This past April 23, Maribel Torres’ father called Miami-Dade County Police to say he hadn’t heard from his daughter in months. He suspected that her husband, 36-year-old Jimmy Torres, might be involved in her disappearance.
Last week, activists warned that the Glades County Detention Center was abusing Muslim detainees and refusing to let them observe Ramadan. Lawyers with the groups Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigrant Justice warned there were only eight days of the Islamic holy month left and begged ICE and Glades County Sheriff David Hardin, who runs the jail, to change their ways before time ran out.
After picking up her high schooler one day in December, Alison Paneque and her 15-year-old daughter stopped at a Coconut Grove juice bar for an after-school snack. But as Paneque pulled out of the parking lot, a Miami Police officer stormed up to her car and went on a curse-filled tirade.
This past October 31, Jose Alfonso, a former City of Miami cop working as an investigator for Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office, was heralded as a hero after he used his government-issued gun to wound an armed robber at a CVS in Perrine. Barely seven months later, on June 4, Alfonso was fired. The reason: He had repeatedly threatened to shoot and kill his co-workers…
In a small village like Biscayne Park, where crime is rare and local cops often have little to do besides keep an eye out for minor crimes such as car burglaries and vandalism, keeping pristine stats is all that matters. When your department has only a few dozen crimes a year to investigate, it looks pretty bad if you can’t solve them.
Before deporting anyone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are supposed to ask refugees, asylum seekers, and anyone else they meet at the nation’s borders whether they’re fleeing persecution in another country. José Crespo-Cagant says that after he came out as gay while living in Mexico in 2002, he was fired…
On November 2, 2014, Jennifer Harper called 911 about a domestic dispute with her husband. But when Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the couple’s Weston home that night, they decided to take her, not her husband, into custody.
In 2012, Miami-Dade County became one of the first places to test a gunshot-detection technology called ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors to alert police to gunfire. But after a year of the pilot program, the county abandoned the system over concerns about its effectiveness: Officers were able to confirm only 50 shootings of 1,000 supposedly detected by ShotSpotter, and the department couldn’t point to a single crime the technology helped solve.
When 92 Somali detainees were flown from Louisiana to Dakar, Senegal, and then inexplicably taken to Miami at the end of 2017, immigration lawyers representing the group were particularly worried about one thing: While some of the detainees were being held at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Krome Processing Center in West Miami-Dade…
American’s incarceration rate is absurdly, stupidly high. The United States imprisons more of its population than noted human-rights scofflaws such as Cuba, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — by a huge margin.
In January 2016, 15-year-old Alder Hill was bicycling home through Liberty City when someone jumped him, dragged him into a grassy field, and sprayed his body full of bullets. Dozens of people soon gathered at the murder scene, some snapping photos of the dead teen and uploading them to social media.
In 2014, James Eric McDonough walked into Homestead Police Chief Al Rolle’s office, placed his cell phone on the chief’s desk, and began recording. Rolle later claimed McDonough never warned him he was capturing their conversation, which, if true, might have been a violation of Florida’s “wiretapping” laws requiring that all parties consent to being recorded. Rolle contacted Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who sent McDonough a letter threatening to arrest him if he ever recorded the chief like that again.
Yoinis Cruz Peña, a 29-year-old motorcyclist, died after crashing on the Rickenbacker Causeway last weekend. His wife Yailen also suffered serious injuries. The bikers who were riding with Peña that day have insisted a Miami Police officer was chasing him when the crash occurred even though MPD said it had no record of any officer pursuing a motorcycle that day. The department’s union president, Ed Lugo, even spent the weekend on Twitter refuting that claim and insulting the motorcyclists.
Maybe the rainy weather had everyone in a funk. Maybe planetary cycles were weird all month. Perhaps local drug-enforcement police were designed from the start to act like an occupying force in communities of color and ought to be de-funded. Regardless of the reasons, Miami-area cops sure got filmed doing…
The Miami Police Department has been banned since 1998 from arresting homeless people for sleeping outside or from destroying their property on public sidewalks. Thanks to a decade-long ACLU lawsuit that resulted in that ’98 agreement, cops must give the homeless a chance to enter a shelter before they can be arrested for “life-sustaining” activities such as showering outdoors.
After North Bay Village Commissioner Douglas Hornsby dramatically announced he was being blackmailed over an old cocaine charge, the town’s police chief, Carlos Noriega, quickly homed in on a trio of high-profile suspects: Mayor Connie Leon-Kreps, the wife of Commissioner Jose Alvarez, and Ana Watson, a well-connected city board member and friend of the mayor’s.
Ever since they found out the company that promised to bring their ideas to life was actually just a massive scam, the would-be inventors who lost thousands to World Patent Marketing have hoped to see the company’s CEO behind bars.
America’s immigration agencies have been ripping families apart, detaining innocent people, and losing contact with seized children since long before Donald Trump became president. But because an open racist is in the White House, more white Americans are finally waking up to that fact.
May has been an absolutely awful month in South Florida for police-misconduct videos, from the Miami Police Department cop charged with assault for taking a flying kick at someone’s head, to the Miami-Dade County cops who shot a man for holding nothing but a screwdriver, to the Miami Beach officer…
Miami Beach Police arrested 40 people this past weekend for misdemeanor drug charges. That number far exceeded the 27 people whom City of Miami Police took into custody in three days during Ultra 2018.
In 1988, the American Civil Liberties Union teamed up with more than 5,000 homeless people and sued the City of Miami to stop police from rampantly arresting them on loitering charges. The city wound up settling a decade later, and the result — the Pottinger Agreement, named for lead plaintiff…
Another day, another public official wishing death and dismemberment upon the teenage survivors of the worst school shooting in South Florida history. After a North Miami Beach cop was suspended for calling the Parkland massacre survivors “crisis actors,” and a member of the Parkland Education Advisory Board was outed for…
