Miami Police Lt. Javier Ortiz, the outspoken head of the city’s cop union, has been temporarily reassigned to desk duty and stripped of his gun, New Times has confirmed. The move came after a judge granted a restraining order to a woman Ortiz allegedly harassed and doxxed online.
The photograph would be cute if it weren’t outrageous. It shows two Miami Beach cops, eyes closed, heads back, and sound asleep in a police cruiser. An anonymous photographer says he took the snapshot of the on-duty officers, Grettel Monge and Pedro Gonzalez, napping together around 4:30 a.m. in the past few weeks not far from the beach, right around Second Street.
South Florida police departments racially discriminating against a person of color? You don’t say! The Miami Police Department has long been criticized for mismanagement, including by the U.S. Department of Justice, which found in 2013 that Miami PD was regularly abusing city residents and acting with excessive force including during an eight-month stretch when seven black men were fatally shot.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami’s lead prosecutor, waited until late Friday afternoon to announce she wouldn’t charge four state prison guards who threw a black inmate with schizophrenia into a scalding-hot, 180-degree shower and left him there until he died. In media circles, the move is known as a “Friday news dump,” meant to bury unsavory news over the weekend.
On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic man serving time for cocaine possession, was thrown into a prison shower at the Dade Correctional Institution. The water was turned up to 180 degrees — hot enough to steep tea or cook ramen noodles.
At least eight police officers, their guns drawn, moved in on a white Range Rover. Nine patrol cars blocked the road at the corner of Fourth Street and Alton Road in Miami Beach. Another cop restrained a police dog. The driver — a black man — had been handcuffed after getting out of the vehicle with his arms over his head, and a woman in the front seat had exited peacefully.
Roger Stone says his life is in grave danger. The maverick onetime adviser to Donald Trump and proud practitioner of political rat-fucking claimed in January that someone had tried to poison him with polonium — coincidentally or not, generating international headlines just as he released a book about Trump’s campaign.
Donald Shockey believes that everyone deserves to live in a clean neighborhood. When he lived in Miami Shores from 2001 to 2014, he didn’t have much of an issue because, he says, that city’s code-enforcement division was well funded and did a good job of making residents clean up their trash. But when Shockey moved into a home on NW 41st Street in the City of Miami in 2014, he says, found a neighborhood in disarray.
The City of Miami’s police union is run by a person who once called a dead 12-year-old a “thug,” has publicly called Islam a “religion that enslaves and allows the beating of women,” has been sued multiple times for alleged cases of police misconduct, and habitually posts on social media about how undocumented immigrants bring crime to American cities. Now Javier Ortiz has been reprimanded again for posting a private woman’s personal cell phone number on the internet and encouraging people to call her and yell at her — all because she caught a county cop speeding.
Miami is a city where “twerking etiquette” is a legitimate cultural and political concern. Skin is acceptable everywhere in Miami Beach, from strip clubs to retirement homes to military-weapons conventions. And most of the time, that cultural body acceptance is great.
Spring break season is upon us. Starting in late February, thousands of tourists have descended on Florida to fulfill their warm weather fantasies. Between now and April, many of them will make pit stops in Miami and Fort Lauderdale before heading south to the Caribbean. For visitors who are Bahama-bound,…
Imagine every conceivable moment when your pants might spontaneously burst into flames. Got them all? OK, now which one would be the single most absurd? Here’s a good one: You’re standing in front of a jury, arguing that your client didn’t purposely set his car on fire — because it spontaneously combusted. Oops, just like your pants!
When an audit revealed in mid-December that many Miami Police officers weren’t wearing their department-issued body cameras or downloading the footage, Police Chief Rudy Llanes told New Times he was ready to get to the bottom of the issue. But, much like Marco Rubio, he said he needed more information first about why the $1.3 million equipment, paid for by taxpayers and a Department of Justice grant, wasn’t being used.
Ifoxa Predestin has worked for the City of Miami’s Department of Solid Waste for the past 11 years. His life as a sanitation worker has been full of surprises — some good, some bad. The good: In 2015, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado honored him at a city commission meeting after Predestin used CPR to save a 2-year-old girl’s life on the job.
A Miami Police officer made himself the executor and sole beneficiary of an elderly man’s will.
Glen Carr pulls out his cell phone as soon as he rounds the corner outside the Miami-Dade County Courthouse. He knows he’ll spot them soon. Then, after he walks just a half-block more, the 40-year-old with a military buzzcut stops and points. “Look, there are two I can see right…
On June 30, 2015, Miami dentist Jesus Enrique Del Valle’s Ranger Rover hit a landscape worker on the road in Miami Beach, reportedly leaving the victim with permanent brain damage. But police say Del Valle didn’t stop to see if the worker was OK. Instead, he drove to a body shop owned by his girlfriend’s cousin to hide the damage to his SUV, the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office says. Del Valle apparently couldn’t cover the repairs in cash alone and needed an insurance quote, so he called Florida Highway Patrol Officer David Casillas to write a fake accident report.
The Miami-Dade Police handbook presumably does not authorize random joyrides to commit revenge beatings. In fact, that’s an idea so boneheaded it sounds like a technique Tammany Hall cops used during the 1863 New York City draft riots.
Last summer, the Miami Gardens Police Department held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new “Real Time Crime Center” — a command-center-like room equipped with video walls and laptops where detectives monitor what’s happening around town. The city pitches the center as a boon for a high-crime corner of Miami-Dade, but the heavy surveillance also makes civil rights activists uncomfortable in a city already rattled by one major police harassment scandal.
On Instagram, Richard Rodriguez comes across as a high-living gym fanatic, posing with top bodybuilding athletes and posting photos of luxury sports cars and his extreme adventures, such as skydiving and firing high-powered weapons. As owner of the popular Iron Addicts gym just north of downtown Miami, he had recently become a…
On a cold February day in 2013, Warren Papove deplaned in Vancouver with 65 cents to his name. After living in South Miami for ten years without committing a crime, Papove — a homeless handyman who did odd jobs for Commissioner Bob Welsh — had been reported to immigration officials and rounded up by ICE. Six months into his lockup at the Krome Detention Center, Papove was deported to his native Canada in the middle of winter without so much as a jacket to keep himself warm.
Shooting a suspect is one of the most serious actions a police officer can take. We entrust cops to walk around town with guns to protect people, but when they have to use them, we also expect a full, clear explanation of what happened and why they felt compelled to take potentially deadly action.
