Police & Law Enforcement

In 2012, Miami-Dade County became one of the first places to test a gunshot-detection technology called ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors to alert police to gunfire. But after a year of the pilot program, the county abandoned the system over concerns about its effectiveness: Officers were able to confirm only 50 shootings of 1,000 supposedly detected by ShotSpotter, and the department couldn’t point to a single crime the technology helped solve.

When 92 Somali detainees were flown from Louisiana to Dakar, Senegal, and then inexplicably taken to Miami at the end of 2017, immigration lawyers representing the group were particularly worried about one thing: While some of the detainees were being held at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Krome Processing Center in West Miami-Dade…

American’s incarceration rate is absurdly, stupidly high. The United States imprisons more of its population than noted human-rights scofflaws such as Cuba, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — by a huge margin.

In January 2016, 15-year-old Alder Hill was bicycling home through Liberty City when someone jumped him, dragged him into a grassy field, and sprayed his body full of bullets. Dozens of people soon gathered at the murder scene, some snapping photos of the dead teen and uploading them to social media.

In 2014, James Eric McDonough walked into Homestead Police Chief Al Rolle’s office, placed his cell phone on the chief’s desk, and began recording. Rolle later claimed McDonough never warned him he was capturing their conversation, which, if true, might have been a violation of Florida’s “wiretapping” laws requiring that all parties consent to being recorded. Rolle contacted Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who sent McDonough a letter threatening to arrest him if he ever recorded the chief like that again.

Yoinis Cruz Peña, a 29-year-old motorcyclist, died after crashing on the Rickenbacker Causeway last weekend. His wife Yailen also suffered serious injuries. The bikers who were riding with Peña that day have insisted a Miami Police officer was chasing him when the crash occurred even though MPD said it had no record of any officer pursuing a motorcycle that day. The department’s union president, Ed Lugo, even spent the weekend on Twitter refuting that claim and insulting the motorcyclists.

Maybe the rainy weather had everyone in a funk. Maybe planetary cycles were weird all month. Perhaps local drug-enforcement police were designed from the start to act like an occupying force in communities of color and ought to be de-funded. Regardless of the reasons, Miami-area cops sure got filmed doing…

After North Bay Village Commissioner Douglas Hornsby dramatically announced he was being blackmailed over an old cocaine charge, the town’s police chief, Carlos Noriega, quickly homed in on a trio of high-profile suspects: Mayor Connie Leon-Kreps, the wife of Commissioner Jose Alvarez, and Ana Watson, a well-connected city board member and friend of the mayor’s.

America’s immigration agencies have been ripping families apart, detaining innocent people, and losing contact with seized children since long before Donald Trump became president. But because an open racist is in the White House, more white Americans are finally waking up to that fact.

May has been an absolutely awful month in South Florida for police-misconduct videos, from the Miami Police Department cop charged with assault for taking a flying kick at someone’s head, to the Miami-Dade County cops who shot a man for holding nothing but a screwdriver, to the Miami Beach officer…

Miami Beach Police arrested 40 people this past weekend for misdemeanor drug charges. That number far exceeded the 27 people whom City of Miami Police took into custody in three days during Ultra 2018.

In 1988, the American Civil Liberties Union teamed up with more than 5,000 homeless people and sued the City of Miami to stop police from rampantly arresting them on loitering charges. The city wound up settling a decade later, and the result — the Pottinger Agreement, named for lead plaintiff…

Another day, another public official wishing death and dismemberment upon the teenage survivors of the worst school shooting in South Florida history. After a North Miami Beach cop was suspended for calling the Parkland massacre survivors “crisis actors,” and a member of the Parkland Education Advisory Board was outed for…

By the time Demarcus Semer’s headlights flashed through the living-room window of the Fort Pierce house, the rest of the guys were already inside. Most nights, the group of childhood friends got together to rap and play videogames at 20-year-old Rhashaad Owens’ North 19th Street home, a three-bedroom ranch with…

Riding dirt bikes and ATVs on the highway is not a great idea, especially if you’re popping wheelies on busy Florida roads where drivers weave in and out of traffic and are regularly involved in accidents.

After another year of fear-mongering news reports and an overwhelming police presence at Memorial Day festivities in South Beach, the worst gun-related incident of the weekend came after a false rumor of gunfire. A brief panic erupted around 8:15 last night near Ocean Drive, sparking a minor stampede that left one person injured.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who in 25 years has never charged a police officer for killing someone while on duty, has quietly cleared another cop for killing an unarmed man.

In 2009, California artist Scott Gairdner made the “Sex Offender Shuffle,” a viral video parodying Miami-Dade’s treatment of sex offenders. With a catchy beat and ’80s-style cinematography, the four-minute spoof of the 1985 Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” mocked the way sex offenders are shuffled from one location to another under the guise of public safety.

“They shot me for nothing, man!” a man yells moments after Miami-Dade Police opened fire on him in Opa-locka this past Wednesday. In a Facebook video filmed just after the 1:15 p.m. incident at the Glorieta Gardens Apartments, the man insists he did nothing to cause officers to shoot him.