Imagine every conceivable moment when your pants might spontaneously burst into flames. Got them all? OK, now which one would be the single most absurd? Here’s a good one: You’re standing in front of a jury, arguing that your client didn’t purposely set his car on fire — because it spontaneously combusted. Oops, just like your pants!
When an audit revealed in mid-December that many Miami Police officers weren’t wearing their department-issued body cameras or downloading the footage, Police Chief Rudy Llanes told New Times he was ready to get to the bottom of the issue. But, much like Marco Rubio, he said he needed more information first about why the $1.3 million equipment, paid for by taxpayers and a Department of Justice grant, wasn’t being used.
Ifoxa Predestin has worked for the City of Miami’s Department of Solid Waste for the past 11 years. His life as a sanitation worker has been full of surprises — some good, some bad. The good: In 2015, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado honored him at a city commission meeting after Predestin used CPR to save a 2-year-old girl’s life on the job.
A Miami Police officer made himself the executor and sole beneficiary of an elderly man’s will.
Glen Carr pulls out his cell phone as soon as he rounds the corner outside the Miami-Dade County Courthouse. He knows he’ll spot them soon. Then, after he walks just a half-block more, the 40-year-old with a military buzzcut stops and points. “Look, there are two I can see right…
On June 30, 2015, Miami dentist Jesus Enrique Del Valle’s Ranger Rover hit a landscape worker on the road in Miami Beach, reportedly leaving the victim with permanent brain damage. But police say Del Valle didn’t stop to see if the worker was OK. Instead, he drove to a body shop owned by his girlfriend’s cousin to hide the damage to his SUV, the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office says. Del Valle apparently couldn’t cover the repairs in cash alone and needed an insurance quote, so he called Florida Highway Patrol Officer David Casillas to write a fake accident report.
The Miami-Dade Police handbook presumably does not authorize random joyrides to commit revenge beatings. In fact, that’s an idea so boneheaded it sounds like a technique Tammany Hall cops used during the 1863 New York City draft riots.
Last summer, the Miami Gardens Police Department held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new “Real Time Crime Center” — a command-center-like room equipped with video walls and laptops where detectives monitor what’s happening around town. The city pitches the center as a boon for a high-crime corner of Miami-Dade, but the heavy surveillance also makes civil rights activists uncomfortable in a city already rattled by one major police harassment scandal.
On Instagram, Richard Rodriguez comes across as a high-living gym fanatic, posing with top bodybuilding athletes and posting photos of luxury sports cars and his extreme adventures, such as skydiving and firing high-powered weapons. As owner of the popular Iron Addicts gym just north of downtown Miami, he had recently become a…
On a cold February day in 2013, Warren Papove deplaned in Vancouver with 65 cents to his name. After living in South Miami for ten years without committing a crime, Papove — a homeless handyman who did odd jobs for Commissioner Bob Welsh — had been reported to immigration officials and rounded up by ICE. Six months into his lockup at the Krome Detention Center, Papove was deported to his native Canada in the middle of winter without so much as a jacket to keep himself warm.
Shooting a suspect is one of the most serious actions a police officer can take. We entrust cops to walk around town with guns to protect people, but when they have to use them, we also expect a full, clear explanation of what happened and why they felt compelled to take potentially deadly action.
For once in Miami-Dade County, a police officer caught doing something blatantly racist won’t be getting his job back. Former Miami Beach Police Lt. Alex Carulo was fired alongside one other high-ranking cop in 2015 for sending hundreds of racist, sexist emails. The slew of garbage included images of a “Black Monopoly” board where every space sent the player to jail…
Most burglars wouldn’t bother cutting the lawn. But on an April day in 2014, that’s exactly what raised the suspicions of a woman in one Miami neighborhood. When she saw a strange man cutting the grass outside a home on SW Fourth Street, she called the homeowner to let him know.
Cops are supposed to give other cops “professional courtesy” when they’re out in public. That means they’re not supposed to arrest or ticket one another when they’re caught breaking the law. But after Donna “Jane” Watts, a Florida Highway Patrol officer, caught Fausto Lopez, a City of Miami cop, rocketing up the highway at 120 mph, she pulled him over — at gunpoint.
Miami Beach Police want to install controversial license-plate readers permanently on the city’s causeways. But it’s difficult to imagine how the department’s plate-reading dragnet could possibly get bigger: According to data New Times obtained from MBPD, the department sucked up data from at least 11,388,106 license plates in the past year.
This morning in a courtroom in Tallahassee, the seven justices of the state’s Supreme Court will hear a case that should be of interest to any Floridian concerned about bad cops. At stake is the question of whether citizens have the right to investigate police or whether we should trust…
In 2014, the brother of Marlon Woodstock, a resident of Sunrise in Broward County, called to warn police that the 38-year-old was off his medication and possibly a danger to himself. Sunrise Police responded by tasering Woodstock, attacking him with a dog, and then shooting him dead.
Apparently, every large gathering in Miami Beach is now an excuse to attack citizens’ privacy rights. In recent years, Miami Beach Police have cracked down hard on Memorial Day revelers, including with license-plate readers, which groups including the American Civil Liberties Union say pose a risk to the privacy of innocent people.
In 2007, then-Miami Beach Police Capt. Richard Weissman stood inside a Miami Beach hotel room, preparing his fellow officers for a prostitution sting. According to a later Miami Herald report, Weissman began tossing heated questions at the other cops, including “What if a prostitute comes in and tries to rob one of you guys?” and “What if when the prostitute enters the room, she locks the door?”
Two years ago, amid a spike in crime on South Beach’s iconic Ocean Drive, the city assigned eight police officers to patrol the street from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday. The city says the Ocean Drive Squad is “the centerpiece of the department’s efforts to address crime and other challenges facing Ocean Drive.”
There’s plenty of argument raging online about how to best honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, especially when MLK Day falls just before the inauguration of walking racist meme Donald Trump. But there’s no doubt that mass violence is the worst possible way to remember the civil rights icon. So…
When Charles Kinsey, an unarmed behavioral technician assisting an autistic client, was shot by a North Miami Police officer last summer, critics immediately assailed the department’s training procedures. Those cries only intensified when news broke that North Miami had recently lost its state accreditation in part due to problems with training its cops.
