Crime & Police

A homeless man with no arms, Jonathan Crenshaw has spent years in South Beach painting colorful canvases using his feet while tourists circle and gawk at the work.

The Glades County Detention Center, which sits less than two hours northwest of Miami, is a county jail that also holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The facility is also allegedly a hot spot of abuse and malfeasance. Back in 2015, the Glades County Sheriff’s…

Despite the fact that Donald Trump came to Miami on the campaign trail and promised to be a friend to Miami’s exilio community in Little Havana, deportations to Cuba spiked after he took office. As of December 9, 2017, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was holding 1,686 Cuban nationals in detention and had…

It perhaps makes sense that one of America’s combined capitals of drug imports and vapid, image-based capitalism is also arguably the nation’s steroid epicenter. Despite ‘roid scandals hitting the news wires about as frequently as Donald Trump hits up Kentucky Fried Chicken, Florida officials seem to have no real interest…

Since the Parkland shooting last February, Broward Sheriff Scott Israel has been the target of a bunch of insane, conspiratorial fearmongering and outrage. He’s been lambasted on InfoWars and attacked by National Rifle Association ghoul Dana Loesch. But there are plenty of very real problems with the sheriff, including the…

After 12 elderly patients died during Hurricane Irma at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills in Hollywood last September, South Floridians were not stunned to learn that the doctor who owned the facility, Jack Michel, had a history of fraud complaints. As WPLG’s Bob Norman noted last November, nothing stopped Michel — who…

Inspiration struck Joe Stone in the most Miami way possible, with his mind wandering and hands behind the wheel of a Porsche Macan as he sped down Interstate 95. “I was driving on I-95 and the entire concept just downloaded into my brain, from the name of the show, to the people I wanted to get involved to help me produce it, to the format,” says Stone, a music producer and writer.

Just over a year ago, Ryan Gellineau sued the Miami Police Department after he says he recorded an MPD officer walking up to him and punching him in the face after he asked the officer, Stanley Mike, for his badge number. Worse, Gellineau says his video evidence of the…

Richard Rodriguez checked the $97,000 Rolex on his wrist again. A crowd milled outside the gate at Miami International Airport, waiting for boarding that was supposed to have begun five minutes ago for an early-morning flight to L.A. What was the holdup? The 37-year-old gym rat with a razored scalp…

American prisons are terrible places for pretty much everyone — including both inmates and the guards who work there. Guards are accused of abuse all the time, sure, but many are also victims of the same broken justice system, as evidenced by the numerous news reports over the years that…

Barely a few months ago, the concept of “abolishing” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and handing its duties off to other government agencies seemed like a far-left pipe dream. In a stunningly short amount of time, though, multiple elected officials have endorsed the idea. Candidates are running on abolishing ICE. And now, 19 special agents in charge of major-city Homeland Security offices have kinda-sorta gotten onboard.

Rob Hiaasen’s newspaper columns were funny — actually, honest-to-god funny. In 2015, he noted his daughter had adopted a South Florida manatee named Squeaky as a gift for him; Hiaasen then spent part of a newspaper column wondering what advice to give his newly adopted sea-cow son. He decided on “Be safe.”

Two years later, the stark facts of Gregory Frazier’s death are still startling. Frazier was eating a chicken dinner in his Pompano Beach backyard September 9, 2016, when two Broward County Sheriff’s deputies stormed in with guns drawn. It was 10 p.m. Within minutes, the two cops had shot Frazier six times, killing him on the spot.

The Broward Transitional Center is basically a jail for people who haven’t committed crimes. It’s designed to hold “low-level” immigrant detainees slated for deportation after they’ve been arrested on minor charges — such as driving without a license — or picked up on no criminal charges at all.

For years, the Civilian Investigative Panel (CIP) has been warning the Miami Police Department that its cops keep refusing to use their body cameras. Despite the fact that more than $1 million in federal and local public money had been spent on the cameras, the CIP — an independent group that looks into complaints against police — found in 2016 that dozens of cops still weren’t recording or uploading footage. In 2017, the CIP criticized MPD a second time for not fixing the problem.

Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez said last evening that if an August 2017 memo from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office accusing his cops of lying was accurate, his officers would indeed have been guilty of perjury and “committed a crime.”

Earlier this year, investigators from the Miami-Dade Police Department and state prosecutors discussed whether to charge or discipline a group of MDPD officers for perjury, but they ultimately declined to do so. That’s according to documents New Times obtained today from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office in the case of Ephraim Casado, who was beaten on camera after being pulled over for allegedly littering and driving recklessly.

Ephraim Casado allegedly did nothing but throw a bottle from his car March 27, 2017. According to documents and footage New Times obtained, Miami-Dade County cops responded by repeatedly punching him in the face, grinding his body into the asphalt, and painfully hoisting him into the air by his arms before arresting him on charges of “resisting an officer without violence.”

Three days after controversial SoundCloud rapper XXXTentacion was gunned down outside a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, the Broward Sheriff’s Office has arrested a suspect in the killing.

In February, a white homeowner in Little Havana captured video of a black stranger moving a garbage can in the resident’s front yard. The fisheye footage came from a “smart” doorbell made by Ring, a tech company now owned by Amazon. In a post shared with other locals, the homeowner labeled the man an “intruder” and warned neighbors to be on the lookout.

Before Miami-Dade County’s now infamous child-migrant camp opened back up in 2018 under President Donald Trump, the facility operated under Obama from 2016 through April 2017. And while the facility was up and running the first time, one worker at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children was sentenced to…

In Homestead, a federal compound housing as many as 1,000 migrant children is managed in part by a federal contractor based in Cape Canaveral called Comprehensive Health Services, which has held a contract at the Homestead camp since February 2018. Sen. Bill Nelson says 94 children at Comprehensive Health’s facility have been taken from their parents by U.S. immigration agents.