massive steel-gray building filled with spartan German decor, billionaire investors, and elevators that lift whole cars right into residents’ condo units.
A note to U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo’s staff: Just stop letting him talk about health care. Earlier this month, the Miami Republican was one of the final swing votes that ensured the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which cripples Obamacare, passed on to the Senate. After his constituents excoriated him for trying to rip away their health care, he wrote a condescending, insulting, and lie-ridden op-ed in the Miami Herald calling his critics leftists and crybabies for asking for basic access to health insurance. That did not go over well.
Most sensible Americans these days believe in ending the War on Drugs. The facts are clear that low-level drug arrests ruin lives and tear families apart. Some day, selling weed in Florida will no longer feed thousands of new prisoners into the state’s broken criminal justice system.
Barnaby Min, Miami’s deputy city attorney, was widely ridiculed last week for comparing legalizing weed to pedophilia at a meeting at city hall. But it turns out he’s an even worse messenger for that offensive claim than most anyone knew.
Where the Florida Republican Party is hell-bent on making life worse for every poor person in the state and turning the Everglades into the Rick Scott Memorial River of Oil, the Florida Democrats are simply an incompetent group of corporate boot-lickers who have no idea how to actually win elections…
There is truly no defeat the Florida Democratic Party will avoid snatching from the hands of victory. Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party radioactive. His polling numbers are plummeting right alongside the GOP as a whole. And the nation is seeing a groundswell of progressive activism at levels not witnessed since the 1960s.
Roger Stone, the political consigliere, accused defamer, and alleged Russia go-between for Donald Trump, is difficult to predict. After spending decades smearing political candidates as an admitted backroom political operative, Stone had seemingly hit a lull in his career over the past decade. Remember when he was handling the campaign of a stoner comedian running for Miami Beach mayor?
