In 2014, Miami-Dade County Police abandoned a technology called ShotSpotter, which detects gunshots using microphones, after the department claimed the technology didn’t work. Then, last September, MDPD decided to spend up to $5 million on ShotSpotter a second time, without mentioning that the technology failed the first time.
South Beach appears to be coming apart at the seams this month. Sure, spring break is nuts every year in Miami Beach, but 2017 was supposed to be different: Police have instituted liquor bans on the beach and even rolled out license-plate readers to try to track down alleged criminals who have entered the city.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami’s top prosecutor, hasn’t been the subject of much public outrage during her 24 years in office. Despite wielding a huge power over Miami’s criminal justice system, she’s largely flown below the radar since she took over for Janet Reno in 1993, despite having…
The three kids heard something in the night but figured mom was just arguing with her boyfriend Carlos. So they went back to sleep. Friday morning, 8-year-old Noah got up for school and awoke his siblings, 4-year-old Martha and 3-year-old Michael. Mom and Carlos still hadn’t stirred, so he walked…
According to a June 2012 police report, Civilian Investigative Panel member Danny Suarez ran into Miami Police Union President Javier Ortiz outside the Sugar Nightclub, threatened to get Ortiz fired, obstructed a traffic stop, and — when Ortiz attempted to arrest him — ran away from the scene of the…
In 2010, Miami-Dade County Police became the first law enforcement department in the nation to buy a drone. The $50,000, military-grade flying robot was paid for with a U.S. Department of Justice grant. But although buying an expensive drone is easy enough, figuring out how to legally fly what is basically a garbage can full of privacy-invading cameras is hard to do. So MDPD’s drone has sat virtually unused since 2011.
City of Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz was temporarily suspended this week. He was stripped of his gun and will be forced to fill out paperwork for the foreseeable future, thanks to a restraining order a county judge granted against him by a woman he’d harassed on Facebook. Ortiz runs…
Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz, the outspoken head of the city’s cop union, has been temporarily reassigned to desk duty and stripped of his gun, New Times has confirmed. The move came after a judge granted a restraining order to a woman Ortiz allegedly harassed and doxxed online.
The photograph would be cute if it weren’t outrageous. It shows two Miami Beach cops, eyes closed, heads back, and sound asleep in a police cruiser. An anonymous photographer says he took the snapshot of the on-duty officers, Grettel Monge and Pedro Gonzalez, napping together around 4:30 a.m. in the past few weeks not far from the beach, right around Second Street.
South Florida police departments racially discriminating against a person of color? You don’t say! The Miami Police Department has long been criticized for mismanagement, including by the U.S. Department of Justice, which found in 2013 that Miami PD was regularly abusing city residents and acting with excessive force including during an eight-month stretch when seven black men were fatally shot.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami’s lead prosecutor, waited until late Friday afternoon to announce she wouldn’t charge four state prison guards who threw a black inmate with schizophrenia into a scalding-hot, 180-degree shower and left him there until he died. In media circles, the move is known as a “Friday news dump,” meant to bury unsavory news over the weekend.
On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic man serving time for cocaine possession, was thrown into a prison shower at the Dade Correctional Institution. The water was turned up to 180 degrees — hot enough to steep tea or cook ramen noodles.
At least eight police officers, their guns drawn, moved in on a white Range Rover. Nine patrol cars blocked the road at the corner of Fourth Street and Alton Road in Miami Beach. Another cop restrained a police dog. The driver — a black man — had been handcuffed after getting out of the vehicle with his arms over his head, and a woman in the front seat had exited peacefully.
Roger Stone says his life is in grave danger. The maverick onetime adviser to Donald Trump and proud practitioner of political rat-fucking claimed in January that someone had tried to poison him with polonium — coincidentally or not, generating international headlines just as he released a book about Trump’s campaign.
Donald Shockey believes that everyone deserves to live in a clean neighborhood. When he lived in Miami Shores from 2001 to 2014, he didn’t have much of an issue because, he says, that city’s code-enforcement division was well funded and did a good job of making residents clean up their trash. But when Shockey moved into a home on NW 41st Street in the City of Miami in 2014, he says, found a neighborhood in disarray.
The City of Miami’s police union is run by a person who once called a dead 12-year-old a “thug,” has publicly called Islam a “religion that enslaves and allows the beating of women,” has been sued multiple times for alleged cases of police misconduct, and habitually posts on social media about how undocumented immigrants bring crime to American cities. Now Javier Ortiz has been reprimanded again for posting a private woman’s personal cell phone number on the internet and encouraging people to call her and yell at her — all because she caught a county cop speeding.
Miami is a city where “twerking etiquette” is a legitimate cultural and political concern. Skin is acceptable everywhere in Miami Beach, from strip clubs to retirement homes to military-weapons conventions. And most of the time, that cultural body acceptance is great.
Spring break season is upon us. Starting in late February, thousands of tourists have descended on Florida to fulfill their warm weather fantasies. Between now and April, many of them will make pit stops in Miami and Fort Lauderdale before heading south to the Caribbean. For visitors who are Bahama-bound,…
Imagine every conceivable moment when your pants might spontaneously burst into flames. Got them all? OK, now which one would be the single most absurd? Here’s a good one: You’re standing in front of a jury, arguing that your client didn’t purposely set his car on fire — because it spontaneously combusted. Oops, just like your pants!
When an audit revealed in mid-December that many Miami Police officers weren’t wearing their department-issued body cameras or downloading the footage, Police Chief Rudy Llanes told New Times he was ready to get to the bottom of the issue. But, much like Marco Rubio, he said he needed more information first about why the $1.3 million equipment, paid for by taxpayers and a Department of Justice grant, wasn’t being used.
Ifoxa Predestin has worked for the City of Miami’s Department of Solid Waste for the past 11 years. His life as a sanitation worker has been full of surprises — some good, some bad. The good: In 2015, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado honored him at a city commission meeting after Predestin used CPR to save a 2-year-old girl’s life on the job.
A Miami Police officer made himself the executor and sole beneficiary of an elderly man’s will.
