The photograph would be cute if it weren’t outrageous. It shows two Miami Beach cops, eyes closed, heads back, and sound asleep in a police cruiser. An anonymous photographer says he took the snapshot of the on-duty officers, Grettel Monge and Pedro Gonzalez, napping together around 4:30 a.m. in the past few weeks not far from the beach, right around Second Street.
All those shiny new condo buildings popping up on the Miami skyline sure look fun. They’re clean, they’re well-designed, and they’re everywhere, including places where poor people used to live. Downtown Miami, in particular, sure has a heck of a lot of condos to sell, so please, by all means, come to Miami-Dade County and tour a condominium or four! Your local elected leaders will thank you!
South Florida police departments racially discriminating against a person of color? You don’t say! The Miami Police Department has long been criticized for mismanagement, including by the U.S. Department of Justice, which found in 2013 that Miami PD was regularly abusing city residents and acting with excessive force including during an eight-month stretch when seven black men were fatally shot.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami’s lead prosecutor, waited until late Friday afternoon to announce she wouldn’t charge four state prison guards who threw a black inmate with schizophrenia into a scalding-hot, 180-degree shower and left him there until he died. In media circles, the move is known as a “Friday news dump,” meant to bury unsavory news over the weekend.
Has Miami Beach been enjoying its annual spring-break revelry a little too hard? Or did someone just dump a vat of high-grade LSD into the local water supply? The answer is unclear. Last week, people were twerking on car rooftops on highways and rubbing their butts on police vehicles.
Miami-Dade County has had the same prosecutor since Bill Clinton was president. Beginning in 1993, through the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump eras, she has not once charged a police officer for an on-duty killing. What Katherine Fernandez Rundle, age 67, has done instead is make decades’ worth of excuses for public officials accused of corruption and murder.
On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic man serving time for cocaine possession, was thrown into a prison shower at the Dade Correctional Institution. The water was turned up to 180 degrees — hot enough to steep tea or cook ramen noodles.
Greater downtown Miami — which encompasses the city’s classic downtown area plus Wynwood, Overtown, Brickell, Edgewater, and the Design District — houses South Florida’s largest collection of young, hip urbanites. The area is all but engineered for people under 35: It’s crammed with artisan-cocktail bars, a never-ending supply of street art, and nightclubs where Diplo spontaneously appears. Without young people, Miami’s downtown would be a drab concrete dystopia.
Maurice Ferré served as the mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985. During that time, his administration noticed that the Brickell Bridge, which spans the Miami River downtown, had been mucking up traffic on Biscayne Boulevard. The structure is a drawbridge, and every time a boat passed into the bay, traffic on both sides of U.S. 1 ground to a halt. So Ferré’s administration proposed digging a tunnel under the river.
Sea-level rise has become such a problem in Miami-Dade that even Republican leaders admit the issue is real. “It’s not a theory,” county Mayor Carlos Gimenez said of global warming in January. “It’s a fact. We live it every day.” For once, we wish Gimenez had spent more time hanging out with his old golf buddy Donald Trump.
When a congressional issue unites the following list of subhuman rat-people, you know it’s going to be something awful. One bill this year has brought together U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton (the dude who hates Iran), Jim Inhofe (the idiot who took a snowball inside the Capitol to disprove global warming), Rand Paul, Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell, the Zodiac Killer Ted Cruz, and Miami’s own Marco Rubio.
Miami State Sen. Frank Artiles is swimming in some boiling-hot water after accepting nearly $2,000 in gifts from Florida Power & Light before rapidly advancing pro-FPL bills in his committee. But don’t criticize Artiles online — he’ll probably just block you.
Donald Shockey believes that everyone deserves to live in a clean neighborhood. When he lived in Miami Shores from 2001 to 2014, he didn’t have much of an issue because, he says, that city’s code-enforcement division was well funded and did a good job of making residents clean up their trash. But when Shockey moved into a home on NW 41st Street in the City of Miami in 2014, he says, found a neighborhood in disarray.
The City of Miami’s police union is run by a person who once called a dead 12-year-old a “thug,” has publicly called Islam a “religion that enslaves and allows the beating of women,” has been sued multiple times for alleged cases of police misconduct, and habitually posts on social media about how undocumented immigrants bring crime to American cities. Now Javier Ortiz has been reprimanded again for posting a private woman’s personal cell phone number on the internet and encouraging people to call her and yell at her — all because she caught a county cop speeding.
There’s no good reason to get into a fight at Miami’s annual Calle Ocho Festival. Everyone’s happy, the food is delicious, and you could even watch a dude wolf down 158 croquetas at this year’s “El Croquetazo” eating contest. So huge congrats to these morons, who took a good thing…
Miami is a city where “twerking etiquette” is a legitimate cultural and political concern. Skin is acceptable everywhere in Miami Beach, from strip clubs to retirement homes to military-weapons conventions. And most of the time, that cultural body acceptance is great.
It’s no secret that it’s best not to live near one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund sites. They’re the most polluted places in America. But those sites also tend to be crammed near low-income communities and communities of color that don’t live there by choice.
Donald Trump might in fact hate brown and Latino people so much that he’s now hellbent on unleashing a record-breaking hurricane on South Florida, some sort of biblical wall of water that can carry “criminals” and “rapists” and Jorge Ramos and everything else Trump can’t stand about Miami into the sea. There’s no other way to explain his recent actions this week: According to multiple memos leaked to the Washington Post, the president is gunning to juice up the hurricanes that hit Miami.
Two weeks ago, Muhammad Ali Jr. was detained at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and questioned about his religion. It was a moment outrageous enough for the son of America’s greatest athlete (and most famous Muslim) that Ali Jr. testified before Congress yesterday about putting a stop to such blatant religious discrimination.
Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine is having a weird month. Last week, he got into an emoji-filled Twitter fight with the Airbnb company account after accusing the home-sharing service of ruining the quality of life on his island. Today, in front of a roomful of Cuban-Americans, Levine suggested invading Havana. The mayor insists he was just kidding, though.
Mexico will never pay for Donald Trump’s proposed wall. The country was never going to pay for a gigantic concrete monument to anti-Latino racism. Donald Trump almost definitely knew that fact from day one of his presidential campaign but just didn’t care about lying to millions of Americans. (The only other option is that Trump is way, way dumber than anyone assumes.)
Beginning in the late 1920s, famed German fashion designer Hugo Boss supplied uniforms for the German Nazi Party. We bring this up not because Donald Trump is the next reincarnation of Adolf Hitler (not yet!), but because the decision has haunted the Boss brand for nearly 100 years. It’s etched into political and fashion history.
