Miami’s relatively small cadre of reporters spent the entire week struggling to cover a horrific school shooting in Parkland. The entire nation has been preoccupied with debates about gun control, politicians have spent most of the past few days reacting to news from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and typical news “beat” reporters have been shuffled around to cover the shooting news round-the-clock since Wednesday.
In a startling announcement, the FBI said in a news release moments ago that someone “close to Nikolas Cruz” called the bureau this past January 5 — slightly more than 30 days before this week’s massacre — and warned the federal government that Cruz owned guns and had expressed a desire to commit a school shooting.
Politicians and pundits trotted out the usual platitudes in the wake of Wednesday’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland: Marco Rubio shared some thoughts, offered prayers, and then went on Fox News to urge everyone not to jump to conclusions. Donald Trump tweeted about mental illness…
The leader of a Florida white-supremacist militia has told the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people yesterday at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, trained with the group. Members of the white-nationalist Republic of Florida came forward on the message-board website 4chan…
Before police even had a chance to clear out the bodies from yesterday’s horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, right-wing hack and conspiracy theorist Mark Dice took to Twitter to post a predictably bad take.
Everyone knew Nikolas Cruz was deeply disturbed. He’d been in and out of mental health treatment. He’d been kicked out of school. His Instagram page was full of photos of dead animals and weapons. He was so frightening to teachers that he’d been banned from even carrying a backpack into school.
A gunman has apparently opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, just west of Deerfield Beach. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) announced moments ago that multiple victims had been reported at the scene. The nearby Coral Springs Police Department has instructed residents to avoid the area and told…
Sitting in an unmarked police car in a dark lot outside her Allapattah apartment, Sara was crying and shaking uncontrollably. The dashboard clock glowed 2 a.m. Three weeks earlier, she had called 911 to report that her boyfriend had violently raped her.
Donald Trump’s deportation forces appear to be using Florida as a testing laboratory to devise new and ever-more draconian ways to clamp down on documented and undocumented immigrants nationwide. Last month, a group of Central and North Florida sheriffs announced plans to partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a pilot project designed to detain immigrants in jail for even longer stretches of time, for example.
Florida saw the nation’s largest spike in immigrant arrests in 2017. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apprehensions shot up 75 percent after Donald Trump took office. Though the U.S. is still arresting and deporting far fewer people than it did under Barack Obama, the fact is that the vast majority…
In December, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 92 Somali immigrants — many of them longtime U.S. residents with families, homes, and jobs. The feds loaded them onto an airplane, kept the immigrants chained in the sky for 48 straight hours as the plane took off from Louisiana for Somalia…
New Times reported in December that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Florida jumped more than 75 percent from 2016 to 2017, after Donald Trump took the presidency and effectively gave ICE agents carte blanche to arrest or deport whomever they want. But other analysts have continued to churn…
Around 1:30 a.m. January 16, 2016, the Miami Police Department received a call from a security service warning that a black man dressed conspicuously in a “teal long-sleeve shirt with pattern pants” used an ax to break into a Family Dollar store on NW 17th Street in Allapattah.
A long line of immigrants forms in the predawn hours every morning outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Miramar, and once a week, a small group of activists hands out coffee, water, and supplies to them. Today was Laurie Woodward Garcia’s first day protesting with the group. She was sickened by the scene: Immigrants told her they’d begun lining up at 4 a.m. but were still waiting outdoors in the heat past noon.
Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez, who runs America’s eighth-largest force, stood in county hall today, put his mouth in front of a microphone, and claimed with a straight face that there is “no widespread mistrust” of his department. His officers are transparent, he said, and already subject to rigorous oversight. So there was no need for the county to revive its civilian oversight board, Perez argued.
Last week’s “How One Famed Hollywood Restaurant Became the National Center for the Mob” catalogued the rise of Broward’s Gold Coast Restaurant as the Southern headquarters for the mob. This is the conclusion. If Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Restaurant was the white whale for law enforcement in South Florida, Lt…
The managers of Joseph’s Club Restaurant, a 24-hour bar in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, apparently really does not want patrons talking to cops. Miami Police say that earlier this afternoon, after someone stole a cell phone outside the restaurant, the management somehow barricaded the restaurant’s doors and locked as many as 12 people inside.
Holding federal immigration detainees in local jails has been ruled unconstitutional. The practice tears apart families, jails people who may never have been convicted of crimes, and can even lead to locking up the wrong people. For some reason, Miami-Dade County insists on detaining immigrants in local jails…
What the family didn’t know is that Owen had already been dead — and in the county medical examiner’s office — for seven days. Despite the fact that officers had recovered Owen’s body from beneath a Metrorail overpass May 31, his sister Kathy Kavalin says Miami Police never notified relatives to let them know.
Kim Hill is one of two activists who have been arrested and banned from City of Homestead public meetings simply for asking for reforms at the police department. In 2016, both Hill and activist James Eric McDonough told WSVN that they’d been arrested and carted out of city hall on three occasions, simply for asking for changes at the police department.
The defendant had already pleaded guilty and a gaggle of reporters had shuffled out of the federal courthouse Thursday morning. But Judge Federico Moreno wasn’t in any rush to leave, and neither were the half-dozen veteran prosecutors and defense attorneys. After all, this case had been more than two decades in the making, dating back to Miami’s cocaine cowboy heyday.
As of 2015, the Miami Police Department reported in a statewide audit that a whopping 2,243 rape and sexual-assault kits were sitting untested on city shelves collecting dust — the highest number of untested rape kits for a single agency in Florida. That meant 2,243 victims had reported a rape…
