Smart and Holmes, who are both black, are two employees among roughly a dozen who accuse the city’s parks and rec department of racial discrimination and toxic dysfunction. In December, Smart grew so frustrated that she started a petition on Change.org called “Blatant Discrimination Against Blacks.” As of this week, 75 people have cosigned.
Here are a few proven concepts Beckham and his ownership team should rip off from South Florida’s other teams if they want to give themselves a shot at being successful in Miami.
This week, Publix responded to pressure from LGBTQ groups and agreed to provide “pre-exposure prophylactic” (PrEP) preventative HIV medications for employees. But the Fortune 100 supermarket chain still has a long way to go to combat its reputation as a hostile place for gay workers. Take former employee Juan Pastran,…
Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez, who runs America’s eighth-largest force, stood in county hall today, put his mouth in front of a microphone, and claimed with a straight face that there is “no widespread mistrust” of his department. His officers are transparent, he said, and already subject to rigorous oversight. So there was no need for the county to revive its civilian oversight board, Perez argued.
What could you do with 64 extra hours of time this year? You could marathon every Star Wars movie ever produced three times in a row. You could road-trip from Miami to San Francisco with 20 extra hours to nap along the way. Hell, you could ride your bike all the way to Atlanta if you’re into that kind of thing.
Being in high school sucks. You’re nervous all the time, you get sweaty when Bobby from math class makes eye contact with you in the hallway, and sometimes you get shoved inside a gym locker. But hey: If you attend Miami Senior High School, at least Drake sometimes shows up out of the blue to make a random Monday the most lit day in your young life.
Last week’s “How One Famed Hollywood Restaurant Became the National Center for the Mob” catalogued the rise of Broward’s Gold Coast Restaurant as the Southern headquarters for the mob. This is the conclusion. If Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Restaurant was the white whale for law enforcement in South Florida, Lt…
The managers of Joseph’s Club Restaurant, a 24-hour bar in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, apparently really does not want patrons talking to cops. Miami Police say that earlier this afternoon, after someone stole a cell phone outside the restaurant, the management somehow barricaded the restaurant’s doors and locked as many as 12 people inside.
Holding federal immigration detainees in local jails has been ruled unconstitutional. The practice tears apart families, jails people who may never have been convicted of crimes, and can even lead to locking up the wrong people. For some reason, Miami-Dade County insists on detaining immigrants in local jails…
What the family didn’t know is that Owen had already been dead — and in the county medical examiner’s office — for seven days. Despite the fact that officers had recovered Owen’s body from beneath a Metrorail overpass May 31, his sister Kathy Kavalin says Miami Police never notified relatives to let them know.
Because the Miami Dolphins have been terrible for decades, fans have needed to find new and exciting ways to derive joy from the pain-filled, quarterback-devoid hellscape that is Dolphins fandom. University of Miami football occasionally fills that emotional void. But there is one sure bet to make Fins fans happy…
Publix remains one of the most popular and beloved retail chains in the entire South, despite the fact that the Fortune 100 corporation has been repeatedly accused of mistreating its LGBTQ workers. The chain has been fighting anti-gay accusations for years — but instead of working to rid itself of…
When planning the city, Miami’s then all-white city government forced early black residents into a segregated area known as “Colored Town.” Over time, that area grew into Overtown — a thriving community that attracted local black artists, politicians, and celebrities. But in the 1960s, local officials decided to cram…
When Miami’s comically inept leaders signed off on the worst stadium deal in American history, one provision they proudly pointed to required team owner Jeffrey Loria to share a chunk of the profits if he sold the franchise. That seemed only fair, considering taxpayers were artificially inflating the worth of the club by gifting him a $2 billion ballpark.
The people have spoken: They want to smoke weed. In a recent nationwide Gallup Poll, 64 percent of respondents said the use of marijuana should be legalized. That’s the highest response rate in favor of legalization Gallup has recorded since 1969. And do you know how many people smoked pot in…
Take any weird news story and there’s always a Florida connection. And this week’s viral tale of an emotional-support peacock denied boarding a United Airlines flight is no exception. The peacock, it turns out, is a South Florida native. Of course.
Florida’s law preventing ex-felons from voting is an actual Jim Crow law that’s somehow still on the books. It was passed in 1868 because white supremacist lawmakers were pissed off at the 14th Amendment granting black people citizenship. Thanks to the efforts of an activist group led by ex-felon Desmond Meade, Florida voters will finally be able to cast ballots on a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to more than 1.5 million former felons this November.
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.
When Miami Beach residents found out the county was spraying a pesticide banned in the European Union to kill mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus, they were furious. Dozens marched to city hall with signs reading, “What are you really killing?” and “Naled does more harm than good.” Some demonstrators wore…
In February 2016, a tipster reported a septic truck driver for dumping liquid waste next to a Kmart off Biscayne Boulevard. Sure enough, when county investigators set up surveillance in the parking lot, they quickly spotted the driver pumping waste directly into a drainage manhole.
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…
