Crime & Police

In 2015, Elgin Hilliard was involved in an accident at work. His injuries were so severe he now walks with a cane and permanently cannot work. But in 2016, barely a year after the accident, Hialeah Police officers allegedly found him so intimidating they threatened to fire their Tasers at him, accused him of threatening to attack the cops, and screamed racial slurs at him, Hilliard says. He alleges in a federal lawsuit filed yesterday that Hialeah officers made comments about his “black ass,” spit on him, and called him the N-word at least once.

Twenty-three-year-old Juvon Simon was at his apartment in Florida City when cops showed up on the afternoon of May 30. According to a witness, Simon ran inside, shut the door, and then dropped dead; a preliminary investigation found that Florida City Police Officer Frantz Hardy was responsible for firing two shots through the door, killing Simon almost instantly.

In the midst of the revelry, a Sigma Chi frat bro bit off a guy’s ear.

Friday, federal officers arrested a man outside an AutoZone store in Plantation in connection with several pipe bombs that were sent to several prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday, three City of Miami Police officers were arrested on federal drug charges. The trio are accused of working as armed escorts for drug traffickers. At a press conference yesterday, U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo Orshan said the three had received tens of thousands of dollars in compensation. Kelvin Harris,…

In 2014, Florida lawmakers reversed their stance on mandatory minimum sentences for opioid offenses, but that means little for the thousands of Floridians like Powell who were sentenced before the law changed. If Amendment 11 passes, changes the Florida Legislature makes to criminal statutes would be retroactive, meaning a person who received a harsh mandatory minimum sentence when lawmakers were cracking down on things like opioid use would have a chance to get their sentence retroactively reduced. The impact on Florida’s prison population — the third largest in the nation — could be huge.

In the seven years since Coral Gables began installing automatic license-plate readers, resident Raul Mas Canosa estimates the city has captured images of his car “thousands of times.” It’s a reasonable guess: By the end of the year, the City Beautiful is on track to scan more than 30 million license plates despite having a population of only 50,000.

Lew has received not only a promotion from deputy chief medical examiner to director of Miami-Dade’s Medical Examiner Department, but also an award and even a pay bump. In March 2017, the year Rundle decided not to press charges, Lew was given Miami-Dade’s In the Company of Women Award for being an “Outstanding Woman in Government.”

For years, Miami-based attorney Eric Waraftig helped bankroll a QVC marketing director’s lavish lifestyle by embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars and using inside information to make deals with competitors — all so he could pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks.

There is virtually no reason for a group of large adult male cops to pin a 14-year-old girl to the ground and continully punch her in the ribs and kidneys. Yet after Coral Springs Police officers were filmed doing exactly that to a teen outside the Coral Square Mall yesterday, the police department is now trying to defend itself and callously throwing the teen under the bus for somehow provoking the beating.

If you were planning on, say, enjoying a leisurely day at South Pointe Pier this Saturday, don’t be alarmed when you see a crowd of people openly carrying Glocks.

A Broward County judge has confirmed the Hollywood Police Department ruined the lives of ten gay men for no reason at all. This past July 26, Hollywood PD raided a gay-cruising hangout and arrested eight men allegedly caught masturbating in a private backroom and two others accused of performing oral sex on each other. The police department then sent the men’s photos and names to the media, and many outlets happily blasted out the men’s identities. One man said he was outed and fired from his job as a result.

Miami-Dade County cops burst into the home of 18-year-old Bryan Crespo last March to arrest him for allegedly stealing airbags from local cars. But according to surveillance video New Times has obtained, an MDPD officer identified as Sgt. Manuel Regueiro decided to wallop Crespo in the face after he…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an agency dedicated to kicking poor immigrants out of the country. ICE functions with even less oversight than local cops and a mandate to just wantonly kick brown people out of America. Studies show deportations have no impact on the U.S. crime rate! And that…

Fraud investigators from Miami-Dade’s property appraiser are looking into claims that Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart committed homestead-exemption fraud, an office spokesperson confirms to New Times. Eileen Hernandez, an agency spokesperson, says the appraiser’s Homestead-Exemption Fraud Office has received “numerous complaints” after local blogger and mortgage broker Grant Stern published documents he said show…

Leonard Pozner has lived through unimaginable pain. His son Noah was shot to death during the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which six adults and 20 children were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut. Then, after that incomprehensible tragedy, conspiracy theorists and gun-rights advocates have continued to harass him. Pozner is suing InfoWars’ Alex Jones for defamation after Jones repeatedly claimed Pozner was a fake “crisis actor.”

A 26-year-old Miami woman was out enjoying the long Labor Day weekend last year in Wynwood when her evening took a nightmarish turn. She’d had too much to drink when she and a friend stepped outside El Patio. When 51-year-old Uber driver Fredrick Gaston offered her a ride, she was…

In September, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission slapped Miami biotech billionaire Phillip Frost with a massive lawsuit accusing him of stock fraud. According to the SEC, Frost and his co-conspirators artificially inflated the price of stocks and then exited with millions, leaving other investors with virtually worthless shares. After the charges were announced in national media, stock prices for Frost’s company, Opko Health, plummeted.

Rayan Rodriguez just wanted to play a few rounds of dominoes in Máximo Gómez Park — better known as Calle Ocho’s famous Domino Park — where tourists line up all day to snap photos of viejitos slapping tiles down on the park’s tables. But instead of snagging a table, Rodriguez…

Flavio Musmanno lost his wallet August 28. He has lived in North Miami Beach on an expired visa since emigrating from Argentina in 2000, but he’d since married an American citizen and is in the process of applying for permanent residency.

Miami Police officers nearly just won the right to do drugs and get away with it. Last month, New Times obtained a copy of the police department’s new labor contract, and its language would let cops caught doing illegal drugs keep their jobs as long as they entered rehab after failing a drug test. Many critics found the rule hypocritical because one of the police department’s main jobs is to arrest people doing drugs.