Crime & Police

An estimated 1,000 migrant children are being held at a heavily guarded federal compound outside Miami. Yesterday guards at the facility threatened to arrest a New Times reporter who arrived at and first reported that the prison-like facility was operational. They later made similar threats to reporters from the Miami Herald and WPLG.

Though the rapper had received widespread criticism for allegations of brutal domestic abuse, investigators have not yet determined a motive for the murder of XXXTentacion or made any arrests.

XXXTentacion, a sensational rapper whose skyrocketing career was rocked by criminal charges of domestic abuse, was shot dead in Deerfield Beach this afternoon. TMZ first reported the shooting, which was later confirmed by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Witnesses on the scene posted graphic images of the rapper motionless in the driver’s seat of a BMW. BSO pronounced him dead around 5:40 p.m.

Roughly 1,000 migrant children are being held inside a secured compound in Homestead, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said today. It’s unclear whether the children crossed the border on their own or whether they were taken from their parents under President Trump’s new policy, which the United Nations says violates international law and which Catholic leaders have decried as “evil.”

Since 2000, Florida has cut its jail admissions rates, pretrial detention populations, and prison admission rates by a huge margin. The state’s urban communities have slightly decreased their arrest and imprisonment rates and slowly (very slowly) tried to become less arrest-happy.

This past April 23, Maribel Torres’ father called Miami-Dade County Police to say he hadn’t heard from his daughter in months. He suspected that her husband, 36-year-old Jimmy Torres, might be involved in her disappearance.

Last week, activists warned that the Glades County Detention Center was abusing Muslim detainees and refusing to let them observe Ramadan. Lawyers with the groups Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigrant Justice warned there were only eight days of the Islamic holy month left and begged ICE and Glades County Sheriff David Hardin, who runs the jail, to change their ways before time ran out.

After picking up her high schooler one day in December, Alison Paneque and her 15-year-old daughter stopped at a Coconut Grove juice bar for an after-school snack. But as Paneque pulled out of the parking lot, a Miami Police officer stormed up to her car and went on a curse-filled tirade.

This past October 31, Jose Alfonso, a former City of Miami cop working as an investigator for Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office, was heralded as a hero after he used his government-issued gun to wound an armed robber at a CVS in Perrine. Barely seven months later, on June 4, Alfonso was fired. The reason: He had repeatedly threatened to shoot and kill his co-workers…

In a small village like Biscayne Park, where crime is rare and local cops often have little to do besides keep an eye out for minor crimes such as car burglaries and vandalism, keeping pristine stats is all that matters. When your department has only a few dozen crimes a year to investigate, it looks pretty bad if you can’t solve them.

Before deporting anyone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are supposed to ask refugees, asylum seekers, and anyone else they meet at the nation’s borders whether they’re fleeing persecution in another country. José Crespo-Cagant says that after he came out as gay while living in Mexico in 2002, he was fired…

On November 2, 2014, Jennifer Harper called 911 about a domestic dispute with her husband. But when Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the couple’s Weston home that night, they decided to take her, not her husband, into custody.

In 2012, Miami-Dade County became one of the first places to test a gunshot-detection technology called ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors to alert police to gunfire. But after a year of the pilot program, the county abandoned the system over concerns about its effectiveness: Officers were able to confirm only 50 shootings of 1,000 supposedly detected by ShotSpotter, and the department couldn’t point to a single crime the technology helped solve.

When 92 Somali detainees were flown from Louisiana to Dakar, Senegal, and then inexplicably taken to Miami at the end of 2017, immigration lawyers representing the group were particularly worried about one thing: While some of the detainees were being held at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Krome Processing Center in West Miami-Dade…

American’s incarceration rate is absurdly, stupidly high. The United States imprisons more of its population than noted human-rights scofflaws such as Cuba, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — by a huge margin.

In January 2016, 15-year-old Alder Hill was bicycling home through Liberty City when someone jumped him, dragged him into a grassy field, and sprayed his body full of bullets. Dozens of people soon gathered at the murder scene, some snapping photos of the dead teen and uploading them to social media.

In 2014, James Eric McDonough walked into Homestead Police Chief Al Rolle’s office, placed his cell phone on the chief’s desk, and began recording. Rolle later claimed McDonough never warned him he was capturing their conversation, which, if true, might have been a violation of Florida’s “wiretapping” laws requiring that all parties consent to being recorded. Rolle contacted Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who sent McDonough a letter threatening to arrest him if he ever recorded the chief like that again.

Yoinis Cruz Peña, a 29-year-old motorcyclist, died after crashing on the Rickenbacker Causeway last weekend. His wife Yailen also suffered serious injuries. The bikers who were riding with Peña that day have insisted a Miami Police officer was chasing him when the crash occurred even though MPD said it had no record of any officer pursuing a motorcycle that day. The department’s union president, Ed Lugo, even spent the weekend on Twitter refuting that claim and insulting the motorcyclists.

Maybe the rainy weather had everyone in a funk. Maybe planetary cycles were weird all month. Perhaps local drug-enforcement police were designed from the start to act like an occupying force in communities of color and ought to be de-funded. Regardless of the reasons, Miami-area cops sure got filmed doing…

After North Bay Village Commissioner Douglas Hornsby dramatically announced he was being blackmailed over an old cocaine charge, the town’s police chief, Carlos Noriega, quickly homed in on a trio of high-profile suspects: Mayor Connie Leon-Kreps, the wife of Commissioner Jose Alvarez, and Ana Watson, a well-connected city board member and friend of the mayor’s.