Crime & Police

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.

Seventeen months after the City of Miami signed an agreement allowing police officers to hand out civil citations instead of arresting people for certain minor misdemeanors — including possessing small amounts of marijuana — Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina says his officers will finally begin doing so by the end of this month.

Miami can’t build anything nice without someone getting charged with fraud along the way. Miami Beach pharmaceutical baron Phillip Frost pumped enough money into the new downtown science museum that the city wound up naming the place after him. He lives in a $59 million mansion on Star Island and sits in the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame.

Of the 10,078 total citations issued between July 1, 2015, and July 1, 2018, 72 percent — or 7,268 — were given to white people. Twenty-eight percent — or 2,789 — were given to black people.

Derek Graham admits he didn’t answer questions from City of Miami Police officers September 14, 2014. But that’s because he says he couldn’t. He was having a seizure.

Have sex indoors. Do whatever the hell you want as long as it’s consensual and behind closed doors. Don’t have sex in public. Especially don’t have sex on the 1300 block of Ocean Drive in broad daylight on Labor Day. Especially if you are a Catholic priest visiting Miami Beach with another church-affiliated man.

According to the feds, Harlem Suarez was a radical, an extremist, and an imminent danger to the public. In the summer of 2015, a confidential informant recorded the 23-year-old plotting to bomb a public beach in the Florida Keys, and investigators found an arsenal of explosive materials inside his apartment. After a three-month investigation, FBI agents swarmed Key West and charged him with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.

Earlier this year, New Times detailed the horrific case of Maria, a 24-year-old who fled persecution in Guatemala, gave birth to multiple American children, and wound up jailed in an ICE detention facility in South Florida after she was arrested while trying to pay a $150 traffic fine. Speaking from inside the detention center, Maria told New Times in Spanish that she was allowed to see her three young children only an hour or two each week and that her 9-year-old daughter was afraid she’d also be detained if she visited her mom.

If you’ve driven through Coral Gables anytime in the past three years, it’s almost 100 percent certain police have a photo of your license plate and the ability to pinpoint your vehicle as it traveled within city limits. Despite having just 50,000 residents, the Gables is on track to capture 30 million license plates this year — more than 26 other police agencies in South Florida.

In 2005, the Florida Legislature passed arguably the state’s most controversial law, Stand Your Ground. Now, whether or not cops can use that defense comes down to how the state’s highest court defines the word “person.”

On the Netflix show Narcos, Valeria Velez is a Colombian journalist who carries on a years-long affair with drug lord Pablo Escobar while he builds his empire and makes a short-lived foray into politics. Her story ends abruptly when she’s killed by a vigilante group after delivering a radio to help Escobar communicate while in custody.

After gunning down two unarmed black men outside a Miami strip club in 2012, security guard Lukace Kendle claimed the shooting was justified under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. During the trial, where Kendle chose to act as his own attorney, he compared himself to George Zimmerman and claimed the evidence was fabricated “because I’m white.”

Miami-Dade County Administrative Law Judge Timothy Maher was arrested last week for reportedly threatening to shoot his family members in his El Portal home. Then, yesterday, Maher allegedly threatened to kill someone at his federal office, which handles disability and Social Security cases. Maher’s threat was serious enough that the Federal Protective Service evacuated the building.

Social media fame is a race to the bottom. Concepts that seem novel one day get chewed up, memed, and worn out in days in a brutal system that ensures only the most outrageous, shameless people are able to achieve sustained fame. Alex Jones has millions of followers. People think the QAnon conspiracy is real. Teen rapper Tay-K scored a massive hit after writing a song about his capital murder charges.

Corey Jones was sitting in his broken-down car on the side of the highway in the middle of the night while he waited for a tow. Suddenly, Nouman Raja came barreling the wrong way up the off-ramp. Raja, an undercover cop in an unmarked white van, strode up to Jones’ window and demanded he put his “fuckin'” hands up.

Miami’s biggest honey caper began unraveling this past April 25, when William Steel bumped into a drum of honey at his company’s warehouse in Homestead. The drum was supposed to be full of 600 pounds of honey, but it wobbled like it was half-empty.