Tom Hunker, Bal Harbour chief of police

In a state seized by a dramatic surge in drug dealing, Bal Harbour police were about to take their controversial sting operation far outside Florida.

After weeks of delivering drug money to Miami storefront businesses, a new deal unfolded thousands of miles away in a country where the war on drugs had shifted: Venezuela.

Instead of enlisting the help of federal agents, the officers from the small community embarked on a series of laundering arrangements that were never revealed to the federal government.

For two years starting in 2010, they funneled millions in drug money into the bank accounts of Venezuelans, including William Amaro Sanchez, now special assistant to President Nicolás Maduro. The stated goal: to disrupt criminal groups.

They sent drug money to a well-known trafficker, a cash smuggler and a money launderer — more than $4 million in all.

In spite of U.S. warnings about the emergence of the country as a major hub for cocaine, the police never investigated the people to whom they were sending millions in drug proceeds, including a host of individuals with criminal records.

“They had no authority to do what they were doing,” said Felix Jimenez, former chief inspector of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They were just lucky that when they were picking up all this money, nobody got killed.”

Federal agents for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago are investigating the money laundered by the Tri-County Task Force, a partnership between Bal Harbour and the Glades County Sheriff’s Office, including $2.4 million kept by the police for brokering the deals.

But the latest revelations about the task force’s foray into a country known as a hub for trafficking is expected to bring more federal scrutiny to a unit that veered far from its borders without any supervision by prosecutors, records show.

“It’s absurd. You’re a Bal Harbour police officer, your jurisdiction is local,” said Jimenez, the former chief DEA agent in New York. “They were just laundering money for the sake of laundering money.”

Tom Hunker, the former Bal Harbour chief who resigned under pressure in 2013, has declined to comment.

The Miami Herald examined hundreds of confidential records of the task force, as well as emails, bank records and Venezuelan passports, and found at least 20 people from the South American country who were sent drug money.

At every turn, the officers — working from a rented trailer — turned an undercover sting into an international operation that broke every provision of undercover work to bring in laundering deals.

The first payments started like the others: Officers traveled to New York to pick up drug cash. Instead of sending the money to Miami export shops — the local targets — they were directed by money brokers to wire the dollars into Panama banks.

Again and again, the police sent money in a flurry of transactions. In one deal, the police picked up a black duffel bag filled with hundreds of thousands in Rhode Island in May 2010, with directions: Move the money overseas.

Among the recipients: Willam Amaro, the 48-year-old assistant to Maduro, a longtime friend who was then the foreign minister under President Hugo Chávez. Amaro’s take: $45,000, according to records reviewed by the Herald.

The next day, they did it again. After collecting a red suitcase stuffed with cash in New York, the cops received an email to wire the money to several people living in Venezuela, including Amaro. This time, he was sent $37,000, records show.

Four more times, the cops wired money to Amaro’s account — $211,000 in all — but at no point did they alert federal authorities before sending the funds nor did they conduct a background investigation of him, according to interviews and Justice Department records.

Making the payments all the more remarkable: The U.S. government was then conducting investigations into Venezuelan government leaders involved in the drug trade, especially the criminal groups using the nation as a shipping point. U.S. studies show 24 percent of all the cocaine produced in South America is sent from Venezuela, often with the help of the military.

Amaro, long considered Maduro’s trusted advisor from when they were union workers in the 1990s, did not respond to interview requests.

For years, the two men have been inseparable, joining the revolutionary movement that swept the nation under Chávez. Amaro rose in stature as his mentor, Maduro, became foreign minister in 2006 and eventually, president after Chávez’s death in 2013.

The overseas deals took place just as the Venezuelan government was cracking down on the amount of U.S. dollars that could be collected each year by citizens, prompting many to turn to the black market.

The task force tapped into the demand in a rush of nearly one laundering deal every week — $1 million to people in the first three months.

One of the recipients: Rodolfo Rashid Velasco Kassem, a well-known Venezuelan tied to one of the largest drug cartels in the hemisphere, federal court records state. While he was sent more than $100,000 by the Florida cops, he was helping to move cocaine for David “El Loco” Barrera, the last of the Colombian drug lords.

The 42-year-old Velasco held ownership in a car dealership, three airplane hangars, boats, guns, and a seven-bedroom mansion in Barquisimeto, Venezuela’s fourth largest city. He was ultimately charged in Venezuela with money laundering and running a criminal enterprise.

Most of the overseas deals followed a similar route: the drug money was wired to correspondent banks and then moved to Banesco in Panama, a Venezuelan bank.

At least three times, money was wired to David Habib Hannaoui Babik, 49, another noted figure in Venezuela who was under investigation for money laundering and engaging in a criminal enterprise. His total haul: $212,000 in 2010.

In sending drug money to Hannaoui, Florida police were actually working counter to investigators in his own country, who were trying to stop his criminal enterprise, Jimenez said. “They facilitated a money-laundering operation,” he said. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Two years later, Hannaoui was arrested after Venezuelan police raided his penthouse and found $1 million in cash, wire receipts, two money counters, Rolex watches, and records of 31 shell companies that he formed, records state.

In the largest case, the police sent millions to Fabian Cedeno, 40, and his brother, Jonathan, 30, in a dizzying series of payments just a few years after the older brother was arrested in Miami for smuggling undeclared cash through airport customs. He was sentenced to six months in prison in the case in 2007.

In one deal, the Bal Harbour police picked up a large bundle of drug cash in San Juan and later sent the money to the Cedenos in nine separate payments totaling $457,167. The police kept the rest of the money for setting up the deals.

In all, the task force sent the Cedenos $2.5 million in at least four dozen payments, but never opened a case. In doing so, the police violated strict federal bans on sending illegal money overseas, said Jimenez, now a law enforcement consultant with Idea International Group in Miami.

Jimenez said only the Justice Department can allow law enforcement agents to wire drug money into other countries. “They should have known better,” said Jimenez, once the third highest ranking DEA member. “Who gave them the authority?”

He said the police failed to follow established practices by not investigating the backgrounds of the people getting drug money. To this day, it’s not clear whether they even knew Amaro’s history, or that he was a close advisor to Maduro.

The larger issue is the missed opportunity to investigate someone emerging as a behind-the-scenes power broker to a future president, said experts. Amaro had been a member of Maduro’s inner circle from the time the latter was running for a seat in the Venezuelan Congress.

When Maduro became foreign minister, Amaro was frequently outside his office, deciding who could see the foreign minister, acting “as Maduro’s right-hand-man,” said a former Venezuelan intelligence agent who spoke to the Herald on the condition of anonymity. To this day, Amaro is the person who’s “most frequently assigned to handle personal, sensitive or potentially embarrassing matters” for Maduro, the agent said.

Just last month, two nephews of the president’s wife were arrested in Haiti on charges of conspiring to ship 800 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. The drugs were to be shipped from Venezuela, court records stated.

Federal agents might have been in a better position to understand the depth of the president’s knowledge of the drug trade if the police had probed Amaro and shared critical information with federal agents, say experts.

“He was a politically exposed person,” said Michael McDonald, a trial consultant and former U.S. Treasury agent. “He was in a position to know high-ranking officials in Venezuela …”

The money sent to him by the cops might have been for “buying and selling U.S. dollars” on the black market, said McDonald. Or “it could have been a payoff. It may well have been political corruption at the highest level.”

Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the office of Chicago federal prosecutor Zachary F. Fardon, declined to comment.

One South Florida lawyer who specializes in money-laundering cases said the police were operating so far out of their realm, they were incapable of carrying out an international investigation.

“I can’t think of a more podunk town than Bal Harbour — not in a bad way. But in the sense that these cops would have otherwise been stopping traffic or shooting radar,” said Ruben Oliva, who has represented alleged narco-traffickers since the 1980s. “In reality they were being launderers. The minute they started doing busts, it would have been over.

“This is like a movie. You’ve got these guys and they’re flying all over. They’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m in the big leagues.’ I’ve seen every kind of law enforcement money-laundering investigations. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s really one for the ages.”

By Michael Sallah and Antonio Delgado for miamiherald.com

ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Fla.  — Police in Florida busted a game of mahjong in Florida at a condominium clubhouse. The group accused of the crime: four women between the ages of 87 and 95.

Heritage Florida reports that police came to shut down the friendly game played by Lee Delnick, Bernice Diamond, Helen Greenspan and Zelda King.

King says word spread about their weekly gathering and that a “troublemaker” in the community called the police citing a law that prohibits playing the game for money. Police closed the clubhouse.

The women were sent a formal notice from condominium management stating that there would be no more mahjong, bingo, or poker played in the location until further notice. Police reportedly stopped by several times later that week to make sure the games weren’t being played.

“This is ridiculous,” King said. “We haven’t played in the clubhouse for weeks! We have to go to each other’s homes to play and not everyone lives in Escondido. It is an international game and we are being crucified!”

The 87-year-old said the game is good for the elderly and that even her doctor has told her that it can delay dementia. The women suggested they could “just play for fun” without money, but the property manager said they should “lay low,” until things were resolved.

After a bit of investigating, officials came to the conclusion that there is no ordinance prohibiting mahjong gambling of the nature.

Heritage Florida did find Statute 849.085, which states: “Certain penny-ante games are not crimes; ‘Penny-ante game’ means a game or series of games of poker, pinochle, bridge, rummy, canasta, hearts, dominoes, or mahjong in which the winnings of any player in a single round, hand, or game do not exceed $10 in value.”

The women playing had a $4 limit. The women also had homeowner rights, were over the age of 18, and were not enforcing debt to be paid.

It is unclear what ordinance the caller thought the group of ladies were violating and why police officials decided to break up the game.

Heritage called Altamonte Springs police for comment, but have not heard back.

You may not know it, but your odds of getting in trouble skyrocket in Tampa.

No valid license? You’re twice as likely to get a ticket than in the rest of Florida.

No proof of insurance? Also double the chance.

Tampa police wrote more tickets last year than sheriff’s offices in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties combined; more per capita than cops in Jacksonville, Miami, St. Petersburg and Orlando, the state’s four other largest cities.

And no other law enforcement agency in the state arrests more people than the Tampa Police Department.

Once you understand how the department measures officer productivity, it’s easy to see why.

Each arrest, each ticket, feeds into a formula that calculates an officer’s “productivity ratio” — number of hours worked divided by the number of tickets and arrests.

The more officers do, the better they score.

But the formula doesn’t discriminate between a murder arrest and a jaywalking ticket; they carry the same weight.

For years, the policy has put pressure on officers to crank out arrests and tickets, leading to allegations of harassment, racial profiling and over-policing.

Case in point: this year’s Tampa Bay Times investigation revealing how Tampa police wrote more tickets for bicycle offenses than any other law enforcement agency in the state, and that eight out of 10 of the cyclists were black.

In a series of community forums and public hearings that followed, complaints circled back to the idea that residents of high-crime neighborhoods — where the department allocates more officers — felt like the aggressive policing was something happening to them, not for them .

Jon Dengler, a white 35-year-old who runs a ministry to feed the poor, lives in Ybor Heights. In the past six years, he has gotten nine traffic tickets in Tampa, but not a single one for bad driving. In 2013, he got three from the same officer, adding up to $345, because his registration had expired and he didn’t have his insurance card or license handy. Two of those tickets were dismissed.

“I love our neighborhood and I don’t feel anxious or afraid,” he told City Council earlier this year. “But when I see TPD on the street, I do get nervous. I don’t get nervous because I’m up to no good, but because of who they are and represent in our community.”

A shift is now underway at the department, one that could change the way officers do their jobs.

It involves the new chief, a new formula and a new definition for what it means to be “productive.”

Though the Tampa Police Department produces detailed statistics to make sure officers are doing their jobs — counting every report they write, tabulating every stolen penny they recover — the ratio has proven to be a powerful little number.

A good one glows on an evaluation. A bad one can stand in the way of a promotion, or even lead to a suspension.

“It was a good program set up to get rid of the guys who weren’t producing, sitting under a tree all night,” said Brian Reschke, a patrol officer who retired in 2011. “It just got carried away.”

To understand how the department got to this point, you need to go back to 2001, when then-Police Chief Bennie Holder sought to come up with an answer to this question:

“You’ve got officers out there working for 40 hours,” he told the Times. “How do you know you’re getting 40 hours of work out of them?”

His administration implemented a series of measures modeled after tools used to evaluate production in corporate America. There was one that calculated time spent on public aid and one that showed how often an officer found a case instead of waiting for a call to come in.

All of those metrics are still in place today, but the one officers now refer to simply as the productivity ratio calculates how long it takes for an officer to either arrest or ticket someone.

It wasn’t supposed to be like a quota.

“This wasn’t made to say you have to give X number of tickets, make X numbers of arrests,” Holder told the Times. “You can be productive without writing 100 tickets or putting 100 people in jail.”

A lot of things happened after Chief Holder retired in 2003.

Chief Stephen Hogue, and later Chief Jane Castor, embraced a proactive policing model tasking officers with finding crime instead of waiting for calls. Technology and statistics became increasingly important, with analysts studying crime patterns and districts deploying resources to hot spots.

Crime dropped.

It’s dropped steadily across the nation, in part because of this kind of modern policing and in part because of societal factors outside of any one department’s control.

But by 2005, the department’s annual report attributed the lowest crime rate in 28 years to “productivity,” including a 14 percent increase in citations and a 15 percent increase in arrests.

The department arrested 10,859 more people that year — enough to fill half the city’s hockey arena — with growth mostly in the lowest category of offense, “miscellaneous” charges like driving with a suspended license.

“The assumption was, well if you go out and make more arrests and you write more tickets, crime is going to drop more,” said Vincent Gericitano, president of the Tampa Police Benevolent Association.

By 2007, Tampa led the state in arrests; almost half the crimes were “miscellaneous.”

“Some supervisors looked at the productivity ratio as the only critique or metric on judging an officer’s productivity,” Gericitano said.

Officers who didn’t write many tickets were put on notice.

There was the officer “recognized by many children in the Belmont Heights area as a positive role model,” according to his evaluation.

Issue more traffic citations, his evaluation said.

There was one district’s “Officer of the Month,” also recognized for “catch of the month” twice in a year.

Improve traffic law enforcement … by 30 percent, he was told.

Then there was the officer whose supervisor noted, “He knows the area he patrols, but more importantly, he knows the people and the people know him… He does not talk at them or down to them … He is objective and leaves people feeling he was interested in serving them.”

Year after year, he was evaluated “below expectations” because of his poor productivity ratio.

He wrote letters to the administration calling the ratio “damaging… to the men and women who abandon their ideals to comply with it.”

If I could only change the way I treat people out here — see them less through the lens of sacred trust they place in us and more as stats to be harvested by us, resolution would be easy.

I could merely “play the game,” see what we do not as putting on a uniform but instead as wearing a costume, then achieve the magic number sought by my supervisors that could be — as one of my old captains said — “easily achieved within the first 10 minutes of each shift.”

The officer was ultimately cited with insubordination and violations of standards of conduct for refusing to increase traffic stops and failing to improve his productivity ratio.

He was suspended for three days.

Eric Ward became chief of police at a critical time this past May, as his department grappled with a spate of inner-city shootings, lack of witness cooperation and calls for a civil rights investigation of the racial disparity the Times found in bicycle tickets.

The department’s relationship with Tampa’s black community was under a microscope, and here came a man who knew both sides of that experience.

He remembers how angry he felt as a kid after an officer questioned him in a convenience store as he tried to buy a jug of milk.

But he also remembers playing in the Police Athletic League.

As a first order of business, Ward told officers to stop worrying so much about their statistics and focus on getting to know the people they police.

He told supervisors to look at the many activities the department already tracks for each officer instead of just the ratio.

“That old fashioned ‘arrest, arrest, arrest, citation, citation, citation’ is not the key. It’s not going to solve our problem with the crime,” Ward told the Times. “Getting back in to the community, walking around, talking to people. That alone will reduce crime.”

He talks of “quality over quantity,” of arresting “the right people,” of “discretion.”

He recalls telling an officer patrolling a park that if he saw kids throwing a ball around, he should join the game. “If you worry about your uniform getting dirty,” the chief said, “I’ll buy you a new uniform.”

The current formula considers tag football a waste of time.

Ward is hoping to change the math with the help of Sgt. Felicia Pecora, who says she has been trying to come up with a better way to measure productivity for years.

She downplayed the ratio’s influence on today’s department, saying supervisors take a more nuanced view than they did when it was first implemented. Nonetheless, she likened the ratio to “when Ford put out the Pinto.”

“It’s a beta version” she said. “Everybody’s got to start somewhere.”

In February, the department made a significant change to the ratio, giving officers credit for written warnings instead of just citations.

It shows in the data. Unless something drastic happens, Tampa is on track to have its lowest ticketing year in at least a decade.

Pecora’s rough draft of a new series of formulas doesn’t count tickets at all.

Among actions counted: traffic stops, street checks, guns seized, stolen cars recovered, reports written and arrests made from reports.

Instead of measuring how long it takes to accomplish these actions, it calculates the percentage of each of those things an officer contributes to a squad. It would still allow supervisors to spot those who aren’t pulling their weight, but would reward the investigative types along with the enforcers.

She calls it a “contribution ratio” and is running versions of it by the chief and her colleagues.

Pecora told of an incident earlier this month in which she and one of her officers tried to track down the owner of an abandoned, broken-down car. Their search led to a home in Belmont Heights and a frail, elderly woman who answered the door.

She said the car belonged to her son, and that he hadn’t been home since the previous night. They asked if she had eaten since then, and she said she was hungry. Pecora heated up some rice and beans and bought groceries to stock the woman’s pantry. By the time the sergeant returned, the son had arrived.

The officers lectured him about keeping his mother fed, closed out the car case and referred the family for elderly services.

None of it counted toward the productivity ratio.

From Tampabay.com by Alexandra Zayas

Police shoot someone in Florida on average once every three days.

But Danny Banks doesn’t know that. He’s the special agent in charge for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in central Florida.

Seventh Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza didn’t want to hazard a guess on how often police use deadly force.

State Rep. David Santiago, R-Deltona, and other lawmakers thought the information was readily available and were shocked to learn it wasn’t.

Not even the FBI is aware of how often police in Florida use deadly force. Cities aren’t legally required to report officer-involved shootings to the FBI, and many of them don’t. Nor does any state agency track officer-involved shootings.

It took hundreds of public records requests, and combing through hundreds of media reports, for The News-Journal to uncover how often police shot people in 2013 and 2014 in Florida. Many agencies cooperated and turned over records, but others put up substantial barriers, charging hefty bills to provide the information and refusing to answer questions.

In 2013 and 2014, Florida law enforcement agencies shot at least 249 people, and 162 of the shootings were fatal. But even that number is likely an incomplete picture because agencies don’t have to release records for cases that are still pending. Based on a review of media reports, 53 people have been killed by Florida law officers so far this year.

As scrutiny mounts on police tactics, it’s unacceptable that the public has no accounting of how often people are shot and killed by officers, said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based group advocating for better police training.

“This is problematic nationwide,” Bueermann said. “The official (federal) data could be as much as 50 percent under-reported. It’s a phenomenon we need to understand, and until we understand how often it happens, we may never get our hands around it and reduce the number of police shootings.”

Deadly force sometimes cannot be avoided. Just over half — about 55 percent — of the officer-involved shootings in 2013 and 2014 involved suspects who were armed with guns. Reports reviewed by The News-Journal describe incidents where officers acted heroically, sometimes defending themselves from a barrage of bullets.

But the lack of transparency surrounding officer-involved shootings also has obscured the public’s view of trends that deserve scrutiny:

• Time and time again, police are called to help the mentally ill and end up shooting and killing them. In Boca Raton, a Palm Beach Sheriff deputy shot and killed a 28-year-old mentally ill man who was holding a Phillips head screwdriver, and who had called police asking for help. In the small North Florida town of Gretna, an unarmed 24-year-old man was killed after his mother requested police help to compel her son to take his medication and a scuffle ensued that led to the man being shot. In Miami Gardens, police fatally shot a mentally ill man who was waving a broom at officers. Only two states spend less per person on mental health services than Florida, meaning it is often left to law enforcement to handle the mentally ill.

• Despite making up less than 8 percent of the population, black men comprised 40 percent of the people shot by the police. Thirty-eight people who were shot by police were unarmed. Twenty-one of those unarmed subjects — about 55 percent — were black men.

• Nothing in Florida law requires an outside investigation of police shootings, and numerous law enforcement agencies across Florida investigate shootings involving their own officers. One of Florida’s largest counties, Palm Beach County, handles its own investigations and has fought efforts to set up an independent citizen’s review board to examine officer-involved shootings, despite calls to do so from citizens. Only one-third of law enforcement agencies have memorandums of understanding with FDLE to investigate officer-involved shootings.

• Officers occasionally shoot people while off duty and not in uniform. Most recently, the shooting death of Corey Jones by a Palm Beach Gardens officer who was not in uniform has captured headlines. But a review of records by The News-Journal found this is not an isolated case. For instance, an off-duty Palm Beach County deputy was not carrying identification but was carrying his gun when he shot a man multiple times who was trespassing in an apartment complex hot tub with his girlfriend in 2014. The deputy said the man threatened him with an empty wine bottle, and the shooting was found to be justified following an investigation by the deputy’s own department. In Daytona Beach, a deputy in plain clothes shot and killed a 52-year-old hearing impaired man who was involved in a dispute at a tow yard.

• Officers continue to shoot into moving cars, despite most major police departments and the U.S. Department of Justice discouraging the practice. Shooting at moving cars is banned by many agencies because it is viewed as ineffective at stopping the threat and dangerous for innocent parties. Despite this, police identified vehicles as the primary threat for 25 people shot in 2013 and 2014.

• Police involved in shootings are rarely prosecuted on charges of excessive force. The last time a Florida police officer was successfully prosecuted for an on-duty shooting was in 1989, according to a survey of state attorney offices. An appellate court eventually overturned that conviction.

‘A TRAGIC, TRAGIC INCIDENT’

Beyond the statistics exist the stories of heartbroken families who must deal with the death of their loved ones and the police officers who must grapple with a split-second decision that can change their life.

On a rainy Oct. 21 afternoon, Sheila Cruice walked into a Volusia County courtroom. Her eyes grew watery, and it wasn’t difficult to know what was coming next. She took a seat on a bench in the courtroom. Family and friends surrounded her.

On March 4, deputies had arrived at 6:30 a.m. to serve a narcotics search warrant at the home of her 26-year-old son, Derek Cruice. A gunshot rang out. Cruice, wearing nothing but basketball shorts, fell to the ground with a gunshot wound to the face.

His hands were empty.

State Attorney R.J. Larizza walked to the podium. Just moments before he had broken the news to Cruice’s family. The clicks of cameras and flashes filled the room. After two days of deliberations, a grand jury had declined to indict Volusia County Deputy Todd Raible, the man who shot and killed Sheila Cruice’s son.

“This was a tragic, tragic incident,” Larizza said with Sheila Cruice’s sobs in the background. “It was an incident that nobody wanted to happen. It’s an incident that if we could turn back the clock, we would.”

It’s a scene repeated across Florida. Investigative files contain numerous incidents where officers make split-second decisions. In this case, Raible forced his way into the home after someone locked the door, and Raible said he saw Cruice clasp his hands together, according to investigative reports. Raible pulled the trigger.

Raible recalled going outside as Cruice lay on the floor dying. He took off his belt and dropped to his knees, thinking or speaking out loud about the gun he thought he saw.

“It was there. The gun was there. He was pointing something at me,” Raible said in an interview with investigators.

Police searched the home. They found about half a pound of marijuana, $3,000 in cash, a drug ledger and a scale.

One thing they didn’t find — weapons. As she left the courtroom, reporters flocked to Sheila Cruice. She bowed her head and clutched a tissue in her hand. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“It hurts,” she said. “It shouldn’t have happened the way that it did.”

While the deputy won’t face criminal charges, the Cruice family plans to pursue the matter in civil court.

Edward P. Miller’s family is also considering legal action in another Volusia County shooting.

On Sept. 20, 2014, a Volusia Sheriff’s deputy in plain clothes and Miller, who according to family members was classified as profoundly deaf by a hearing aid specialist, mixed in a fatal combination that continues to echo in the family’s memory. Miller, 52, was sitting in his SUV getting ready to drive away after taking his son to get his pickup from Fryer’s Towing in Daytona Beach. But after a complaint by Fryer’s workers, deputy Joel Hernandez, wearing street clothes and a badge, cuffs and gun on his belt, walked toward Miller. Hernandez announced he was a deputy, reports said. But Miller didn’t have his hearing aids, his family said. The hearing aids were in the shop being repaired.

After Hernandez opened the door to Miller’s SUV, Miller pulled his gun from his pocket, the report states. Miller had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Hernandez shot Miller to death. Larizza determined that the shooting was justified.

Miller had worn hearing aids since age 3, said his sister Irena Crouch, 62, of Port Orange. Crouch, who is also deaf and depends on hearing aids and lip reading to communicate, dabbed at her eyes with tissue to wipe away the tears as she spoke about her only sibling.

“It’s a tragedy because a beautiful human being is no longer here,” Crouch said. “He was my baby brother.”

LAWSUITS AGAINST POLICE

If the Cruices and Millers take their cases to court, they’ll face an uphill battle.

Suing the police is immensely difficult, and for good reason, said Christopher Dillingham, a civil rights attorney who worked for the DeLand Police Department before becoming a lawyer.

“As a societal policy, we want the police to do their job without fear of lawsuits,” he said.

The 1989 court case Graham v. Connor gives guidance on when it is appropriate for police to use deadly force. Judging an officer’s actions should be based on the judgment of a “reasonable” officer on the scene rather than based on hindsight. Factors to consider when evaluating the use of deadly force include the severity of the criminal act, whether the suspect poses an immediate danger to the officers or others, and whether the suspect is resisting or evading.

At one time, Florida law allowed police to shoot any fleeing felon. The 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner limited that to only instances in which the fleeing suspect poses a significant threat to the officer or others.

Indictments of police officers for the use of deadly force are extraordinarily rare, and even successful lawsuits against the police are uncommon, Dillingham said. He estimates he receives hundreds of complaints about the police in a year, but he only has filed one lawsuit involving allegations of excessive force in 2015.

Officers are entitled to qualified immunity, meaning to be successful he must show the officer acted in bad faith in blatant disregard of someone’s constitutional rights.

SIMILAR SHOOTINGS, DIFFERENT RESULTS

Officers are unlikely to face sanctions in court. Even when it comes to internal disciplinary action, penalties can vary greatly by department.

In St. Petersburg, two officers were suspended and another terminated for shooting into a fleeing stolen car in April 2013, wounding 19-year-old Shaquille Sweat and a 15-year-old female passenger. Officers found the car backed into an alley and fired a collective 20 rounds when the car fled. One of the bullets struck a nearby house. Both Sweat and his passenger survived.

The city’s policy instructs officers to avoid moving cars, not shoot at them. Police are only authorized to use deadly force if the occupants are threatening them with a firearm. The girl in the car told investigators that neither she nor Sweat had a weapon.

Officer George Graves was fired for his role in the shooting, and former St. Petersburg Police Chief Chuck Harmon wrote that Graves was 90 feet away from the car when he fired and it was driving past him.

An arbitrator reinstated Graves in 2014 with back pay on the grounds that the disciplinary action wasn’t in line with that issued to other officers.

Compare that shooting to one that happened in DeLand.

DeLand police officers tried to stop Sean Grant on Oct. 21, 2013, after a convenience store clerk said he stole a 24-ounce can of Bud Light and a sandwich. Officer Joshua Santos opened fire after Grant backed up and hit another car, then pulled forward in the direction of Santos and out of the store’s parking lot. Bullets struck Grant and a backseat passenger. Both survived. At his trial, Grant’s attorney argued that he was just trying to get away. A jury found Grant not guilty of aggravated assault on an officer.

Officer Santos didn’t face any disciplinary action, and DeLand Police Chief Bill Ridgway defended the officer. He added that officers don’t receive any special instruction regarding shooting into vehicles, and he thought Santos’ actions were used only as a “last resort.” After an FDLE investigation, the 7th Circuit State Attorney’s Office determined the shooting was justified.

LAWMAKERS WANT ACTION

Riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore have directed the public’s attention on police shootings, but officers are likely using less deadly force than they have in the past, said Eugene Paoline, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida.

Officers also have access to less lethal options, such as stun guns, that weren’t available in the past.

“The use of force is a rather rare event,” Paoline said. “There is no evidence to suggest police are using more deadly force. If you compare it over time, it is less because the policies are more restrictive.”

But assessing how the use of force has changed over time or how it varies by department is difficult because of a lack of reliable data, Paoline said.

State Rep. Fred Costello, R-Ormond Beach, found it hard to believe there was no accounting of officer-involved shootings in Florida.

“I would have thought that there was one,” Costello said of an accounting of police shootings in Florida. “We can’t decide if there is a problem until we can measure what is happening.”

In terms of establishing a database of shootings, Costello thinks the cost would be negligible, and he’d support making it mandatory for FDLE to investigate all police shootings in Florida.

Other state lawmakers joined Costello in calling for more oversight.

Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Orlando, said she plans to introduce a bill requiring the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate any officer-involved fatality in the state, whether it’s an officer-involved shooting or the person dies due to some other cause, such as police use of a chokehold or a Taser. Thompson said she wants a third agency to be involved since prosecutors who work daily with police also make decisions on whether to charge police with crimes.

“I want impartiality, particularly because the state attorney now makes this kind of decision and the state attorney depends on law enforcement to make the cases that they pursue,” Thompson said in a phone interview. “I believe a third party that is removed and impartial should be involved, and that would be FDLE.”

One bill supported by the Legislative Black Caucus would create a 15-member panel to review police shootings. Members would be appointed by the FLDE commissioner, and at least five could not be current or former law enforcement officers.

State Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs , believes someone should be tracking how pervasive police shootings are in Florida. More importantly, he said, lawmakers need to focus on addressing the issues that contribute to police shootings. Increasing education funding to provide an extra hour of instruction at low-performing schools would be a good start.

“There exists a segment of society that feels like they have no future,” he said. “There are places in American cities simply stated where many people don’t want to go. What we have to do is we have to deal with the underlying problem. Education is the great equalizer in our society.”

In October, The News-Journal asked Republican Gov. Rick Scott whether he thought Florida adequately tracked officer-involved shootings and if a database is needed to track the shootings.

“First off, let’s think about where we are. We are at a 44-year-low in our crime rate. Whether you talk to FDLE … whether it’s FDLE, whether it’s our sheriffs’ offices, our police departments, I mean, they’re working everyday to keep everybody safe,” Scott said.

Santiago, the Deltona representative, thinks the public deserves a clearer picture, and a database of police shootings would be a good place to start, he said.

“It educates us,” Santiago said. “It lets us know what is happening. It doesn’t mean I am demonizing the cops. Data is still data.”

From gainesville.com

Matt Agorist writes on Alternet:

Orlando, FL — Ryan Richard Diaz and two of his friends were huddling under the corner of a parking garage last July, trying to get out of the rain, when they were approached by officer Michael Napolitano.

According to a lawsuit filed this week, when Napolitano arrived he became very aggressive which compelled Diaz’s friend, Mario Manzi, to begin film.

Napolitano became irate after seeing these teens practicing their 1st amendment right to film the police; so, he proceeded to violate their rights by stopping them.

As Napolitano attempted to grab the phone, the teens began passing the phone off to each other. This behavior infuriated the already raging Napolitano, so he then resorted to his only available tactic — violence.

Because the teens didn’t immediate prostrate themselves before his divine authority, Napolitano struck Diaz in the stomach with his knee multiple times and threw him to the ground. While on the ground, the video shows Napolitano continue to dole out blows to Diaz’s legs and head.

During the melee, you can hear Napolitano attempt to take the phone several times.

When told by one of the teens that he cannot take their phone, Napolitano answers, “You don’t understand how this works. When you are detained, you do not run the show.”

“You cannot grab my camera,” one of them then says.

Napolitano’s answer, “Yes, I can.”

The other two teens involved were then molested by Napolitano as he searched them for the non-existent plant.

The entirely unscathed Napolitano then accused Diaz of battery on a law enforcement officer and arrested him. Prosecutors dropped the battery charges but, unfortunately, they held a lesser charge of resisting arrest without violence in October.

Diaz and his friends had committed no crime, they had harmed no one, yet they were subject to state-sponsored violence and harassment because a cop claimed to have “smelled marijuana.”

“This kid is 5-6, 130 pounds, and his only crime is being at the wrong place at the wrong time and trying to video-record a police officer,” said his attorney, J. Marc Jones.

Unsurprisingly, officer Napolitano faced no punishment and, in fact, received support from his superiors for his actions.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, police Cpl. Joseph Catanzaro reviewed video of what happened, talked to Diaz and his friends and concluded that Napolitano’s use of force was justified.

The video below shows a symptom of much larger sickness in America today. The state is addicted to controlling what individuals can and can’t put into their own bodies. In an ostensible attempt to protect individuals from themselves, the state will kidnap, cage, and kill you — for your own good.

If you are truly concerned about reducing the level of brutality among American cops, you cannot be taken seriously unless you address the war on drugs.

A Florida City, Florida family is devastated after a policeman shot their beloved dog three times in the head on Tuesday as the dog ran happily out of her home.

On Tuesday morning, dog owner and rescue volunteer, Gillian Palacios had been preparing to take her children to school and one of the family’s other dogs to the veterinarian. As Palacios packed up her car, she left the doors of the vehicle open. At the same time, a police officer on routine patrol noticed the car doors and approached the family home to make sure they knew about the opened vehicle.

When Palacios’ daughter answered the door, the family’s two-year-old bull dog mix pooch named Duchess ran enthusiastically to the door; no one in the family ever thought a police officer would be at their door early in the morning for no apparent reason. No one had called authorities.

At the moment the front door opened, a happy Duchess ran out the front door. The policeman backed off a few feet, took aim and shot their dog three times in the head. The shocked family ran out, and as they watched the life blood drain from the wounded dog’s body, Duchess wagged her tail until her last dying breath. According to Local10News, the officer told the family, “Your dog charged me.” The officer then walked away, telling her that Animal Services would be by to pick up their dog. The entire scene has been captured on the family’s surveillance video.

Florida City police spokesman Officer Ken Armenteros confirmed that one of the department’s officers shot a dog Tuesday morning, and said the police department is “gathering all the facts at this time.”

“We don’t have the luxury of hind sight,” Armenteros said. “We have to use the information that is given to us in a split second. So, the officer has to make that decision with the information that he has available.”

“She was curious. She wasn’t barking (and) she wasn’t growling. There was no reason for him to think she was aggressive in any way,”cried Palacios. According to Florida City police spokesman Officer Ken Armenteros, police are gathering all of the facts.

Warning: the video is extremely graphic and may not be suitable for all viewers.

Rest in peace Duchess.

The city of Orlando has agreed to pay $30,000 to a 37-year-old Orlando man whose jaw was broken when former police Officer William Escobar kicked him in the face, according to the man’s attorney.

The settlement was with Kentluku Nugent, an ex-convict who was taken to an Orlando hospital Jan. 1, 2013, shortly after a foot chase and his arrest, records show.

Escobar is the former Orlando officer who was video-recorded hitting and kicking another unarmed man, Refus Holloway, in a separate incident last year. Holloway was handcuffed at the time.

Escobar was awaiting trial on battery and perjury charges in that case.

His attorney, Mark Horwitz, did not return a phone call.

There was no video-recording of Escobar arresting Nugent about midnight Dec. 31, 2012, said Travis Williams, Nugent’s attorney, but there were several witnesses.

In his arrest report Escobar wrote that Nugent was injured because Officer Jonathan Mills shocked him with a stun gun, and Nugent fell and struck his mouth on a concrete sidewalk.

But Williams said the injury was from Escobar kicking Nugent in the face after his client was already on the ground.

Nugent was taken by ambulance to Orlando Regional Medical Center, where he was admitted, Escobar wrote in his report.

Escobar had gone to a motel on Orange Blossom Trail because of a domestic-violence complaint involving another man, he wrote in his arrest report.

Nugent matched the description of the suspect, Escobar wrote, but when the officer began to pat him down for weapons, Nugent thrust his wallet at the officer in a way that made Escobar think he was about to get hit, so he tried to force Nugent to the ground, the officer wrote.

Nugent then started running.

During the foot chase Escobar twice fired a stun gun at him but that didn’t stop him, neither did a shot of chemical spray, Escobar wrote.

Mills then shot Nugent with his stun gun, and the suspect went down, Escobar wrote. Nugent still resisted and Mills and Officer Joel Williams hit him with their batons and chemical spray, they wrote in separate reports.

The settlement was signed July 6. Nugent had not filed a lawsuit against the city but had filed notice of his intent to sue.

In an email City Attorney Mayanne Downs said the city disputed Nugent’s allegations but settled the case for “less than nuisance value.”

Police department spokeswoman Sgt. Wanda Ford would not comment, except to say that the settlement was a decision made by the city’s risk-management department.

Nugent has a long criminal record that includes arrests for marijuana possession, battery and resisting arrest. He spent five years in state prison following a 2002 attempted escape arrest in Maitland.

He had tried to bolt from the back of a patrol car after being taken into custody for driving an unregistered car with no license plate and with marijuana in his pocket, according to his arrest report.

In this case, he was accused of resisting arrest without violence, but after reviewing evidence, the State Attorney’s Office opted to file no charge.

From Orlando Sentinel

It’s no secret many Florida police are uneasy about a bill that advanced in Tallahassee yesterday to allow residents to openly carry firearms. In fact, the only reason the Sunshine State is still one of six states prohibiting open gun-toting is because the Florida Sheriffs Association has vigorously opposed such laws in the past.

So it’s not a huge shock that Lt. Javier Ortiz, president of Miami’s police union, lashed out at the proposal last night. What’s raising eyebrows, though, is Ortiz’s argument: namely, that if it passes, militant black activists will use the law to threaten cops.

Ortiz took to Twitter last night to direct his feelings about open-carry at Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Panhandle Republican — along with his dad, Sen. Dan Gaetz — who sponsored the new legislation. Ortiz began with a pretty reasonable complaint:

That tweet echoes the Sheriffs Association’s talking points through the years. Many cops believe that more guns on the street equals more violence.

But then Ortiz banged out this followup:

Say what? Gaetz quickly replied that Ortiz’s critique was in bad taste:

And Gaetz knows something about racially tinged Twitter backlash. This past May, Gaetz found himself in a firestorm after singling out three black legislators and joking that they were responsible for typos in a Democratic court filing.

But Ortiz has an even longer history of making racially dubious remarks. Two months ago, he made national news by slamming a black woman who had filmed an instance of alleged police brutality. He posted screen caps of what he claimed was her Facebook page and accused her of hanging out with “young men with handguns.”

Ortiz has been a loud defender of Officer Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Missouri police officer who killed Michael Brown. And earlier this year, the union president spread rumors that MPD Assistant Chief Anita Nijay, a black woman, was a Muslim.

Ortiz’s Twitter feed isn’t exactly a bastion of political correctness either. In July, he retweeted this gem:

So what is Ortiz talking about with the Black Panthers? The group has become a favorite fear-mongering tool among right-wing internet types. (Just check out the Black Panthers section at Snopes.com, which has myth-busted recent rumors about everything from Michelle Obama wearing a Panthers shirt to the group plotting 9/11 massacres.)

In fact, the black militant group essentially disbanded by the early 1980s. A loosely affiliated offshoot cropped up in Texas a decade later but hasn’t really spread beyond there. Members of that group did hold an open-carry protest against police brutality earlier this year, but compared to some of the tense showdowns that mostly white open-carry groups have sparked in Texas, it was a tame affair.

So why single out the supposed threat of Black Panthers to police? In a response to New Times, Ortiz didn’t back down from the tweets, but directed his ire at Gaetz for sponsoring the bills:

I don’t believe the Florida Sheriffs Association has endorsed this bill. If that was the case, the Miami FOP’s position is we don’t need open carry on the urban streets of Miami. In some of our areas within the City of Miami where poverty and blight are prevalent, the good residents of that area are threatened on a daily basis with gun violence. They don’t need the bad guys publicly brandishing weapons at them while they commit crimes.We also don’t need cop wannabes (AKA George Zimmermans) putting our communities at risk. Matt Gaetz’s bill is bad in every aspect. #alllivesmatter

Matt Gaetz needs to go on a ride-along in Liberty City. Gaetz is pretty brave on Twitter. It’s different when you’re walking the crime-ridden streets of Liberty City in the late evening. The kids in the neighborhood say that when the streetlights turn on, it’s time to stay inside. Publicly displaying a gun won’t keep you safe. The bad guys on the street will just take it from you.

An Apopka man is accusing city officials of trying to pin murder charges on him, in part because he clashed with the police chief in a “deep-seated, bitter” youth football league rivalry.

In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday, Timothy Allen Davis Sr. accuses Apopka officers of tampering with evidence, lying under oath and unlawfully arresting him following the 2011 death of his son. Davis, a retired Orlando police officer, shot and killed his 22-year-old son in what he argued was self-defense, and a jury acquitted him of criminal wrongdoing in the case.

Davis, 51, said in a phone interview that the Apopka Police Department conducted a “malicious prosecution” that traumatized him and his family during their bereavement.

“It was truly nobody but the lord on my side,” he said.

Mayor Joe Kilsheimer said he cannot comment on pending litigation against the city.

The deadly fight between Davis and his son, Timothy Davis Jr., unfolded Oct. 1, 2011, at the family’s Apopka home. The complaint states that the son “violently and brutally” attacked his father without provocation.

The elder Davis told a jury he ran into the garage to escape the assault. When his son followed him, he grabbed a gun from his car and fired twice, he testified.

Davis’ lawsuit accuses Apopka police of extensive misconduct in the investigation. He alleges that law enforcement officers targeted him because of a dispute with former Apopka police Chief Robert Manley III over coaching for the Apopka Raptors, a local youth football team.

Davis claims his arrest after the shooting was unlawful because he shot his son in self defense.

Detectives also failed to advise him of his rights before interviewing him and extracted a statement by promising to let him see his hospitalized son if he cooperated, the complaint alleges. Davis claims that the officers deleted portions of the interview recording that would’ve shown the statement was coerced.

Named as defendants in Davis’ lawsuit are Apopka’s former and current mayors, the former chief administrative officer, the former police chief and 11 other current and former employees with the police department. The suit does not specify how much Davis is seeking in damages; he said the legal action is “not even about the money.”

A man was killed after a shooting involving two Miami-Dade police officers in southwest Miami-Dade County.

Jorge Suarez-Ruiz, 51, was shot by officers after they were called to a home on Southwest 42nd Terrace near Southwest 160th Avenue about 9:40 p.m, on September 16.

“This is a very quiet neighborhood, so hearing those gunshots out of nowhere really shocked us,” neighbor Vilma Obando said.

According to Miami-Dade police, Suarez-Ruiz’s family called for help when he began making verbal threats to harm himself and told officers that he was armed with a gun.

Police said Suarez-Ruiz left the home in a Toyota Camry before officers arrived, but officers found him nearby in his car. Police said Suarez-Ruiz led them back to his home.

When Suarez-Ruiz exited his car, there was a confrontation that led to shots being fired, police said.

According to Obando, at least five shots were fired at the man.

Suarez-Ruiz was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said a gun was recovered nearby.

Neither officer was injured in the shooting. Their names have not been released, but police said one is a 14-year veteran of the Miami-Dade Police Department and the other is a six-year veteran.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating.