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Kim Hill is one of two activists who have been arrested and banned from City of Homestead public meetings simply for asking for reforms at the police department. In 2016, both Hill and activist James Eric McDonough told WSVN that they’d been arrested and carted out of city hall on three occasions, simply for asking for changes at the police department.

The defendant had already pleaded guilty and a gaggle of reporters had shuffled out of the federal courthouse Thursday morning. But Judge Federico Moreno wasn’t in any rush to leave, and neither were the half-dozen veteran prosecutors and defense attorneys. After all, this case had been more than two decades in the making, dating back to Miami’s cocaine cowboy heyday.

As of 2015, the Miami Police Department reported in a statewide audit that a whopping 2,243 rape and sexual-assault kits were sitting untested on city shelves collecting dust — the highest number of untested rape kits for a single agency in Florida. That meant 2,243 victims had reported a rape…

Three City of Miami Police officers raced down the train tracks, desperately waving their arms at the freight train barreling past the NE 54th Street intersection. A few hundred feet down the tracks, a dark-green SUV was stuck on the rails. If the train hit the car at full speed, it could easily derail the miles of shipping containers.

Mel Fisher is the closest thing Florida has to Indiana Jones. Recently retired Floridians adopt the state’s Jimmy Buffett-inspired, faux-pirate persona after spending 30 years selling renters insurance in Denver, but Fisher was the real deal. He spent his life diving for pirate treasure and most famously hit the mother lode…

Late one Tuesday night, a heavyset man in a worn-out sport coat lumbered out of a sprawling restaurant on Hollywood Beach to his parking spot, the one closest to the building. His basset hounds, Amos and Tillie, tagged along. Even at 78 years old, Joe Sonken was usually the first…

In September 2014, Miami-Dade Police Sgt. James Edwards submitted a two-sentence letter resigning from the department with a “heavy heart” because of personal circumstances. But those circumstances also happened to involve two other people: a 15-year-old boy and his 16-year-old brother.

The Florida Department of Corrections remains adamant that “Operation PUSH,” a statewide prison-labor strike designed to force state officials to treat prisoners better, never actually happened, even though prisoner-rights groups released a statement last week about the action. They say prisoners in more than a dozen facilities either went on…

Last week, a video went viral showing a Jamaican-born grandmother being hauled off a Greyhound bus at a Fort Lauderdale station. The woman was returning from visiting her grandchild for the first time in Orlando, according to activists who mounted a campaign to pressure the bus line to stop granting federal agents access to randomly demand papers from its customers.

Miami Beach leaders took turns last week heaping praise on the founders of a secret Facebook group aimed at banishing criminals from the city. “You’ve taken an active role to become part of a solution for your community, and it’s just beautiful,” Commissioner John Elizabeth Alemán gushed. Added Commissioner Kristen Rosen…