Showing posts with label City of Hallandale Beach Police Dept.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label City of Hallandale Beach Police Dept.. Show all posts

Thursday, December 13, 2018

#murder - Sad news re murder of 2010 Hallandale Beach 'missing woman' Lynda Robin Meier confirms our worst fears -and reminds us of HBPD's incompetency, failure to perform professionally then under Police Chief Thomas Magill. As I wrote about at the time




The very sad news regarding the apparent murder of 2010 Hallandale Beach 'missing woman' Lynda Robin Meier confirms our collective worst fears, but for many of you longtime readers of the blog, it should remind you of lots of things that have been written about and analyzed in this space many times before, namely the Hallandale Beach Police Dept.'s longstanding incompetency, indifference to facts and appearances, failure to perform professionally then under Police Chief Thomas Magill. As I wrote about at the time.

Above, June 4, 2011 photo of Hallandale Beach Police Dept. HQ, across from HB City Hall, by South Beach Hoosier. On the one-year anniversary of Lynda Meier's disappearance, just as has been the case every single day since she vanished on June 4th, 2010, there was no flyer about her on the outside of the HB Police Dept., the City Hall bldg. or the nearby HB Cultural Center. 
Or anywhere in the entire city. SNAFU!


Yes, that jaw-dropping fiasco in 2010 where the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. NEVER put up ANY posters at ANY of the dozens of restaurants, retail stores, parks that residents visit daily, in the days immediately after Meier's disappearance, where a possible witness may've been found. 
Not one.

 I know that from personal experience because in the days afterward I walked from I-95 to State Road A1A and personally spoke to nearly every store owner/manager and business owner on that route to inquire if someone from HBPD or HB Crime Watch had come by to ask if they could put a flyer in their window. Not one business ever responded yes to my simple question, and given that everyone wanted to help, they asked ME if I knew why HBPD and Crime Watch NEVER came by.
I told them why and they glumly shook their heads in silent agreement.
And there was no good reason for this failure except failure at every level and a lack of effort.

 They NEVER even so much as put one up at next door City Hall, but sure as hell, there was a taped missing poster for someone's pet at the time, right next to the City Hall front door.
But not for Lynda Meier.

Mendacious and incompetent Hallandale Beach Police Chief Thomas A. Magill, who made the small ocean-side city of Hallandale Beach in Broward County a never-ending laughingstock thru his self-serving words, highly questionable actions and disreputable behavior.


Remains found of Hallandale Beach woman missing since 2010, source tells Local 10
Lynda Meier last seen June 4, 2010
By Roy Ramos - Reporter, Jeff Weinsier - Investigative Reporter
Posted: 12:13 PM, December 13, 2018Updated: 6:23 PM, December 13, 2018
JULY 1, 2010 
What's THE worst possible thing you can do during an active search for a 'missing person'? Another tale of HB incompetency under Police Chief Magill

JULY 9, 2010
The answer to my question of last Friday re Lynda Robin Meier will be answered on Saturday morning
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/answer-to-my-question-of-last-friday-re.html
SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
100 Days Missing: Lynda Meier of Hallandale Beach has been gone for over 14 weeks, so where are all the "missing" flyers around town?
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/100-days-missing-lynda-meier-of.html

 JUNE 8, 2011
Lynda Meier's disappearance one-year later: apathy and absence of effort & thought by the HBPD and the South Florida news media loom larger than ever
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/lynda-meiers-disappearance-one-year.html
That same mentality by HBPD is what had caused me to get so angry in 2010 with the Meier case because HBPD and HB Crime Watch -the latter then led by Alexander Lewy before he was elected a HB City Commissioner months later- did NOT do the bare minimum you'd expect from such a group, especially in such a time-sensitive case.
The sort of thing that we have all routinely seen done in a TV newscasts, a fictional drama or in motion pictures. Why?
Because it's common sense.

 Because we know that people have a short memory and attention span for what seems like inconsequential things/facts that don't fit their daily lives.
So you have to get that information from those people before it completely evaporates.
But those efforts, the sort of thing we all have a reasonable right to expect in case of such an emergency, sadly and rather predictably, didn't take place.

Specifically,they chose NOT to pass out flyers themselves in the immediate area of US-1 and Hallandale Beach Blvd. at the time Meier went to that Bank of America branch to capture the attention of joggers, drivers, pedestrians, or anyone who might've seen something, or even use trained volunteers from the Crime Watch group.

The Police compounded this by also refusing to post fliers in nearby popular stores or restaurants until long past the point that any possible witness had long since forgotten what they might've seen or heard many weeks and months before for a fleeting second.
There was not a single police flier about the 2013 double murder posted on the bulletin board at Panera Bread until July! Five months later!

I know this because I have a photo of the flyer there shortly after it went up -too late.
Many of you received a copy of it from me in an email that July bemoaning HBPD's inability to get out of their own way.

And in case you might've forgotten, Michele Lazarow, the HB City Commissioner who lives closest to where this crime too place, someone who actually lives not so far away, and who'd just been elected weeks before, was NOT allowed to attend HBPD's meeting with the neighborhood.
A meeting that Mayor Joy Cooper was allowed to attend.
What does that tell you?
What sort of image does that convey to the public?

There's so many aspects of these two crime stories that stink to high heaven and still cause me to grieve for these families and their inability to get the closure they need and deserve, to say nothing of the questions never asked publicly about the enormous amount of time it took for HBPD to finally release a photo of a person of interest in the double murder case, and then, made that photo next-to-impossible to find on the city's own website!

But rather than repeat them all here, in case you want to have your memory jarred in a profound way, here are my last two blog post about the double-homicide, though there have been MANY more emails detailing the numerous policy and procedural failings of all the relevant parties and the failure of the South Florida news media to publicly question and criticize what in any other part of the country would be coming under justified criticism.

(If you want to know more details, contact me and we can always meet at Panera Bread or somewhere else and dissect the HBPD blunders all over again.)

FEBRUARY 11, 2013 
Still no new news or facts in Hallandale Beach re January's double-murder of Toronto couple in Venetian Park neighborhood; Important Three Islands neighborhood public meeting tonight at 7 p.m.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 
Crime and (No) Punishment in Hallandale Beach: Observations on Rachel Mendleson's spot-on Toronto Star article on January's double-homicide of a Toronto-area couple in the Three Islands neighborhood of Hallandale Beach, which remains unsolved 8 months later. I still believe the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. has done a very poor job of engaging in outreach and making it as easy as possible for the community to access relevant info about the case that could prove helpful, just as HBPD and HB Crime Watch completely botched public outreach in 2010 following the disappearance of HB resident Lynda Robin Meier, who has never been found. Just like others at HB City Hall, HBPD continues to never learn from experience







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Monday, June 25, 2018

Hallandale Beach resolves litigation re 2014 shooting of Howard Bowe by the city's SWAT team, but facts that didn't add up in 2014, still don't in 2018. Beware of SJWs suddenly claiming to be civic activists when they were MIA when it really mattered


Last Wednesday night the City of Hallandale Beach City Commission voted to resolve the litigation involving the city as a result of the 2014 shooting of an African-American Hallandale Beach resident named Howard Bowe by the city Police Dept.'s SWAT unit in a bungled operation that smelled fishy and seemed dodgy from the get-go as far as I and many of my friends in the area were concerned.
Facts just didn't add up.
Didn't add up in 2014, still don't in 2018.

Below is my initial response to the publication on Thursday of Meryl Kornfield's article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
I've posted my tweets and explanatory comments in chronological order so that they make more sense. Especially for those of you who aren't active on Twitter and aren't used to reading comments from the bottom up.

Many of you reading this blog post today were among the 130-plus recipients of my May 28th, 2014 email that I reference in my tweets about the shooting of Howard Bowe in Hallandale Beach, and how the city seemed determined from the very start to do every single thing wrong in its aftermath.

Just think of how differently and better this all could have been handled years ago if someone in a position of leadership at Hallandale Beach City Hall had actually had its citizens and residents long-term best interests at heart.
Shown some savviness, a degree of compassion and some old-fashioned common sense.
Someone like then-Mayor Joy Cooper and City Manager Renee Morse.
But they didn't.
Just the opposite.

If you've been a longtime Small Business owner or resident of Hallandale Beach or a regular visitor of this fact-based blog you will be all too familiar with the various reasons why expecting Cooper and Morse to act responsibly and speak candidly to the community was never in the cards - it was common knowledge from their track records that they were deceitful to residents and stakeholders in ways that were and are shocking even by the very low ethical and moral standards of conduct common among South Florida's unsavory elected officials and highly-paid bureaucrats.

 To quote myself from a few years ago: For Mayor Cooper, the truth is like water was to the Wicked Witch - something to be avoided at all costs!

When THAT is your default culture at City Hall, as it was at the time, and STRICTLY enforced, 
only very bad things can result.
And they did -over-and-over for over a decade.
Very bad things.

And for those of you who are new to the blog or reading this blog post from a distance and don't know the situation, in 2014, at the time of this shooting, Hallandale Beach, the city that is notable for being the poster child in South Florida for traffic gridlock and over-sized condominium towers and where 70% of its population lives east of US-1/Federal Highway, had a White Jewish female mayor, and an African-American City Manager, City Attorney and Police Chief.

 That reality in 2014, far from an Old Boys Club-type environment, is an inconvenient fact for some people in the community suddenly trying to thrust themselves onto the scene who've never actually done anything selfless for residents and Small Business owners.

South Florida Sun Sentinel 
Family of man killed in police raid to get $425K
South Florida Sun Sentinel 
Meryl Kornfield, Staff writer
June 21, 2018
The Hallandale Beach City Commission voted unanimously to pay the family of a man who died after being shot by a SWAT team carrying out an early-morning search warrant in his home.
Howard Bowe, 34, died 11 days after the May 8, 2014 fatal raid when officers were serving a search warrant as part of a narcotics investigation but instead killed Bowe and his dog.
The family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court two years against the city and four police officers involved after the shooting of the father of three, alleging the "military-style raid committed a series of errors resulting in unnecessary confusion and chaos among the officers."
A resolution to pass the $425,000 settlement wasn't mentioned during the Wednesday night City Commission meeting, but the city clerk said it was passed unanimously, 4-0. The city isn't admitting liability by settling, and the officers were already cleared during an internal review.








Attorney Brian Stewart? Ever hear of him? There's a reason you likely haven't.
You haven't for the same reason that nobody who does closely follows or participates in Hallandale Beach politics or government, people who actually attend meetings and have a familiarity with the true facts and civic landscape of this city, like myself and many of my friends had ever seen or heard of him before 2017.
Last year Stewart showed up a few times at HB City Hall when I was there as usual in the back of the Chambers with my notepad, pen and camera, and as seems to be the case whenever I've seen him, he brought along some acolytes to cheer him on when he spoke.

While they were strong at barking out their agitprop on cue and showing everyone their anger, they were not so solid on the facts or the environment, as several well-informed friends and acquaintances told me during and after the meetings, when they walked up to me before I could slip away and get on my way home.
Enough people, mind you, that I could tell before they even said anything that they were genuinely peeved that someone was trying to portray himself as a genuine Hallandale Beach civic activist -yes, like that's a prestigious title, right- not just an attention-seeker.

The facts are that Stewart was someone who at City Hall and at public meetings as well as at informal occasional get-togethers where longtime concerned residents gather -often Panera Bread as a default for lack of enough good choices- was an unknown quantity because he was a no-show.
There's no there there.
Stewart had never actually done anything of note in Hallandale Beach public policy prior to 2017, not least, showing up and asking good hard questions at public places where the public has a chance to evaluate people based on their words an actions and judge who is a work horse and who is a show horse.

What you need to know is that he never showed up when it counted in the past. 
As it happens, Stewart is the guy behind http://blarg.legalmechanics.us/ and its associated Twitter feed, @LawBlarg, https://twitter.com/LawBlarg
At both, it's rather hard not to notice the rather self-congratulatory tone.

Where was Brian Stewart and his Identity Politics friends in 2014 when he and they could have made a positive difference? 
Could have held people like then-HB Mayor Joy Cooper, the city manager, the city attorney and the police chief to account?

It's tough to stroll into the City Chambers and act like an aggrieved Social Justice Warrior (SJW) when three of the most powerful people in the city are actually African-American, and another is 1 of the 4 other City Commissioners, no?
These facts made Hallandale Beach unique in Florida among non-Majority Minority cities.
(But none of them are in office or power now.)

 Those facts, though, never prevented me from publicly criticizing them to their faces over the years in the Chambers or at contentious civic meetings, whether calling them out for their bad judgment or lack of oversight when it was justified, a fact that many people in Hallandale Beach are well aware of, when others were much less eager to do so.




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I strongly urge you to read Radley Balko's article in The Washington Post becase there is some highly-useful information and context there that will shock a lot of newcomers to Hallandale Beach, and give you an excellent idea of how shady things have really been there for decades. 
It also will give longtime residents, i.e. people who think they're longtime because they've been in the area for 10-15 years, something to think about: you should have gotten involved years ago.
Things are the way they are today because you thought you were too busy to hold people in local government to account the way you should've.

In my opinion, it's the very sort of piece we should have seen in the South Florida news media at the time, or since, but never do. 
Yes, not only giving some historical context but holding people in power or who used to hold power to account for their decisions and the logical consequences that followed. 
Yes, you rarely if ever see that now in Miami-based news coverage, as I am forever mentioning and decrying here on this blog.









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Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Reminder: There's a killer still at large four years later in #HallandaleBeach. What's new in the 2013 Double Murder of Toronto couple, Rochelle Wise and David Pichosky?

Above, one of the alternating empty Hallandale Beach Police Dept. vehicles that play the role of Scarecrow on Three Islands Drive in northeast Hallandale Beach. Police vehicles that rarely if ever move, which even the dumbest of area criminals know as well as local residents do. The empty police cars are right near the Three Islands Safe Neighborhood District security guard stand that isn't manned, right near the security cameras that didn't/don't work.  
They're just props! Some protection!
February 10, 2013 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved

 Reminder: There's a killer still at large four years later in Hallandale Beach. So what's new?
Precious little judging by what the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. says and shares with the public they are supposed to work for, a longstanding problem for this dept. as I've detailed here in the past many times.
http://hallandalebeachfl.gov/Search/Results?searchPhrase=Rochelle+Wise

 So the reality is that the Double Murder of a Toronto couple in Hallandale Beach four years ago this week, with the usual Hallandale Beach flourishes of incompetency and counter-intuitive foul-ups, is STILL unsolved.

 Four years ago today, most of us in South Forida woke up to the shocking news that a hard-working, civic-minded and apparently quite beloved Toronto couple were viciously murdered in their winter-time Hallandale Beach home, in one of the quietest areas of the city, Venetian Park.

Then as now, the evidence is clear that the initial failure of the Hallandale Beach Police, the Broward Sheriff's Office and Broward Crime Stopper's to share relevant information with the local community in a timely enough manner, has had very real consequences.
Unfortunately for the public and the family of the victims, they are bad consequences.

This baffling and counter-intuitive approach by all involved likely prevented possible leads from emerging then that may well have made a tangible difference in actually connecting some fragmentary clues, and helping to solve the entirely senseless murder of Donny Pichosky and Rochelle Wise.

A few of you may even recall receiving an email from me four years ago today with the news about a double-murder taking place in a city that, while full of corruption and incompetency, had been, mercifully, low on senseless murder. 
I sent that email of mine on my first full day of a two-week trip to Stockholm, after I'd read the details about it online that morning in my hotel room, almost not believing what I was reading. 
But there was no mistake, was there?

In that email, I asked what-if-anything you'd heard that thus far had not yet been mentioned in published media accounts, as well as whether you were personally aware of any attempt by HBPD or other LEOs of at a rapid public information outreach campaign taking place in the general area.

My fear, quickly confirmed by so many of you, was that it was the usual HBPD routine of chasing-its-tail after-the-fact.
Just as had been the case in 2010 with the Lynda Meier disappearance following her visit to the Bank of America on Hallandale Beach Blvd. one morning, after which, she was never seen alive again. 
Just her car driving west on Hallandale Beach Blvd. and US-1, via FDOT camera footage

My fear that morning while in Sweden was the same as it would have been if I'd been bak here: that HBPD would put on a good Dog-and-Pony show for the local news media but NOT communicate effectively with the very people who might've seen something at the time, without knowing it at the time.
And despite the fact that HBPD had to get to those people right away and had no time to waste.
But waste time is exactly what they did.

That same mentality by HBPD is what had caused me to get so angry in 2010 with the Meier case because HBPD and HB Crime Watch -the latter then led by Alexander Lewy before he was elected a HB City Commissioner months later- did NOT do the bare minimum you'd expect from such a group, esp. in such a time-sensitive case.
The sort of thing that we have all routinely seen done in a TV newscasts, a fictional drama or in motion pictures. Why?

 Because it's common sense.
Because we know that people have a short memory and attention span for what seems like inconsequential things/facts that don't fit their daily lives.
So you have to get that information from those people before it completely evaporates.
But those efforts, the sort of thing we all have a reasonable right to expect in case of such an emergency, sadly and rather predictably, didn't take place.

Specifically, some of you will recall that I was calling out HBPD's handling of this double-murder case almost from the very beginning, most egregiously, their choosing NOT to pass out fliers
themselves in the immediate area of the crime in Venetian Park, or to use trained volunteers from the Crime Watch group.

They compounded this by also refusing to post fliers in nearby popular stores or restaurants until long past the point that any possible witness had long since forgotten what they might've seen or heard many weeks and months before for a fleeting second.
There was not a single police flier about this double murder posted on the bulletin board at Panera Bread until July! Five months later!

 I know this because I have a photo of the flier there shortly after it went up -too late.
Many of you received a copy of it from me in an email that July bemoaning HBPD's inability to get out of their own way.

And in case you might've forgotten, Michele Lazarow, the HB City Commissioner who lives closest to where this crime too place, someone who actually lives not so far away, and who'd just been elected weeks before, was NOT allowed to attend HBPD's meeting with the neighborhood.
A meeting that Mayor Joy Cooper was allowed to attend.
What does that tell you?
What sort of image does that convey?

There's so many aspects of this particular case that stink to high heaven and still cause me to grieve for this family and their inability to get the closure they need and deserve.
to say nothing of the enormous amount of time it took for HBPD to finally release a photo of a person of interest, and then, made that photo hard to near-impossible to find on the city's own website!

But rather than repeat them all here, in case you want to have your memory jarred in a profound way, here are my last two blog post about this double-homicide, though there have been MANY more emails detailing the numerous policy and procedural failings of all the relevant parties and the failure of the South Florida news media to publicly question and criticize what in any other part of the country would be coming under justified criticism.

(If you want to know more, contact me and we can always meet at Panera Bread and detail and dissect the HBPD blunders all over again.)
:

FEBRUARY 11, 2013 
Still no new news or facts in Hallandale Beach re January's double-murder of Toronto couple in Venetian Park neighborhood; Important Three Islands neighborhood public meeting tonight at 7 p.m.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 
Crime and (No) Punishment in Hallandale Beach: Observations on Rachel Mendleson's spot-on Toronto Star article on January's double-homicide of a Toronto-area couple in the Three Islands neighborhood of Hallandale Beach, which remains unsolved 8 months later. I still believe the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. has done a very poor job of engaging in outreach and making it as easy as possible for the community to access relevant info about the case that could prove helpful, just as HBPD and HB Crime Watch completely botched public outreach in 2010 following the disappearance of HB resident Lynda Robin Meier, who has never been found. Just like others at HB City Hall, HBPD continues to never learn from experience


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