Bank heists are a dangerous business. A skilled crew has to case a place for weeks, acquire weapons and masks, and then pull off a risky holdup within minutes before the cops show up. Of course, stealing huge piles of cash is a hell of a lot easier when you can…
This past January, Claudia Castillo pulled over a speeding Miami-Dade cop in a video that went viral. The Miami Police’s union chief, Lt. Javier Ortiz, responded by posting Castillo’s Facebook photos and phone number and urging his social media followers to call her. Castillo received hundreds of threatening phone calls and Facebook messages, and Facebook itself removed the posts for being abusive.
In Florida, the Gunshine State, it’s not a terrible idea to assume just about everyone is armed and ready to fire. In the past month, at least three residents around Miami have fatally shot would-be home intruders. Now an Uber driver has joined the Stand Your Ground…
If 12 months pass, and a food establishment in Miami isn’t busted training errant opossums to deal cocaine out of its rear entrance, did the Earth really orbit around the sun at all? Try as Miami might — and oh, how its cops have tried and tried — South Florida’s…
You know that episode of Black Mirror where an unsuspecting teen is filmed watching porn through a hacked webcam, and then blackmailed into (spoiler) robbing a bank and murdering somebody, just so the hacker wouldn’t leak his information to his family? Turns out that sci-fi episode’s plotline is heavy on the…
Newly released video footage shows Israel Hernandez hustling through an alleyway, tailed by two officers carrying what the family believes to be guns. The 18-year-old artist died after being hit in the chest with a Taser.
Miami’s various police departments clearly don’t know how to deal with disabled people. Last week, City of Miami cops were caught on tape handcuffing a legless woman and dropping her on the ground, and in July, a group of City of Miami Police officers was sued for allegedly beating up…
In the wake of the Ferguson unrest — and after years of questionable police-involved shootings in South Florida — the Miami Police Department began equipping its officers with body cameras in late 2014. The cameras, officials promised, would lead to more transparency and better policing.
Gary Catronio stands in the middle of his daughter Marisa’s small bedroom inside a tidy Coral Springs home. A portly New Yorker with a head of white hair and a trimmed white beard, he is careful not to bump or knock anything over. He points to a pile of women’s…
Just in time for the holiday season, two Miami-Dade County Police officers this week were filmed handcuffing a frail, legless woman, dropping her on the ground, and letting her lie on the asphalt as she screamed for help, all because the woman panhandled a single dollar outside a Chevron gas…
On September 1, a Miami-Dade Police detective walked into Kareta Kafe on Bird Road in West Miami-Dade and sat down at the bar. He ordered a beer, which the bartender happily handed over. He then ordered $20 worth of cocaine, and the bartender gave him that too.
The strange saga of Alberto Chang-Rajii — the tech guru who wowed Miami with an elaborate backstory that turned out to be totally made-up — took an even stranger turn earlier this year when he fled to the tiny isle of Malta as his business imploded and criminal charges were filed in his native Chile.
On December 8, 2014, 60-year-old Charlie Bradley drove from Sarasota to Miami for a meeting of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, a group that has sought to restore the historic, graffiti-covered structure on Virginia Key. Walking around the stadium that Monday, Bradley — a retired schoolteacher who grew up in Miami —pulled out his cell phone and began recording video of the colorful graffiti that adorned the walls. That’s when a police officer stopped Bradley and threatened to throw him in jail.
Mary Luis Brown, a disabled woman missing both her legs, was caught panhandling for a single dollar at a Chevron gas station this past Saturday when two Miami-Dade Police officers tried to arrest her. Thanks to a bystander’s footage of two cops handcuffing her and dropping her to the ground, that confrontation went viral.
Last month, a truly heroic traveler strolled into Miami International Airport, strode up to the TSA security line, and whipped out a gold-plated gas mask spiked with high-caliber ammunition. Turns out, as the TSA notes, “post-apocalyptic, bullet-adorned gas masks” are not allowed aboard airplanes. Who knew?
Mary Luis Brown is missing both of her legs. She’s also 52 years old, gets around in a wheelchair, and isn’t armed with any kind of weaponry. It’s hard to imagine any situation where she’d be a serious threat to trained police officers. So why did two Miami-Dade cops…
Just after sunrise on a muggy September morning, Steve Dutton and Tom Lang sip coffee at a sidewalk table in downtown Miami. Steve, who has warm brown eyes and an easy smile, drinks black coffee from La Provence; his husband of 11 years, Tom, blue-eyed behind the oval-shaped lenses of…
Three years after Israel “Reefa” Herandez’s Taser-induced death, his family still clings to the young artist’s dreams as a way to keep him alive. This Sunday, they’ll make one of them come true by displaying his artwork at a Wynwood gallery.
For years, Alberto Chang-Rajii charmed Miami power brokers with his rags-to-riches story of immigrating from Chile to attend Stanford University, meeting Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and investing in Google before the company blew up. He turned that origin story into a multimillion-dollar tech investment fund and a board seat with Endeavor Miami.
A former Miami Gardens Police officer says he was fired for blowing the whistle on the department’s practice of stopping and frisking all 15-to-30-year old black men, which sparked outrage after it came to light through a man stopped more than 400 times.
Will Donald Trump strip a group of Miami cops and U.S. military veterans of their citizenship? If he makes good on his promise to crack down hard on anyone caught desecrating the U.S. flag, he’ll now have to: Today the City of Miami Police Department tweeted a photo of a group of military veteran officers signing their names on an American flag.
In most instances, it’s perfectly legal to record police officers in public. Yet cops regularly arrest and harass people filming them, which is why one of the most followed police-accountability websites is called Photography Is Not a Crime. City of Miami Police still haven’t figured out that they can’t pester…
