Miami Gardens Police Records Reveal Broad Policy of Stopping and Questioning Citizens

Fusion.net ^ | May 29, 2014 | Alice Brennan & Dan Lieberman

[Altariel]

In the summer of 2010, a young black man was stopped and questioned by police on the streets of Miami Gardens, Florida. According to the report filled out by the officer, he was "wearing gray sweatpants, a red hoodie and black gloves” giving the police "just cause” to question him. In the report, he was labeled a "suspicious person.”

He was an 11-year-old boy on his way to football practice.

A Fusion investigation has found that he was just one of 56,922 people who were stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens Police Department (MGPD) between 2008 and 2013. That’s the equivalent of more than half of the city’s population.

Not one of them was arrested.

***

"I have never seen a police department that has taken the approach that every citizen in that city is a suspect. I’ve described it as New York City stop-and-frisk on steroids.” said Miami-Dade County Public Defender Carlos Martinez.

****

Fusion’s analysis of more than 30,000 pages of field contact reports, shows how aggressive and far-reaching the police actions were. Some residents were stopped, questioned and written up multiple times within minutes of each other, by different officers. Children were stopped by police in playgrounds. Senior citizens were stopped and questioned near their retirement home, including a 99-year-old man deemed to be "suspicious.” Officers even wrote a report identifying a five-year-old child as a "suspicious person.”

Fusion’s Investigation also found evidence that some field contact reports may have been falsified.

****

"You're essentially saying you have reasonable suspicion to stop everybody in your community. That's crazy, because that means they're exercising no discretion,” says Martinez, the Miami-Dade public defender.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

I said, “WHY’D YOU KILL EVERYBODY IN THE HOUSE???”
“They was home.”

[minnesota_bound]

East Germany comes to Miami.