Police & Law Enforcement

When the controversial Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted premiered in 2015, some sex workers were upset about the film and argued it was a needlessly negative take on the porn industry. Some porn performers said the that film was demeaning to actors who consensually have sex on camera and that the movie, produced by Rashida Jones, cherry-picked negative stories from porn stars to make the industry look worse than it really is.

The U.S. government says Pedro Luis Martin Olivares is an international drug trafficker who exploited his position in the Venezuelan government to move narcotics through his country. According to U.S. officials, he “facilitated the movement of cocaine,” “accepted bribes from drug traffickers,” “bribed other Venezuelan officials,” and “worked closely with other…

If a City of Miami Police officer suspects you have drugs in your car, you’d better believe you’ll get arrested. Sure, prosecutors might eventually drop your case or send you to a pretrial diversion program, but there’s also a good shot you could end up in jail. Either way, the process is humiliating and expensive.

Under Miami Police Department rules, cops aren’t allowed to post selfies on Instagram showing them grinning next to detained, handcuffed people. The rule might seem self-evident, but in January, New Times caught Miami Police Captain Javier Ortiz — the city’s former police union chief known for insulting dead children…

Miami is unique. No other major city on Earth is wedged between the ocean and an endangered river of grass. No other metropolis in the United States was founded by a woman. So it makes sense the Magic City’s criminals are also an unusual breed.

Miami-Dade’s weird-crime chronicles include a fellow huffing dust-cleaner at a Homestead bus stop and a man allegedly tinkering with the dead at Miami cemetery.

Pro tip: If you want to work in a job where you arrest people for doing cocaine, don’t do cocaine yourself. That advice might seem obvious, but the Miami Springs Police Department says former cop Christopher Dweck failed to follow those wise words. Now, after failing a test for coke and amphetamines and getting fired, he is suing the department in federal court.

In 2014, Miami-Dade County prosecutors said Rickey L. Davis was a killer. State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office, working with Miami-Dade Police, announced it had determined Davis had strangled then-26-year-old Joycelean Burrows to death in Liberty City in 1986. Reporters blasted Davis’ mugshot all over the press and claimed new DNA evidence had solved the case after nearly 30 years.

Bryan Deneumostier helped run the website StraightBoyz for roughly four years.

If you’ve ever played soccer in Miami, you’ve seen it happen dozens of times: Someone makes a hard tackle or calls a borderline foul. Suddenly, the testosterone flows like cafecitos from a ventanita. Sweaty faces are pushed together. Someone screams, “¡Puta!” Chests are shoved. An irate striker grabs the portable goals and tries to walk off the field.

Clarens Desrouleaux spent five years in prison for burglary before he was deported to Haiti last year. The problem is that he never stole anything from anyone. Desrouleaux was, in fact, a victim of a heinous scheme by former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano in which he told his cops to frame black residents for burglaries in order to make his department seem competent.

Bud Conlin, a heavily bearded former high-school principal with a grandfatherly demeanor, has been showing up at the Krome Processing Center once a week since 2014. He’s the co-coordinator of Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees, a nonprofit that visits people at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, buys them books, and puts money…

On May 1, detectives with the South Florida Internet Crimes Against Children were assigned a case involving a 14-year-old girl. After downloading the contents of the girl’s iPhone 8, the investigators found what they were looking for: a series of explicit text messages sent to her by Kevin Kerlin, a 45-year-old Miami-Dade firefighter.

It takes a special sort of asshole to pin a bunch of crimes on an innocent 16-year-old kid just for being black. But former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano now admits he’s exactly that sort of asshole: Federal prosecutors announced today that Atesiano pleaded guilty to framing a Biscayne Park teenager…

The Taco Bell menu is pretty easy to comprehend in any language. Hell, half of it is just made-up words anyway — CrunchWrap Supremes and “nacho fries” aren’t exactly ancestral Mexican dishes. You can also order food by simply shouting a combo number, such as “T3” for a three-taco meal.

Traditionally, police need two to three months to collect, process, and analyze DNA samples. But with a new kind of technology recently adopted by the Miami Police Department, the entire procedure can be wrapped up in less time than it takes to watch a movie. Soon enough, the agency says, it’ll be able to analyze a suspect’s DNA before he or she is even released from custody.

Two civilian employees of the Miami Police Department were quietly fired this week after they were caught taking police “property” from storage lockers and placing it inside their own cars, a Miami Police spokesperson confirmed to New Times yesterday. A third civilian employee tied to the scheme resigned amid the investigation.

Comedian and TV star Hannibal Buress walked out of a Wynwood bar during Art Basel 2017, stepped right up to Miami Police Officer Luis Verne, and shouted “this cop is stupid as fuck” right into Verne’s body camera. While certainly confrontational, the incident was both legal and hilarious. Verne disagreed and…

The U.S. government recently launched a campaign to crack down on money-laundering and corruption in Latin America’s state-run oil companies, including the one in Venezuela. Now the target has moved a bit south and west. A Miami man yesterday pleaded guilty to trying to funnel more than $1 million to an official at Petroecuador, Ecuador’s state-run oil company.

Chief Colina is going a step further than any other police department in Miami-Dade with his department’s citation program: he is removing officer discretion for the first two violations, meaning all officers must issue a citation the first and second time a person is caught committing any of the five ticketable misdemeanors.