In 2010, Miami-Dade County Police became the first law enforcement department in the nation to buy a drone. The $50,000, military-grade flying robot was paid for with a U.S. Department of Justice grant. But although buying an expensive drone is easy enough, figuring out how to legally fly what is basically a garbage can full of privacy-invading cameras is hard to do. So MDPD’s drone has sat virtually unused since 2011.
City of Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz was temporarily suspended this week. He was stripped of his gun and will be forced to fill out paperwork for the foreseeable future, thanks to a restraining order a county judge granted against him by a woman he’d harassed on Facebook. Ortiz runs…
Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz, the outspoken head of the city’s cop union, has been temporarily reassigned to desk duty and stripped of his gun, New Times has confirmed. The move came after a judge granted a restraining order to a woman Ortiz allegedly harassed and doxxed online.
Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart definitely, totally, absolutely hasn’t been trying to trade his vote for “Trumpcare” for control over the Trump administration’s Cuba policy, the congressman’s spokesperson tells New Times. Just minutes before the scheduled high-stakes vote, such is the surreal world of political intrigue in which Diaz-Balart now finds himself.
Before voting to ban floating billboards in his city, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine told the company behind the concept that it was an “interesting business.” He must have meant it: A month and a half later, he’s now using their services to advertise.
There are a lot of skills that can be learned over a long weekend in a Holiday Inn ballroom. Meditation techniques. Speed reading. The basics of budgeting. But a new bill moving through the Florida Legislature wants to add something a bit more technical to the list: namely, eye surgery…
Miami real-estate analyst Andrew Stearns releases a report about the health of the city’s condominium market four times per year. Read between the lines of Stearns’ last three consecutive releases, and it’s easy to picture him pulling out clumps of his hair and nervously loosening his tie as he writes the reports.
According to Longwood state Rep. Scott Plakon, Florida’s firefighters, cops, and corrections officers are a “special” type of public servants, the sort that are integral to a functioning democracy. The state’s teachers and nurses? Not so much. Earlier this month, Plakon filed a bill that, if enacted, would strip a union of its collective bargaining power…
A South Florida woman is locked in a fierce legal battle with DJ Deadmau5 over the name of her cat-themed website.
Miami appointed its first female city attorney, Lucia Allen Dougherty, way back in 1984. In fact, women have held the city’s top legal position for 16 of the past 33 years. But when a staffer in Commissioner Ken Russell’s office was flipping through the city code recently, she noticed…
On February 24, Florida Power & Light — Miami’s electricity monopoly and the single biggest donor to politicians in Florida — lost a court battle with the Miami, South Miami, Pinecrest, and Miami-Dade governments over whether the company could string power lines from massive, 80-to-150-foot towers through South Miami-Dade County.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle is responding aggressively to mounting criticism over her decision not to charge four prison guards who were allegedly involved in the death of schizophrenic prison inmate Darren Rainey. In an unprecedented hourlong interview backed by her three top prosecutors, Rundle described in detail her…
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.
Because good climate-change news is about as common in Florida as a calm and pleasant rush-hour drive on I-95, let’s start there first: The vast majority of the Sunshine State now believes global warming is a real phenomenon supported by scientific evidence. That’s great! But this is Florida, so you know there’s a Lake Okeechobee-size “but” hanging at the end of that first sentence.
Though Heat fans are incredibly unique and difficult to predict, we can still categorize them. Here are the five most common types found in Heat Nation.
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.
In November, more than seven in ten Floridians at the polls checked yes on Amendment 2, which legalized medical marijuana in the Sunshine State. Considering that Floridians would probably split 50-50 if asked whether they’d like a free delicious cupcake, that’s an amazing result.
That show ended in 2015 when the museum began its move to downtown and its rebranding as the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science. And now the circle of life continues. The new location will carry on with the laser show, the museum confirms. Frost Science public relations manager Paola Villanueva Ortega tells New Times that a new laser light show will debut June 2.
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 Heat fans were devastated when Dwyane Wade left for Chicago, but after the Heat’s miraculous turnaround season, would they even take him back in 2018?
