Crime & Police

Thirty years ago this November, federal agents unsealed a litany of indictments against arguably the most famous drug traffickers in world history: The Medellín Cartel, led by the infamous drug-importing Ochoa crime family and its accomplice, Pablo Escobar. The indictments were billed as the end of Miami’s era of drug-riddled violence. In 1986, crime had skyrocketed to unforeseen levels: There were 12,000 incidents per every 100,000 people. (Turns out arresting Escobar didn’t solve the city’s problems. The crime rate jumped to 13,500 by 1989.)

Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis and a friend, Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, had just finished a practice with the Republican congressional baseball team early this morning when they had an odd encounter with a man in the parking lot outside a Virginia baseball diamond. “There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there,” DeSantis recounted to Fox News this morning. “It was just a little odd.”

The details of Miami-Dade County’s proposed plan to surveil poor, black neighborhoods with semipermanent spy planes were grotesque. MDPD had asked for a federal grant for so-called wide-area surveillance (WAS) planes, which can record up to 32 square miles at once and were first used to track Iraqi insurgents.

In 2012, Homeland Security Bureau operatives within Miami-Dade County Police started tracking the social-media accounts of Occupy Miami protesters. The cops tracked Occupy protesters’ every day, sending out “situational awareness” bulletins to specific officers when activists hosted events as innocuous as a “Jazz Night.” Muhammed Malik, a local civil rights…

Annie had three evil spirits inside her. Well, actually, two: One was pregnant with a cute little baby evil spirit. Annie, a tough, athletic 31-year-old, learned of the problem during a walk near her Manhattan apartment, when a slightly chubby, blond teen dressed in a long, loose-fitting shirt stopped her…

According to a City of Miami Police arrest report, Ryan Gellineau was booked June 2, 2013, on charges of resisting an officer with violence, a third-degree felony. Officer Stanley Mike, who wrote the arrest affidavit, says he and another cop were set to arrest Gellineau’s girlfriend when Gellineau “charged” at the officers…

The Miami-Dade Police Department has already applied for a $500,000 Department of Justice grant to fly planes over the county that can record and track the movements of the city’s population. These “wide-area surveillance” systems were originally developed to track insurgents planting car bombs during the Iraq War — but now the technology is being used on American civilians.

In the last year, Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez positioned herself as a liberal fighting for the rights of disadvantaged black and brown Americans. At a protest against Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s decision to comply with President Trump’s sanctuary-city ban, Rosen Gonzalez swore to protect the city’s massive…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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.

For the past year, Brandon Russell has saluted the flag and worn the uniform of the Florida National Guard while serving his country as a private first class. But in his suburban Tampa apartment, Russell and his three roommates pledged allegiance to a whole different ideal. Russell’s bedroom was decorated with neo-Nazi and white supremacist propaganda and a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. His garage was full of guns, ammo, and high-powered materials for bomb-making.

Miami’s police union president, Lt. Javier Ortiz, notoriously said he had “no regrets” after posting a woman’s photos and contact information online and encouraging his Facebook followers to harass her. But when the case came before the city’s independent police oversight board this March, almost everyone agreed his actions reflected poorly on the police department.

The Coral Gables Police Department, which patrols one of the safest, richest parts of Miami-Dade County, inexplicably has two military-grade, tank-like armored trucks called Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected trucks (MRAPS). The department got the truck from the U.S. Department of Defense, which outfits local cops with military-grade equipment for free, so long…

Records show that everyone in Vernon’s immediate family, from Ziel to his first wife to all three of his children, have accused him of domestic violence.