Above and below, photos of Hallandale Beach City Hall, June 6th, 2020, by me, South Beach Hoosier.
Today's blog post is a fact and context-filled, chronological analysis about how things got to the point they did in Hallandale Beach with its Police Department.
But first, my usual disclosure when writing about police matters.
Just a reminder for you newcomers to the blog about my beliefs and particular bias here:
CBS4 News
Hallandale Beach Without SWAT Team After Meeting With Chief Goes Poorly
By Ted Scouten, June 15, 2020 at 11:22 pm
https://cbsloc.al/37tgWaC
1. So very, very predictable! Years of neglect and lack of proper oversight of the Hallandale Beach Police Dept (HBPD) by Hallandale Beach's elected officials -and an equal lack of interest by South Florida's news media in honestly reporting what was really happening- results in yet another predictable black eye for a city that's EARNED plenty of them the past 20 years.
2. The decision last week by the Hallandale Beach SWAT team to resign en masse, soon after its Police Chief -below- and City Comm. Javellana engaged in virtue-signaling efforts by kneeling before George Floyd/BLM/Leftist protesters on city property, shows that Identity Politics has reached deep down into small U.S. city PDs.
That makes even good police officers feel like they're always skating on thin ice, and about to be made an example of by politicians and administrators more interested in pandering to and placating Grievance Groups than they are in having their back. Period.
And less than one block from where HB's Police Chief was kneeling?
The street signs honoring the disengenuous and mendacious former Police Chief who attempted to frame and imprison two innocent HBPD officers in order to impress his boss, then-City manager Mike Good.
3. The immediate aftermath of the Howard Bowe, Jr. killing in 2014 by the HB SWAT team was handled so poorly by the city's elected officials and HBPD -as I wrote at the time and describe in detail below- that many Hallandale Beach citizens who previously gave them both the benefit of the doubt, stopped doing so, and have never trusted them since.
4. Sweden's all-too-predictably embarrassing police response to looting in its largest cities and the subsequent kneeling by a female police officer, to the dismay of the whole country, serves as a predicate to HB's current controversy. #distrust
This blog post is longer than usual, but as you will see, dear reader, there's a good reason for that. These contentious issues have a mountain of context and facts that many people directly involved in it, as well as reporting on it, either don't know or have clearly forgotten.
I don't want you to be yet another ill-informed person spouting nonsense when it's so easy to be well-informed.
Right now, the most loathed person in all of #Sweden is the blonde, blue-eyed female police officer who kneeled before protesters in #Stockholm two weekends ago, then held a handmade "
White silence is violence" sign, thus becoming the latest Leftist prop.
People of very different political backgrounds and beliefs throughout Sweden were united in being caught dumbfounded that on top of everything else they've collectively endured the past 20 years, that an event that took place in the U.S., Minneapolis, was now helping to tear apart the increasingly fragile fabric of Swedish society.
In a country with half the population of Florida, it's a society already straining for most of the past 20 years after accepting into a still-largely homogeneous and secular nation, the highest number of immigrants in the world, per capita. No, not Germany, Sweden.
And with those new arrivals came much more violent and sadistic crime than the country has ever known in its history.
And so it is that in Hallandale Beach... what do you know, not just a police officer kneeling before or with protesters, but the actual Police Chief, Sonia Quiñones, a woman I've interacted with dozens of times in the past.
Taking place not in some small city in another state but right here where we live in South Florida.
And once again, the city's elected officials and the HBPD did a very poor job of explaining their actions and words -and themselves- to the public.
Like it never occurred to them that their words and actions, whether sincere or politically-calculated, could be misinterpreted, or that some/most people in the community could have a different point-of-view and think what they were saying or doing was not just incorrect, but would actually make things arguably worse.
Now you and I recognize that high self-regard at HB City Hall for the vanity that it is, and if there's one thing that we've come to know and understand about the City of Hallandale Beach and its elected officials, it's that the vanity at HB City Hall is off-the-charts in ways that would astound people who live in much larger cities with more resources and amenities.
Yes, more often than you would think makes sense, HB's elected officials prefer to imagine that they are something they are not, but they can't acknowledge this dissonance publicly, so continue the ridiculous pretense that they and Hallandale Beach are much more important in the scheme of things than is the case.
And as I've chronicled on this blog for the entirety that it has existed, 17 years, we know who that person is who has personified that pompous attitude for over 20 years - Mayor Joy Cooper.
More about what these two events taking place in different parts of the world had in common is below... But first, buckle up!!!
And here's a useful reminder: Stockholm and Hallandale Beach and its 37,000 residents are NOT New York...
“She has shown that she takes pleasure in besmirching the hard work and dedication of the members of this professional agency, having the gall to compare us to the Minneapolis Police Department," the SWAT team wrote in the letter.
Like so many times in the past 17 years that I've been writing this blog, chiefly about the nexus of public policy, government, and politics in South Florida and elsewhere, a dismaying event took place in Sweden that precipitated my blog post here. In today's case, it's of police and government officials publicly engaging in virtue-signaling and kneeling before protesters. And crossing lines that should not be crossed. So here's the backstory.
Last week, after first hearing about and then finally seeing multiple stories in Swedish newspapers and TV newscasts full of the disturbing details surrounding the large George Floyd protests that took place over the weekend in Sweden's three largest cities, Stockholm, Göteborg (Gothenburg), and beautiful but crime-plagued Malmö, and the subsequent rioting and looting that took place there that made it among the worst in Europe, I understood precisely what was vexing and frustrating so many of my friends over there.
This was especially true for my friends in Sweden living in large, sophisticated big cities located on the water that are some of my favorite places on earth.
Places that I can clearly see when I close my eyes.
Places I feel a palpable sense of peace and contentment in, unlike most days in South Florida.
Thru watching these newscasts and reading the 1,001 stories on Twitter, I also came to better understand the palpable sense of dismay felt by millions of average Swedes seeing what was taking place right in front of them, being shared and shown around the world via TV and YouTube and Twitter. And it was not pretty.
To many Swedes, even liberal ones who are always decrying the dangers of populism, the chaos they saw represented nothing less than the end of the society they had grown up with and loved. An imperfect Swedish society to be sure, but one that up until now has continually emphasized the needs of the larger community over the individual, and especially, the whiny, greasy wheel that's eager to draw attention to itself.
There are many Swedish words and phrases that are commonly used to describe Sweden and Swedes sense of self and the responsibilities of the individual. Suffice to say that it's frowned upon to try to draw attention to yourself, even when you have done something noteworthy or meritorious.
And trust me, THAT is -or was until recently- a very, very real thing there to promote cohesiveness.
Yet there on my computer screen or on my Android phone were mountains of evidence that in multiple cities, people's lifetime investments in their small, family businesses were trashed, burned, or ruined in just a matter of minutes without a thought as to what would happen the next day.
And the business owners were just supposed to be stoic about it.
You know, because they're Swedish and all, even if they were originally from Serbia, Syria, Turkey, Iran, or Pakistan.
But what these folks really were, of course, was angry. Angry because just
like had been the case for many days in so many ostensible Floyd marches in the U.S., including in Downtown Miami near Bayside Marketplace, people marching one moment consciously made a decision to chose to steal or destroy the property of others who had nothing to do with police misconduct, and consciously put other people's lives and jobs in danger, without any sign of remorse.
It was the usual routine, wasn't it? Looters march around with the genuine protesters for awhile, with deeply-naive reporters and TV cameras everywhere, but not asking the questions of #Antifa protesters that people wanted asked.
No, judging by the local Miami TV reporters' overall peppiness, it was as if they were all involved in a fundraising march against Pediatric Cancer! But they weren't of course.
And the whole time, the looters-hiding in plain sight were just waiting until they saw a weak spot among the police, or a glimpse of undefended stores that were ripe for plucking and liberating.
Unfortunately, the police in Sweden, who already have lots of other issues and failings that I don't have the time to get into here, deployed far too few few cops on the street. That was no accident.
In the year 2020, Swedish cops, like Swedish politicians, are perpetually focused like a laser on public appearances.
So besides not seeing the appropriate number of properly-equipped policemen deployed, the Swedish public saw that once again the police force had been politically neutralized and marginalized by their more politically-inclined superiors who intentionally wanted a low number out on the streets, so as to not rile or antagonize the crowds of protesters.
Once again, the appearance of policing was considered more important than actual policing, and when the looting started, guess what happened?
In fact, I received a larger-than-usual response to what I tweeted below, especially via DMs from people in Sweden who are frustrated beyond belief that they live in places where, now, it seems like the criminal element always has the numbers advantage, in part because the Swedish judicial system is truly an embarrassing joke.
Serious criminal offenses are rarely seriously punished as they would be in the U.S., even multiple rapes of teenage girls. Despite what the rules and laws are supposed to be, if the criminal is foreign-born, especially a recent immigrant, they often don't face the called-for deportation despite their serious criminal record.
Meanwhile, smart, hard-working foreigners and their families who are contributing to Swedish society, especially in the technology industry, people who with their families are grateful to Sweden for providing them a safe place to live freely, people in the process of becoming citizens by following the rules and actually learning to speak the language and come to appreciate Swedish culture, are routinely featured in business news reports about them being deported because of paperwork mistakes by their employers involving... surprise, taxes.
The taxes that fund and lubricate the massive Swedish social system, and nothing is prioritized more highly than getting taxes. #tragic
Right now, the most loathed person in all of #Sweden is the blonde, blue-eyed female police officer who kneeled before protesters in #Stockholm, then held a handmade "White silence is violence" sign, thus becoming the latest Leftist prop.
People everywhere were caught dumbfounded that on top of
Chicago police union boss says he’ll boot cops who kneel with protestors.
John Catanzara, the new president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, said the gesture,
seen throughout the nation during protests over Floyd's death in police custody in Minneapolis,
The photo that enraged and upset so many in the Broward area, even people who are not usually very keen on either the past or current performance of the Hallandale Beach Police Dept.
For the Hallandale Beach SWAT team and many other members of the Dept., a clear sign was sent to them when Police Chief Sonia Quiñones showed her eagerness to publicly/politically placate and break bread with George Floyd/BLM/Left protesters via her decision to actually kneel down with them on City Hall property, in front of the HB Cultural Center.
The SWAT team unit's interpretation may've been a simple one, but it wasn't without good cause: Why wait for Chief Quiñones to stab you in the back?
After all, HBPD has a history of its Chief and the administration tossing good police officers overboard to score points with the City manager, City Commission or the community.
If you doubt me about this, consider the two separate comments online this afternoon, June 15th, that you can see for yourself at the HBPD portal for
LEO Affairs,
a site I have been looking at for well over ten years
http://forums.leoaffairs.com/forumdisplay.php?374-Hallandale-Beach-Police-Department
http://forums.leoaffairs.com/showthread.php?795145-Congratulations-to-the-SWAT-GUYS
Congratulations to the SWAT GUYS
You did a great thing in resigning.....your chief will throw you to the wolves for doing your job and she wouldn't give a damn. But then again she would also target you now for making her look incompetent...(which she is)....good luck and good job!
Everything she’s doing now is to protect her image. She doesn’t care about us. There are dozens of officers here that she has screwed over for her own benefit.
It's a sordid history that I've written about honestly, factually and from a first-person perspective for over 17 years on this blog, a fact I reminded HB Vice-Mayor Sabrina Javellana of on Twitter on May 31st, in her response to a tweet by film director and South Florida Social Media star Billy Corben. (Corben has Followed me on Twitter since my earliest days there.)
In fact, as you can see above, I communicated my mix of dismay and concern to Javellana days BEFORE the mock funeral processions she was involved with, and the larger controversy that she has been the center of ever since she was elected to the HB City Commission as a college student in November of 2018.
I could already see how things would be going and said as much to friends in phone calls to out-of-part-time HB residents who are civic activists.
They knew I was right, too, because HB lacks real political or local business leadership to hold public officials to account and act as a counter-weight, whether Mayor Cooper, Comm. Javellana or longtime local ne'er do-well politician Shevrin Jones of West Park, who as I've chronicled here on the blog many times in the past, has almost perfected the art of appearing to be sincere when he wasn't, as well as co-opting other people's issues and concerns to advance his political goal of becoming a career politician.
This despite his fecklessness and consistently ignoring his constituents interest in genuine oversight and an audit of the HB CRA, as my many past blog posts about Jones' seemingly recklessness in office made clear.
It's almost criminal how little remorse for being so disinterested in getting tangible results for the residents of western Hallandale Beach included in House District 101.
Here's a perfect example of Shevrin Jones' duplicity, which I will be expanding into a future blog post"
So, on the one hand Jones tweets how indignant he is, but when someone who lived in HIS legislative district was needlessly killed by the police, here's how important Howard Bowe, Jr's death really was.
Here, in their entirety, per Twitter, are ALL the tweets about Howard Bowe, Jr. before and after the City of Hallandale Beach finally paid his family $425,000 in 2018 after its SWAT team killed him in 2014:
No results for "@ShevrinJones, Bowe"
It speaks for itself.
So back in 2018, the then-20-year old Javellana defeated a no-talent interim City Commissioner whom nobody in Hallandale Beach or Hollywood had ever heard of before getting the temp gig. A guy whom my friends and I thought so little of that we sarcastically called him "Dilly Dally," rather than say his real name aloud: Rich Dally. A total cipher.
My February 27, 2018 blog post helps explain how and why someone as inexperienced and ill-informed as Javellana could come to power, and as I expected, has become a magnet and lightning rod for the professional Grievance Class and Identity Politics crowd in South Florida, a large segment of Establishment Democrats in Broward and Miami-Dade, as a quick peek at her Twitter page quickly shows.
That particular February 2018 HB City Commission meeting also explains why then-interim Mayor Keith London was thoroughly trounced and tossed out as mayor less than a short nine months later, his second time being defeated in an HB mayoral campaign.
As most of you regular readers of the blog know, Keith London is a one-time friend of mine whom I used to speak to, see, or communicate regularly with about 3-5 times a week -for years.
Someone I often spent time with outside of HB City Hall, had coffee and bagels with at Panera Bread or the now-defunct Sage Bagels, or have Starbucks iced drinks with at their tiny location on Hallandale Beach Blvd.
But no more the past seven-plus years.
Longtime #HallandaleBeach civic activists and past supporters of Mayor #KeithLondon and Comm. #MicheleLazarow are DISMAYED and EMBARRASSED at what is taking place at City Hall now, with personal/political expediency trumping common sense and rational public discourse
Excerpt: What the public saw after Keith London was voted in as interim mayor on a 2-1 vote was a government action that was NOT on the public agenda, should NOT have taken place then without the proper public notice being given, and what in almost every respect, resembled the sort of thing that Joy Cooper loved doing.
That is to say, doing something not because it was the right thing to do for the community at large, or even some part of it, but rather because she thought she and what I have long called her "Rubber Stamp Crew" thought they could get away with it.It was that simple.For years!
Then as now, it was exactly what it looked like, and yet I would hazard to say that few people who know Keith London even a fraction as well as I do, would have expected such a cynical, self-destructive and negative thing to be his first official act as Mayor.And yet it was.
He squandered his opportunity to look like he was up to the challenge of running things instead of being the opposition, and seemed to act petty and argumentative just for the sake of being that way, with no apologies for how things appeared to the public.
Read the rest of the post at:
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2018/02/longtime-hallandalebeach-civic.html
The above post of mine received well over 1,500 page views.
Dally got appointed to that interim position on the dais instead of either of my two much more-deserving good friends, Csaba Kulin and Rob Raymond, the first two people who were actually nominated that night at a meeting that reeked of a "fix."
It was also easily one of the worst and most self-defeating episodes in a city so well known for them that it's been a news media laughingstock throughout South Florida since I moved back here from Washington, D.C. in late 2003.
That embarrassing political and personal episode would have been front page news in many other parts of the country: someone getting nominated to be on the City Commission by one elected official, then acting-Mayor Keith London, who promptly stabbed his friends in the back publicly by voting for an unqualified person nobody I knew had ever heard of, who had never even been seen at a City Commission meeting.
But it was largely ignored by South Florida's news media.
The Hallandale Beach Police SWAT team has specifically stated in their communications with Police Chief Quiñones that they believe Comm. Javellana has consistently played politics with crime and policing issues in general, and the recent George Floyd incident in particular.
They also believe she mocked them and their duties by also kneeling with protesters, most of whom have no history of being genuine civic activists who are interested in the welfare of the ENTIRE CITY. No, because they are niche activists.
Nibblers on the margins.
People who in many if not most cases have either never appeared publicly at HB City Hall to confront the powers-that-be, or even shown any inclination to show up at public events located outside of NW and SW Hallandale Beach to speak up about their concerns, legitimate or otherwise.
I'm someone who would know about that from having gone to 99% of the public meetings held in HB between 2007 and 2016, even the ones that didn't end until after 2 a.m.
“She has shown that she takes pleasure in besmirching the hard work and dedication of the members of this professional agency, having the gall to compare us to the Minneapolis Police Department," the SWAT team wrote in the letter.
People who routinely tell others that they are well-known critics of the city or HBPD but who are anything but that.
In order for them to be that they would have to be in line behind me, someone who was actually criticizing HBPD to its face for years, including to the two previous Police Chiefs, as I've detailed on this blog, including the fishy circumstances surrounding its "certification."
So where exactly were these concerned HB citizens protesting now when HBPD was making a mess of the investigation into the double-murder in January of 2013 of a Toronto couple that lived here part-time, or the sudden disappearance of longtime resident Lynda Meier?
Where were they hiding???
Where were all the George Floyd/BLM protesters and police reform advocates around here hiding in 2015 when I was writing about this little War Wagon now being in town?
So, speaking of certified police departments, guess who continually spoke to the out-of-town law enforcement official assigned by the FDLE to conduct the review of HBPD while mendacious Chief Tom Magill was in charge, and who told the truth about how all the bad things that were self-evident, as well as the ones under-the-radar?
Me, yours truly. Dave.
Members of the HBPD also believe that
she has no problems with consistently mis-representing the findings of past legal and criminal investigation of the 2014 Howard Bowe, Jr. shooting.
The SWAT unit and its supporters in the community have made the calculated decision to call Police Chief Quinones' bluff, and left her and her political Identity Politics supporters in the community holding the bag, knowing that most other current members of the HB Police Dept. will NOT want to join the controversial SWAT unit under the current circumstances, which requires specialized training.
Left unsaid for many years in Hallandale Beach and never ever discussed in media reports, but often speculated on by me and my other well-informed civic activists friends in HB when we got together - Why didn't HB simply rely and pay for the Broward Sheriff's Office SWAT team to handle those sorts of needs?
Questions that continue to be asked now, years later.
In part it comes from Mayor Joy Cooper's longstanding contention that this small city of less than 4 square miles needed or DESERVED to have everything that much-larger cities have, including separate police and fire departments, rather than simply have a contract with the BSO, as many other neighboring cities do.
Cooper's contention always failed the smell test since it was a self-evident fact known by anyone who has ever been in the HB Commission chambers that hardly any members of the current HBPD or HBFD actually live in the city. Or even nearby, and that even includes the two most recent Police Chiefs as well as most of the recent City Managers and City Attorneys of the past 17 years.
Though #HallandaleBeach = small in larger scheme of things in #SoFL, anger w/HBPD -inc. mine- goes back LONG B4 Bowe debacle, as I've chronicled. On Sunday, I'll post relevant facts being IGNORED!
Completely unsatisfactory job #HallandaleBeach City Comm. has done by providing proper oversight of HBPD 4 YEARS, along w/petty rules previous CMs had in place to discourage accountability, kept public in dark, and in turn, has led to MANY preventable tragedies.
https://cbsloc.al/2MPGEwu
CBS4 News
Entire Hallandale Beach SWAT Members Resign From Team
June 12, 2020 at 11:00 pm
https://miami.cbslocal.com/2020/06/12/hallandale-beach-swat-team-resigns/
---
What follows below is my May 28th, 2014 email to about 130 or so people around Hallandale Beach, Hollywood, South Florida, Tallahassee, and to local South Florida newspaper and TV newsrooms.
It's remarkable how prescient I was then and also how little things have changed for the better.
Below it I've added additional information about the Bowe case that you probably have not heard about but which I have known for six years.
-----
Yet another story the #SoFL news media (and esp. the Sun Sentinel) are ignoring at their peril, even while The Washington Post is NOT Howard Bowe shot by Hallandale Beach SWAT -the police that don't knock.
The last few days, those three chalkboards placed by the City of Hallandale Beach on the south side of Foster Road, across from Foster Park, have had nothing but messages -and warnings-
about this police shooting, which from what I've heard, seems pretty sketchy.
(I'll use the photos when I blog about this soon.)
Apparently this unarmed man was shot at 5:30 a.m. while getting up from his reclining chair in the Living Room after hearing either his window or back door being broken down.
Just like you or I would.
South Florida Sun Sentinel
Man shot by Hallandale Beach SWAT dies
By Tonya Alanez, Sun Sentinel reporter
7:00 PM EDT, May 21, 2014
A Hallandale Beach man has died 11 days after he was shot by the city police department's SWAT team serving a search warrant at his home.
Howard Bowe, 34, died shortly after midnight Monday at Hollywood Memorial Regional Hospital from complications of a gunshot wound, Broward Medical Examiner Craig Mallak confirmed Wednesday.
Hallandale Beach police officials could not be reached Wednesday for confirmation of Bowe's death, despite email and voicemail requests. The officer who shot Bowe has not been identified.
A search warrant had brought police to Bowe's home in the early morning of May 8. They suspected drug distribution from the duplex in the 700 block of Northwest Fourth Street.
During the course of serving the warrant, Bowe and his pit bull were shot. The 13-year-old dog died at the scene.
"It appears the officers from the SWAT team felt threatened," Maj. Thomas Honan, a spokesman for the agency, said on the day of the shooting.
The dog, Honan said, was at the door of the home and broke free from its chain and charged the officers.
"Everybody's still just in shock," Mike Ashley, 34, of Atlanta, a friend of Bowe's since they were students at Nova Middle School in Davie, said by telephone Wednesday. "I feel like there's a lot of unanswered questions."
Bowe's sister, Corneesa Bowe, who lives in the other half of the duplex, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
He had a car wash business and lawn mowing service, and had never been violent, his sister said in the immediate aftermath of her brother's shooting.
She had awoken to the sound of gunfire, she said.
"They came in the back door," Corneesa Bowe said. "Why shoot an unarmed person?"
Police briefly took her 16-year-old nephew into custody on the morning of the shooting, Corneesa Bowe said.
-------
So, can you explain to me how, IF the Sun Sentinel was doing their job well, and clearly they are NOT and have not in many, many years, NINE DAYS BEFORE the story above appeared, the Washington Post had already told the real tale, with meaningful facts and historical context completely missing from the "local media."
Yes, just like how Rachel Mendleson of the Toronto Sun was consistently running circles around the local South Florida news media in covering the double-homicide last January in the Venetian Park area of Hallandale Beach of the part-time HB residents from Toronto:
David Pichosky and Rochelle Wise.
And unlike the majority of the media folks down here, Rachel Mendleson knows all about those pesky and inconvenient facts I've shared with many of you all about HBPD's shameful and inexcusable delay in getting vital information out to the public about that double-murder in a timely & logical fashion, when it would've actually happened -in the hours and days immediately after it happened, NOT weeks later.
She also knows as well about the abject failure of HB Crime Watch in this case, just like it was completely inadequate and MIA after the Linda Meier disappearance when Alexander Lewy was in charge of it and not yet on the HB City Commission.
My well-informed friend, Chad Lincoln, was paying attention, even while the Sun Sentinel was not even pressing HBPD to get the basic facts straights -the back door or a window?- in the days afterwards.
8:39 AM - 21 May 2014
By the way, Chad delivered, by far, the single best oral presentation of the 18 candidates at last Tuesday's HB City Comm. meeting re selecting an interim Comm. until November, and who, for his articulate recital of relevant facts, promptly received a 1 on a scale of 1-25 from our loathsome
and thin-skinned authoritarian mayor, Joy Cooper, on account of Chad's penchant for wanting meaningful transparency and accountability for HB citizens to be genuine, not merely buzz words Cooper tosses around when it suits her.
For Mayor Joy Cooper, the truth is like water was to the Wicked Witch -something to be avoided at all costs!
Dave
“The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a war.”
— Former Hallandale Beach, Florida, attorney Richard Kane, after police officers raided the home of Edwin and Catherine Bernhardt. Police broke into the couple’s home and immediately threw Catherine Bernhardt to the floor at gunpoint. Edwin Bernhardt, who had come down from his bedroom in the nude, was also thrown to the floor and cuffed at gunpoint. Police forced him to wear a pair of his wife’s underwear then took him to the police station, where he spent several hours in jail. Police later discovered they had raided the wrong address.
Mr. Kane gave that quote to to the Miami Herald in a 1999 article about the Bernhardt lawsuit. A year after that raid, police in Hallandale Beach again made headlines, this time after raiding the home of Tracy Bell and her three young children. Bell also happened to be pregnant. They found no drugs, but this time the police continued to insist they had hit the correct house, citing a tip from a confidential informant who claimed to have made a buy at Bell’s address. Bell had actually complained to police about drug activity in the neighborhood. The police had likely confused her home with the one next door. Bell had no criminal record but her neighbor did. Her neighbor also admitted to having friends in the drug trade.
A man was shot before dawn Thursday by a member of the Hallandale Beach Police Department’s SWAT unit while a search warrant was being served, an official said.
The incident happened about 6 a.m. at a duplex in the 700 block of NW Fourth Street. The wounded man was identified by police as Howard Bowe, 34.
According to Major Thomas Honan, a warrant was being served for suspected distribution of drugs from the property.
“It appears the officers from the SWAT team felt threatened,” Honan said. “A SWAT officer discharged his weapon and struck him.”
Bowe was taken to a hospital, where he remained in surgery late Thursday morning.
Honan said the investigation into the shooting was still unfolding and that “we don’t know what caused the SWAT officer to discharge his weapon.” . . .
Corneesa Bowe, who lives in the other half of the duplex, said the wounded man is her brother.
“He’s in critical condition and we’re praying for him,” Corneesa Bowe said. “He’s in ICU right now.”
She said her brother has a car wash business and lawn mowing service, and has never been violent.
Bowe said she woke up when the family’s 13-year-old dog was killed.
“They came in the back door,” she said. “Why shoot an unarmed person? Now he’s fighting for his life.”
She said she also was upset that police took her 16-year-old nephew into custody for part of the morning.
Neighbor Fred Webb lives across the street from the duplex, where he said scores of patrol cars and unmarked cars arrived after the gunfire.
Webb said Howard Bowe “is an honest man who worked every day” at his business, a traveling car wash. A trailer for the car wash was parked next to the house.
“I can’t understand it,” Webb said. “I hope he’s all right.”
Details are still sketchy, but from what I can tell, there has yet to be any mention of the police finding drugs or of Bowe possessing a weapon. That may come in the next few days, but it’s usually information the police release immediately.
Hallandale Beach (population: 38,000) is in Broward County, which is home to a variety of drug war excesses. There’s the town of Sunrise, where police were recently shown to have been luring drug offenders to town with “reverse stings” designed to nab cash-heavy suspects in order to pad the asset forfeiture account. Broward County has also been home to several drug raid deaths over the last decade or so, including Anthony Diotaiuto, Vincent Hodgkiss and Brenda Van Zwieten.
Defendants of the door-kicking drug raid say these tactics protect the lives of police officers. Here’s a contrary data point, also from last week:
A Killeen police officer has died after being shot in the line of duty Friday.
Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie succumbed to his injuries at Scott & White Hospital in Temple, just after 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon.
Dinwiddie, along with three other officers were injured in Friday’s shooting.
Authorities went to a four-plex apartment on the 1100 block of Circle M Dr. to serve a search warrant. When Dinwiddie and another officer tried to enter the apartment, 50-year-old Marvin Louis Guy and a 49-year-old woman opened fire on authorities, hitting Dinwiddie in the face and Officer Odis Denton in the leg.
Guy is now in the Bell County Jail and faces three attempted capital murder charges. . . .
One of the suspects who shot several Killeen police officers has been charged with three counts of attempted capital murder. Marvin Louis Guy is being held in the Killeen City Jail on a $3 million bond, $1 million for each count against him.
Two of the officers wounded this morning are still in the hospital, the other two were treated and released.
The shooting happened around 5:30 a.m. Friday, in the 1100 block of Circle M Drive in Killeen. A Killeen tactical response unit and a central Texas Organized crime unit came to serve a search warrant. When two officers tried to enter the apartment, a man and a woman opened fire.
Last December, about 90 miles from Killeen, Henry Magee shot and killed Burleson County, Tex., Deputy Adam Sowders during a night raid on Magee’s home. Magee was raided because he was growing some pot plants. In February, a grand jury declined to indict Magee, finding that a reasonable person in his position could have thought he was being attacked and thus fired back in self-defense.
Even if you believe the goal of eradicating drugs is worth some collateral damage — that you’re okay with the occasional dead cop, dead bartender or critically wounded car wash owner if it means fewer people are getting high — 15 years have lapsed between the time the Hallandale Beach police terrorized the Bernhardts and then made Edward Bernhardt sit in a jail cell wearing only his wife’s underwear and the shooting of Howard Bowe. Does anyone think it’s any more difficult to get high in Hallandale Beach now than it was then? How about in Killeen or Burleson County?
For folks in Hollywood who want to laugh at how bad things are in Hallandale Beach, here's a reminder of where y-o-u live.
Will Hollywood's Police Dept. be equipped with body cameras before the first bit of dirt is turned over for the new HPD HQ? In case you forgot, progressive Hollywood, one of the most liberal cities in Florida has never had body cameras on its police.
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Dave
