Police & Law Enforcement

Somewhere across the mystical river Acheron, the River of Woe, deep down in the darkest pits of the Malebolge, the undead servants of Hell are picking open a new prison in Cocytus, the frozen lake where God has permanently trapped Satan in the Homeric underworld. They await the arrival of a new Prince of Darkness, a Bringer of Sadness, a Miami man named Adrian Abramovich, who is accused of making 96 million illegal telemarketing robocalls in just three months…

A group of racial justice advocates gathered outside Hollywood, Florida’s city hall yesterday with a simple request: Change the names of streets honoring Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee, John Bell Hood, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was also the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Fritz Severe’s family believes police had no need to shoot him dead June 11, 2015. Severe was homeless, unarmed, and not posing much of a threat to anyone. He was standing in a park outside the Culmer/Overtown Branch Library and holding a three-foot-long metal pipe. According to the Miami Herald, a park worker called 911 to complain that Severe might have been bothering nearby children attending summer camp. But other witnesses said Severe was in the park every day and always carried his “little stick.”

Vagner Dapresa walked into the West Flagler convenience mart looking for justice. He’d been pumping gas the night before when another customer had shouted at him: “You’ve been looking at me a lot — and I don’t like faggots looking at me.” The remark stung Dapresa, a 31-year-old genderqueer Cuban-American…

In Nigeria, Dammy Krane is a major pop star whose silky-voiced party anthems like “Izzue” regularly hit the million-view mark on YouTube. Onscreen, Krane lives a hip-hop baller life of expansive mansions full of beautiful women and luxury cars.

In 2007, a jury convicted Liberty City native Harrel Braddy of kidnapping a 5-year-old and leaving her to die on the side of Interstate 75, where she was eaten alive by alligators. Eleven jurors believed Braddy should be put to death, but one disagreed. Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court vacated Braddy’s death sentence, calling it unconstitutional under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that invalidated the state’s sentencing practices.

If the Miami-Dade County Commission approves an upcoming funding request from Miami-Dade Police next month, the amount of money county police spend on guns, ammo, and body armor will have jumped from $6.8 million to $24 million — nearly quadrupling — in just a year.

For years, the graying, muscular teacher with a bright tattoo of Buddha inked across his back has been a sought-after yoga guru in South Florida. Every weekend, dozens of students from Miami to Palm Beach have gathered at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach for classes by the man called Yoga Fox, who boasted of crafting his own style of yoga — complete with live harmonium playing — after years of intense study.

Lawrence McCoy, a 29-year-old semihomeless man, was shot dead by Miami Beach Police Officer Adam Tavss in 2009. In 2011, a lawyer for McCoy’s family, Gregory Samms, sued the City of Miami Beach for wrongful death and claims McCoy was unarmed when he was shot. But the case remains open to this day. Once or twice a year, Samms drives to the Miami-Dade County Courthouse and files a motion to prevent the case from getting dismissed. But he says he can’t do much more.

Thirty years ago this November, federal agents unsealed a litany of indictments against arguably the most famous drug traffickers in world history: The Medellín Cartel, led by the infamous drug-importing Ochoa crime family and its accomplice, Pablo Escobar. The indictments were billed as the end of Miami’s era of drug-riddled violence. In 1986, crime had skyrocketed to unforeseen levels: There were 12,000 incidents per every 100,000 people. (Turns out arresting Escobar didn’t solve the city’s problems. The crime rate jumped to 13,500 by 1989.)

Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis and a friend, Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, had just finished a practice with the Republican congressional baseball team early this morning when they had an odd encounter with a man in the parking lot outside a Virginia baseball diamond. “There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there,” DeSantis recounted to Fox News this morning. “It was just a little odd.”

The details of Miami-Dade County’s proposed plan to surveil poor, black neighborhoods with semipermanent spy planes were grotesque. MDPD had asked for a federal grant for so-called wide-area surveillance (WAS) planes, which can record up to 32 square miles at once and were first used to track Iraqi insurgents.

In 2012, Homeland Security Bureau operatives within Miami-Dade County Police started tracking the social-media accounts of Occupy Miami protesters. The cops tracked Occupy protesters’ every day, sending out “situational awareness” bulletins to specific officers when activists hosted events as innocuous as a “Jazz Night.” Muhammed Malik, a local civil rights…

Annie had three evil spirits inside her. Well, actually, two: One was pregnant with a cute little baby evil spirit. Annie, a tough, athletic 31-year-old, learned of the problem during a walk near her Manhattan apartment, when a slightly chubby, blond teen dressed in a long, loose-fitting shirt stopped her…

According to a City of Miami Police arrest report, Ryan Gellineau was booked June 2, 2013, on charges of resisting an officer with violence, a third-degree felony. Officer Stanley Mike, who wrote the arrest affidavit, says he and another cop were set to arrest Gellineau’s girlfriend when Gellineau “charged” at the officers…

The Miami-Dade Police Department has already applied for a $500,000 Department of Justice grant to fly planes over the county that can record and track the movements of the city’s population. These “wide-area surveillance” systems were originally developed to track insurgents planting car bombs during the Iraq War — but now the technology is being used on American civilians.

In the last year, Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez positioned herself as a liberal fighting for the rights of disadvantaged black and brown Americans. At a protest against Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s decision to comply with President Trump’s sanctuary-city ban, Rosen Gonzalez swore to protect the city’s massive…

The Miami Beach Police Department’s basic mission statement tells officers to conduct themselves with “honor, courage, integrity.” The slogan is routinely plastered on official city and department documents. But when Lori Freedline, a civilian employee at MBPD, hung signs in her office that encouraged employees to act with “integrity” and to beware of “karma,” her boss wasn’t happy.