Rob Hiaasen’s newspaper columns were funny — actually, honest-to-god funny. In 2015, he noted his daughter had adopted a South Florida manatee named Squeaky as a gift for him; Hiaasen then spent part of a newspaper column wondering what advice to give his newly adopted sea-cow son. He decided on “Be safe.”
Two years later, the stark facts of Gregory Frazier’s death are still startling. Frazier was eating a chicken dinner in his Pompano Beach backyard September 9, 2016, when two Broward County Sheriff’s deputies stormed in with guns drawn. It was 10 p.m. Within minutes, the two cops had shot Frazier six times, killing him on the spot.
The Broward Transitional Center is basically a jail for people who haven’t committed crimes. It’s designed to hold “low-level” immigrant detainees slated for deportation after they’ve been arrested on minor charges — such as driving without a license — or picked up on no criminal charges at all.
For years, the Civilian Investigative Panel (CIP) has been warning the Miami Police Department that its cops keep refusing to use their body cameras. Despite the fact that more than $1 million in federal and local public money had been spent on the cameras, the CIP — an independent group that looks into complaints against police — found in 2016 that dozens of cops still weren’t recording or uploading footage. In 2017, the CIP criticized MPD a second time for not fixing the problem.
Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez said last evening that if an August 2017 memo from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office accusing his cops of lying was accurate, his officers would indeed have been guilty of perjury and “committed a crime.”
Earlier this year, investigators from the Miami-Dade Police Department and state prosecutors discussed whether to charge or discipline a group of MDPD officers for perjury, but they ultimately declined to do so. That’s according to documents New Times obtained today from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office in the case of Ephraim Casado, who was beaten on camera after being pulled over for allegedly littering and driving recklessly.
Ephraim Casado allegedly did nothing but throw a bottle from his car March 27, 2017. According to documents and footage New Times obtained, Miami-Dade County cops responded by repeatedly punching him in the face, grinding his body into the asphalt, and painfully hoisting him into the air by his arms before arresting him on charges of “resisting an officer without violence.”
Three days after controversial SoundCloud rapper XXXTentacion was gunned down outside a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, the Broward Sheriff’s Office has arrested a suspect in the killing.
In February, a white homeowner in Little Havana captured video of a black stranger moving a garbage can in the resident’s front yard. The fisheye footage came from a “smart” doorbell made by Ring, a tech company now owned by Amazon. In a post shared with other locals, the homeowner labeled the man an “intruder” and warned neighbors to be on the lookout.
Before Miami-Dade County’s now infamous child-migrant camp opened back up in 2018 under President Donald Trump, the facility operated under Obama from 2016 through April 2017. And while the facility was up and running the first time, one worker at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children was sentenced to…
In Homestead, a federal compound housing as many as 1,000 migrant children is managed in part by a federal contractor based in Cape Canaveral called Comprehensive Health Services, which has held a contract at the Homestead camp since February 2018. Sen. Bill Nelson says 94 children at Comprehensive Health’s facility have been taken from their parents by U.S. immigration agents.
An estimated 1,000 migrant children are being held at a heavily guarded federal compound outside Miami. Yesterday guards at the facility threatened to arrest a New Times reporter who arrived at and first reported that the prison-like facility was operational. They later made similar threats to reporters from the Miami Herald and WPLG.
Though the rapper had received widespread criticism for allegations of brutal domestic abuse, investigators have not yet determined a motive for the murder of XXXTentacion or made any arrests.
XXXTentacion, a sensational rapper whose skyrocketing career was rocked by criminal charges of domestic abuse, was shot dead in Deerfield Beach this afternoon. TMZ first reported the shooting, which was later confirmed by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Witnesses on the scene posted graphic images of the rapper motionless in the driver’s seat of a BMW. BSO pronounced him dead around 5:40 p.m.
Roughly 1,000 migrant children are being held inside a secured compound in Homestead, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said today. It’s unclear whether the children crossed the border on their own or whether they were taken from their parents under President Trump’s new policy, which the United Nations says violates international law and which Catholic leaders have decried as “evil.”
Since 2000, Florida has cut its jail admissions rates, pretrial detention populations, and prison admission rates by a huge margin. The state’s urban communities have slightly decreased their arrest and imprisonment rates and slowly (very slowly) tried to become less arrest-happy.
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…
