Five Worst Miami Cops of the Year: Rape Porn, Drunk Driving and A Horrible Chief

By Tim Elfrink Mon., Jan. 2 2012 at 10:04 AM

Categories: Crime

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illustration by Pat Kinsella

As always, we'll start Riptide's annual tradition of counting down our list of the year's worst cops with a caveat: being a cop in the 305 is one of the toughest law enforcement gigs in the country and despite the weekly headlines here, most Dade cops do good work. As always, we salute them for it.

Buuuuut -- boy there were some terrible cops this year, from rape-porn producers to a sophomoric war between two local forces to America's worst chief. Click through for our five worst Miami cops of 2011:

5. Miami Officer Thomas Vokaty
Back in October, a Miami cop named Fausto Lopez (who just missed this list himself) was caught blazing down the highway at 120 mph with no lights on by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper. When video of the trooper arresting the incredulous Lopez went viral, a juvenile war between the two forces erupted, Super Troopers-style, with Internet sniping, gallons of human shit dumped on an FHP car and -- the nadir of the fight -- Vokaty randomly pulling over an FHP trooper in revenge way out of his jurisdiction.

Sadly for Vokaty, the trooper he picked to pull over happened to be the brother of Miami's Internal Affairs chief. Vokaty was promptly disciplined, and the fight seems to have dissipated. In honor of Vokaty's sheer idiocy, let's revisit the video that started it all:

4. Miami-Dade Officer Fernando Villa
Just after evening rush hour last month, cops in West Kendall made a startling discovery: A Miami-Dade police cruiser idling at an intersection, its driver seemingly unconscious. Inside sat Fernando Villa -- an off duty cop wearing a T-shirt and shorts and slumped over the wheel, apparently passed out drunk.

That's bad enough -- and so is the fact that his fellow cops drove Villa home without slapping him with a DUI -- but when Riptide went digging in the 32-year-old's file, we found Villa's story was much worse: he'd previously been accused of strangling his sister and wrongfully beating up several suspects -- including one young man with Down Syndrome.

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