Miami Cops Misuse Tasers, With Deadly Results

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

Richard Rosengarten walked into Publix at 4:20 p.m. November 15, 2013. Normally, not even Rosengarten, a brilliant and bespectacled University of Miami law student, would remember the exact date and time he went grocery shopping. But it's not every day you see cops electrify an innocent man. The supermarket's automatic doors parted with a whisper. Ten feet in front of Rosengarten stood Vincent Miller, a tall, powerfully built Miami Police officer recently returned from a ten-month overseas military tour. The officer's broad back was turned to the law student. Between the hulking cop and a sale display cowered a dirty and disheveled man.
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"If you ever come here again, I will beat your ass," Miller threatened the homeless man. Then the cop removed the Taser from his belt and thrust it into the man's chest. Rosengarten saw the weapon crackle with 50,000 volts.
The homeless man moaned and curled into himself. Miller zapped him again and then yanked him to his feet. As the officer dragged the man outside, two Publix employees stood nearby, laughing.
What worried Rosengarten most, however, was not the brutality of the arrest. It was that there was no arrest. The homeless man wasn't charged with a crime: He was simply thrown onto the street in pain. Miller didn't even fill out a report on the incident. Instead, it seemed as if the cop were meting out punishment on his own, without a court order.
The incident "shocked my conscience," Rosengarten wrote in a complaint three days later. "I believe Officer Miller engaged in unwarranted abuse of the man he tased."
The previously unreported event is just one of dozens of troubling taserings uncovered by a yearlong New Times investigation into Miami-Dade's three largest police departments.
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