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.
Hey, Miami, your hometown Marlins have actually been playing some pretty good baseball. They’ve won four in a row and are no longer living in the moldy basement of the NL East. Their pitching staff has stopped handing out walks like sketchy club flyers in South Beach, and Stanton and Ozuna have started mashin’ taters again.
As the American Airlines plane full of passengers looked on, two law enforcement officers escorted Michael Mennella — a double amputee with no feet — down the aisle and into the airport. They told him he was under arrest for extreme intoxication. But soon enough, the officers realized Mennella was sober.
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.
Over the past few years, Miami-Dade County Public Schools began phasing out hard-line discipline in favor of more effective policies. Thanks in part to the efforts of local advocacy groups, the district found alternatives to arrests, stopped issuing out-of-school suspensions, eased its zero-tolerance stance on drugs, and embraced a restorative justice approach.
The shots rang out before either cop could reach for his holster. The only thing the two Broward Sheriff’s deputies could do was call for help. “We’re shot!” came a voice over police radio. Then it was quiet. When the bullets stopped flying that November night, Dep. Corey Carbocci lay…
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.
This Memorial Day weekend was a test for Miami Beach. For the first time, the city scheduled a massive air show during the unofficial Urban Beach Week, with the not-so-secret goal of ending the gathering that draws thousands of mostly black hip-hop fans to South Beach. Could the two coexist?
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…
Three days ago, Fox News retracted an explosive story: The FBI was probing whether murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had sent thousands of emails to WikiLeaks before his mysterious death. Everyone, from the U.S. intelligence community to cybersecurity pros, says the claim is nonsense: The nearly universal consensus…
Planning on driving anywhere this weekend? Good luck! With Urban Beach Week and a new air and sea show dueling for space on the beach, plus the World OutGames hosting events at venues across the county, plus Critical Mass pedaling out of downtown tonight, prepare to stare at plenty of bright-red streets on Google Maps.
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…
When Sean Gallagan was named Miami-Dade’s principal of the year in 2011, administrators lauded the leader of George T. Baker Aviation Technical College for his humanitarian work in Haiti and resourcefulness in getting American Airlines to donate a $6 million plane to the district. Clearly pleased with his abilities, the district…
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.
The caller to “Amandi on Air” was somewhere between irate and fuming. Fernand Amandi had asked his listeners to grade Donald Trump on his first 100 days in office and a woman with a New York accent had a word or two to offer. “This is a comment, not a…
Without Miami Heat playoff basketball, May is an abysmal time for South Florida sports. The only thing keeping us entertained is whether the godawful Marlins can score five runs in a loss so we can snag some half-off Papa John’s pizza. There is little else going, and sadly we are still a couple of months away from the sports scene picking up.
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.
