Smartphones in 2018 are necessary, ubiquitous devices that function as GPS location trackers, cameras that follow us into the bathroom, private-communication-logging devices, business computers, and, let’s be honest, porn-streaming screens. Yet there are still bizarrely few laws banning cops from swiping highly personal phone data without your consent or just cause.
Cops across the state have been repeatedly accused of misusing Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID), which logs motorists’ addresses, driver’s license photos, plate numbers, and other personal info. Sometimes they stalk ex-lovers. Other times, they just bother people they don’t like.
According to Jacques, Mill and Ross were friends who occasionally paid him for security services and consulting.
It’s all in a claims bill.
Despite budget cuts and taunts of “fake news,” local journalists continued to churn out great work in 2018.
Here’s an age-old question: Is Miami actually more corrupt than other cities, or do Florida’s fantastic public-records laws just let people find out more about their elected officials? We’re still not sure about that one. But 2018 wound up being yet another year in which Magic City politics drove us…
Jordan E. Goodman markets himself as “America’s Money Answers Man.” He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, CNBC, CBS, and even ABC’s the View. He spent 18 years as a Wall Street columnist for Money magazine. For three years, he was also allegedly telling people to invest in a Ponzi scheme…
The Church of Scientology was founded by a science-fiction writer. The group allegedly collects intel on its members and critics to use as blackmail, forces workers into indentured servitude, and maybe-probably has kidnapped people. In addition to attracting Hollywood celebrities, the Clearwater-based church also has a habit of buying tons of expensive real estate, including a new Miami headquarters, which opened in 2017 and received praise from former Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado.
When immigrant detainees enter the Adelanto Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center outside Los Angeles, they are trapped, virtually unable to consult with a lawyer, rights groups say. All calls, including those with counsel, are recorded. Detainees cannot leave voicemails and calls are cut off if humans…
With every day that passes, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s 2017 order to hold federal immigration detainees in his county’s jails seems like an even worse move. The Trump administration has offered Miami-Dade virtually nothing in financial incentives after the mayor loudly declared his county was not a “sanctuary” community. Instead,…
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed that cops can kill civilians under the Stand Your Ground law.
A plan to have a private investor build and possibly operate a new Miami-Dade jail is moving forward. County Commissioner Esteban Bovo first proposed the idea at an October meeting of the Chairman’s Policy Council. The plan involves replacing the county’s crumbling jails with new ones financed through “P3.”
As chairman of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, Bob Gualtieri was supposed to bring accountability to the families that lost loved ones in that school’s massacre on Valentine’s Day. But Tuesday, Gualtieri slapped those families across the face…
A lawsuit questions Miami-Dade officers training after hip-hop weekend shooting.
Miami Police officers said they had to shut down an Air Jordan shoe-release event at the Miami nightclub E11even this past Saturday after cops said patrons got too “rowdy” while waiting for sneakers. Video shows crowds surging against metal barriers in an unsafe manner.
Javier Ortiz has led the City of Miami Fraternal Order of Police since 2011. In that time, he has racked up excessive-force complaints, been sued a few times, and said demonstrably racist things on social media. He has also mysteriously escaped punishment after multiple Internal Affairs investigations and nearly lost his job after he got caught harassing a police critic online. He appeared to be made from Teflon.
Before the federal government sued California in an attempt to open the state to private-prison contractors, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought the advice of GEO Group, the Boca Raton-based, multibillion-dollar private-detention-facility corporation. Mother Jones broke news of the close ties between GEO and ICE’s legal team this past Friday. New Times has…
When Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez made a snap decision in 2017 to capitulate to Donald Trump’s threats and force the county to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, lawyers warned that innocent people were going to wind up getting hurt. The head of the Florida American Civil Liberties Union…
In 2014, New Times writer Terrence McCoy found 15 Miami men who’d been accused of murder on the A&E TV show the First 48 — and later walked free because they’d been wrongfully accused. Taiwan Smart was one of those men: In 2009, Smart contacted the City of Miami Police Department to…
For over three decades, the coral rock house at 900 Collins Ave. was a medical office run by Edward Roth, one of the first Jewish doctors in Miami Beach. Over the weekend, drawings of swastikas were found on the home.
Like all great conspiracy theorists, #QAnon believers hang on to their ideas whether or not there’s a shred of evidence. QAnon is the hilariously false theory that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a war within the government to arrest high-level Democratic pedophiles, and that a top Trump operative known as “Q”…
Peter Sean Brown was born in Philadelphia and is a U.S. citizen. But that fact apparently didn’t matter to Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay, whose deputies illegally held Brown in a jail overnight because they thought he should be deported to Jamaica, a country where he’s never lived…
