Adam Tavss - Miami's Finest

It's not only in Oakland that they give cops the benefit of the doubt.

NBC Miami reports.

The former Miami Beach police officer who shot and killed an unarmed Virginia tourist outside a South Beach club in June 2009 was cleared by prosecutors Tuesday.

Officer Adam Tavss was justified in the shooting of 29-year-old Husien Shehada during a June 14, 2009, encounter outside Twist nightclub, Miami-Dade prosecutors said in a final report.

We discussed Officer Adam before, expressing the usual complaint about police brutality. This decision just makes it official.

The reason he's no longer a cop is not because he murders suspected criminals every once in a while, two in one week back in the summer of 2009, but because he's also a drug dealer and drug user.

Tavss was busted in May at his home on the 14000 block of Southwest 94th Circle Lane, where cops found 47 pot plants worth about $50,000 after they received a CrimeStoppers tip.

The three-year veteran resigned from the force last November after he failed a drug test that found pot in his system. It wasn't the first time that the troubled cop had been accused of dabbling in drugs. He was also reportedly investigated for cocaine use in 2007 after another officer accused him of using the drug.

What's your opinion? Is he one bad apple of a cop, or what?

Please leave a comment.

Miami Cop Adam Tavss Kills Two in a Row

The New York Times reports on the apathy with which Miami is responding to the two fatal shootings within a week of their patrolman Adam Tavss.

The first one was Husien Shehada, which took place on June 14th. The second was Lawrence McCoy Jr., which took place three days later.

The grainy video from an outdoor security camera shows Husien Shehada walking through South Beach just after 4 a.m., then stopping and putting his hands in the air. His brother, Samer Shehada, steps beside him — then three gunshots from a police officer off-screen throw Husien Shehada to the sidewalk. “His eyes were still open,” said Samer Shehada, 31. “And when they say you can see the life leaving someone’s eyes, I could see that.”

Four days later, the same officer who shot Husien Shehada, 29 — Adam Tavss, a Miami Beach patrolman who had been on the force for three years — was involved in a second shooting. Calls to 911 suggested that each man was armed, but neither appeared to have a weapon when shot. Both later died.

The Miami Beach Police Department and the state attorney’s office are investigating the shootings. But since the first shooting on June 14, the police and lawyers representing the victims’ families have been battling for sympathy with leaks, exaggerations and omissions, and the public struggles with who to blame, who is covering up — and how much to care.

I find it hard to believe these shootings would be met with apathy. Has Miami become so savage that anything less than a major shooting in which several people are killed and wounded gets ignored?

The first incident was covered by video surveillance as well as eye-witnesses. It turned out the victim had a coat hanger under his shirt, which could have been mistaken for a weapon, not the ridiculous claim that he had an AK under his shirt, but some kind of weapon that patrolman Tavss mistook for a gun. Still, I'd say that threat was met with excessive force.

In the second shooting, the men were running away. This is unacceptable police brutality at its worst.

What's your opinion? Do you think the police should be given a break due to the incredible pressure they're under putting their lives on the line every day? Or do you think they should be held to an even higher standard as far as gun-play goes?

Has Miami become jaded to all the violence? Don't these kinds of incidents in other cities generate a mass outcry and demonstrations? What's going on down there?

Please feel free to leave a comment.