Crime & Police

Donald Trump’s deportation forces appear to be using Florida as a testing laboratory to devise new and ever-more draconian ways to clamp down on documented and undocumented immigrants nationwide. Last month, a group of Central and North Florida sheriffs announced plans to partner with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a pilot project designed to detain immigrants in jail for even longer stretches of time, for example.

Florida saw the nation’s largest spike in immigrant arrests in 2017. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apprehensions shot up 75 percent after Donald Trump took office. Though the U.S. is still arresting and deporting far fewer people than it did under Barack Obama, the fact is that the vast majority…

In December, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 92 Somali immigrants — many of them longtime U.S. residents with families, homes, and jobs. The feds loaded them onto an airplane, kept the immigrants chained in the sky for 48 straight hours as the plane took off from Louisiana for Somalia…

New Times reported in December that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Florida jumped more than 75 percent from 2016 to 2017, after Donald Trump took the presidency and effectively gave ICE agents carte blanche to arrest or deport whomever they want. But other analysts have continued to churn…

Around 1:30 a.m. January 16, 2016, the Miami Police Department received a call from a security service warning that a black man dressed conspicuously in a “teal long-sleeve shirt with pattern pants” used an ax to break into a Family Dollar store on NW 17th Street in Allapattah.

A long line of immigrants forms in the predawn hours every morning outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Miramar, and once a week, a small group of activists hands out coffee, water, and supplies to them. Today was Laurie Woodward Garcia’s first day protesting with the group. She was sickened by the scene: Immigrants told her they’d begun lining up at 4 a.m. but were still waiting outdoors in the heat past noon.

Miami-Dade County Police Director Juan Perez, who runs America’s eighth-largest force, stood in county hall today, put his mouth in front of a microphone, and claimed with a straight face that there is “no widespread mistrust” of his department. His officers are transparent, he said, and already subject to rigorous oversight. So there was no need for the county to revive its civilian oversight board, Perez argued.

Last week’s “How One Famed Hollywood Restaurant Became the National Center for the Mob” catalogued the rise of Broward’s Gold Coast Restaurant as the Southern headquarters for the mob. This is the conclusion. If Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Restaurant was the white whale for law enforcement in South Florida, Lt…

The managers of Joseph’s Club Restaurant, a 24-hour bar in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, apparently really does not want patrons talking to cops. Miami Police say that earlier this afternoon, after someone stole a cell phone outside the restaurant, the management somehow barricaded the restaurant’s doors and locked as many as 12 people inside.

Holding federal immigration detainees in local jails has been ruled unconstitutional. The practice tears apart families, jails people who may never have been convicted of crimes, and can even lead to locking up the wrong people. For some reason, Miami-Dade County insists on detaining immigrants in local jails…

What the family didn’t know is that Owen had already been dead — and in the county medical examiner’s office — for seven days. Despite the fact that officers had recovered Owen’s body from beneath a Metrorail overpass May 31, his sister Kathy Kavalin says Miami Police never notified relatives to let them know.

Kim Hill is one of two activists who have been arrested and banned from City of Homestead public meetings simply for asking for reforms at the police department. In 2016, both Hill and activist James Eric McDonough told WSVN that they’d been arrested and carted out of city hall on three occasions, simply for asking for changes at the police department.

The defendant had already pleaded guilty and a gaggle of reporters had shuffled out of the federal courthouse Thursday morning. But Judge Federico Moreno wasn’t in any rush to leave, and neither were the half-dozen veteran prosecutors and defense attorneys. After all, this case had been more than two decades in the making, dating back to Miami’s cocaine cowboy heyday.

As of 2015, the Miami Police Department reported in a statewide audit that a whopping 2,243 rape and sexual-assault kits were sitting untested on city shelves collecting dust — the highest number of untested rape kits for a single agency in Florida. That meant 2,243 victims had reported a rape…

Three City of Miami Police officers raced down the train tracks, desperately waving their arms at the freight train barreling past the NE 54th Street intersection. A few hundred feet down the tracks, a dark-green SUV was stuck on the rails. If the train hit the car at full speed, it could easily derail the miles of shipping containers.

Mel Fisher is the closest thing Florida has to Indiana Jones. Recently retired Floridians adopt the state’s Jimmy Buffett-inspired, faux-pirate persona after spending 30 years selling renters insurance in Denver, but Fisher was the real deal. He spent his life diving for pirate treasure and most famously hit the mother lode…

Late one Tuesday night, a heavyset man in a worn-out sport coat lumbered out of a sprawling restaurant on Hollywood Beach to his parking spot, the one closest to the building. His basset hounds, Amos and Tillie, tagged along. Even at 78 years old, Joe Sonken was usually the first…

In September 2014, Miami-Dade Police Sgt. James Edwards submitted a two-sentence letter resigning from the department with a “heavy heart” because of personal circumstances. But those circumstances also happened to involve two other people: a 15-year-old boy and his 16-year-old brother.

The Florida Department of Corrections remains adamant that “Operation PUSH,” a statewide prison-labor strike designed to force state officials to treat prisoners better, never actually happened, even though prisoner-rights groups released a statement last week about the action. They say prisoners in more than a dozen facilities either went on…

Last week, a video went viral showing a Jamaican-born grandmother being hauled off a Greyhound bus at a Fort Lauderdale station. The woman was returning from visiting her grandchild for the first time in Orlando, according to activists who mounted a campaign to pressure the bus line to stop granting federal agents access to randomly demand papers from its customers.

Miami Beach leaders took turns last week heaping praise on the founders of a secret Facebook group aimed at banishing criminals from the city. “You’ve taken an active role to become part of a solution for your community, and it’s just beautiful,” Commissioner John Elizabeth Alemán gushed. Added Commissioner Kristen Rosen…