Crime & Police

For almost ten years, Pastor Frank Diaz has been feeding the homeless in Overtown. But beginning last year, he says, he and his volunteers have been repeatedly stopped by Miami Police officers and told they’re no longer allowed to hand out food.

In January, Miami-Dade prosecutors charged 42-year-old Ana Watson with four felonies for allegedly stealing thousands from the North Bay Village condo board where she served as treasurer. The charges came after months of work by Det. Tom Columbano, a 30-year veteran who pieced together the alleged scheme to pass off photoshopped checks.

The strip search played out in broad daylight on a sidewalk near Mana Wynwood: As Wendy Matute screamed for help, two male Miami Police officers held down her arms while a female officer held her legs apart. Another female officer, Annette Delgado, unzipped Matute’s shorts, pulled them partway down, and reached inside to grab three baggies of suspected drugs.

Russell Cooper, a 77-year-old South Florida grandfather using a walker, went viral in 2014 after Boynton Beach Police released video of him somewhat pathetically trying to rob a local PNC bank while armed with little more than a pocketknife.

A federal grand jury today unsealed multiple criminal charges against Antwan Johnson, a guard accused of encouraging a group of young inmates to beat up 17-year-old Elord Revolte, a detainee at a juvenile facility. As first reported in the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer-nominated investigative series Fight Club, Revolte died August 31, 2015, from what appear to be injuries sustained during the beating.

Every year for nearly a decade, Fred Guttenberg took the stage at his daughter Jaime’s dance recital for a routine called “Dancing Dads.” The number featured all of the dance dads doing their best to follow choreography and ended with all of the girls joining their fathers onstage.

Al Crespo has never been shy about his past. Before he became a pugnacious blogger, he robbed banks and served years in prison. So when Crespo watched Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo publicly shame a city employee last night over an old arrest record, he became so irate he hopped into his car and sped to Dinner Key to lambaste Carollo in front of the commission.

Since 2014, a colony of homeless sex offenders has been rapidly growing by the railroad tracks near Hialeah. Nobody wants them there, including the dozens who call the ramshackle camp home. Everyone, from the Homeless Trust to the ACLU to the county commission, agrees the encampment is a public health and safety hazard. But for years, the sex offenders have said that restrictive county laws mean they have nowhere else to legally live and that county officials have failed to solve the problem.

When former Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega was hired to run the cop shop in North Bay Village in 2015, he set out to hire a trusted veteran without local ties to head the internal affairs department. That person would also tackle sensitive political cases if they arose. Noriega chose Sam Bejar, a retired MBPD vet with decades of experience.

For 26 years, Gustavo Falcon lived the mundane life of a middle-aged suburban-Orlando dad. He jogged, he worked an ordinary job, and — unbeknownst to all of his new friends and neighbors — he kept one eye over his shoulder for the federal agents he knew one day would catch up to him.

The morning of April 17, Wilbur Cauley left all of his belongings in their usual place: stacked by a fence under the I-395 overpass at NW First Court and 13th Street. It was in the middle of a four-block area where about 30 homeless Miamians live. That morning, Cauley, an Army veteran in his late 50s who served three years in…

When Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida in 1992, the Category 5 storm destroyed much of Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Miami, a prison that houses 1,000 inmates near Zoo Miami. So whenever serious storms have threatened since then, the feds have evacuated inmates. In 2004, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) moved inmates out as Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne moved in.

When a group of Coral Springs Police officers rushed to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High this past February following reports of an active shooter, one officer says he arrived to find Broward Sheriff’s deputies taking cover behind cars and a tree — despite knowing that shooter Nikolas Cruz was still inside firing on students.

While fellow passengers record on their cell phones, a young man with a waxed mustache struggles with three Miami-Dade Police officers on an American Airlines plane sitting on the tarmac at Miami International Airport.

Is it possible to be so angry about racial politics in the workplace that you give yourself a heart attack? A lawsuit filed this week makes that case: Opa-locka Police Officer Alexander Hernandez, a self-described “white Hispanic” male, claims he was so upset upon hearing that a “black American” officer was being promoted to major over him that the news quite literally gave him a heart attack.

Looking at an Instagram collage that featured Miami Police Capt. Javier Ortiz smiling for a selfie above a photo of a handcuffed woman on the ground, Civilian Investigative Panel member Courtney Omega had to double check his rank. “This is a captain?” she said during a Tuesday meeting of the…

Nearly two years after a North Miami cop shot an innocent, unarmed black man lying on the ground with his arms in the air, the city’s police department is still reeling. The cop who shot Charles Kinsey, who was just trying to help an autistic man that bystanders mistakenly through had a weapon, has been charged with two felonies and the North Miami Police chief was fired.

BodyRx, an anti-aging clinic that offers testosterone and other hormone treatments, fills an unassuming office on the ground floor of a Coral Gables apartment complex. The lobby is pristine, with gray floors, ornate shelving, and delicate upholstery that wouldn’t seem out of place in a wedding planner’s office. As patients wait to be seen, a TV on the wall plays one testimonial on repeat.

After the mass shooting that left 17 dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, most Florida teachers were horrified by the push from President Donald Trump and GOP legislators to arm teachers. But one vocal Parkland faculty member — science teacher Sean Simpson — said he would be open to packing heat in the classroom.

Miami Gardens Sgt. Javier Romaguera’s credibility has been called into question since at least 2009, when he was first accused of filing a false police report. Over the next several years, his reputation became so tarnished the U.S. Attorney’s Office stopped prosecuting his cases. In April 2015, the feds notified his employer they would no longer even use him as a witness.