From [HERE] and [HERE] Five Miami Beach police officers are now facing criminal charges after they were seen on body camera and security video kicking a handcuffed Black man in a hotel lobby and tackling and pummeling a Black witness who was recording the incident on his cellphone.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced the officers have been suspended and charged with first-degree misdemeanor battery.

"Excessive force can never, ever, ever be an acceptable foundation for policing in any community," Fernandez Rundle said at a news conference on Monday. "Officers who forget that fact do a grave disservice to the people they have sworn to serve [keep enslaved or put in greater confinement]."

Fernandez Rundle, with Miami Beach Police Chief Richard Clements standing behind her, played a four-minute compilation of body camera and security camera footage showing the episode that unfolded in the early hours of July 26 in the lobby of the Royal Palm Hotel in South Beach.

The state attorney went over the footage in detail, stopping and rewinding it several times to point out the individual officers who were charged and even running the video in slow motion to show two officers kicking the handcuffed detainee in the head.

"With my team, when we saw that kick to the head, and then we replayed it and saw all the kicks that preceded it -- it was just unfathomable. It was unspeakable. It was just inexcusable," Fernandez Rundle said.

She said the incident started when a police officer chased 24-year-old Dalonta Crudup into the hotel and stopped him at gunpoint as he tried to take an elevator.

A police report obtained by Miami ABC affiliate WPLG alleged that Crudup was involved in a confrontation with a Miami Beach bicycle police officer over illegally parking a motorized scooter and allegedly struck the officer with the scooter. Fernandez Rundle said the officer's leg was injured in the encounter with Crudup and that he had to be hospitalized.

The gang mentality of this latest episode of excessive use of force stirred memories of a similar, if more unconscionably brutal and deadly act by police: the McDuffie killing.

In 1979 Miami, one had to imagine a police beating so savage that it took a man’s life. 

His name was Arthur McDuffie, a 33-year-old Black insurance salesman and former Marine, beaten into a coma — his skull shattered like an egg, the medical examiner said — by as many as a dozen officers.

In 2021 Miami Beach, we don’t have to imagine a thing.

There’s crystal-clear videotape of a bunch of angry Beach police officers kicking and punching handcuffed Dalonta Crudup, 24, who had stepped out of a hotel elevator with his hands up, laid himself on the ground and pulled his hands behind him, ready for handcuffs.

There was no need to do a thing other than cart Crudup off to jail on charges that he allegedly struck a police officer with his scooter, then fled to the hotel. The officer had been allegedly trying to give Crudup a citation for wrongful parking.

But frenzied officers just kept rushing into the Royal Palm Hotel lobby in South Beach, some assaulting Crudup, others arresting for resisting arrest two other bystanders guilty of nothing but being there watching the scene unfold.

Officers had the gall to beat up the bystander videotaping the beating, Khalid Vaughn, 28, of New York, and criminally charge him when he was doing nothing but peacefully exercising his legal right to record the arrest, video shows. They also arrested Sharif Cobb, 27, a friend of Vaughn who was there witnessing Crudup’s beating, and charged both of them with resisting arrest.

These were way, way more than simply rough arrests, videos compiled by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office show. 

Let this number sink in: 21 police officers on the scene to handle the arrest of a man who had already surrendered.

A ”gang of hoodlums” homing in on their victim, the Miami Herald aptly described the scene in an editorial that asks, “Will the lessons of George Floyd’s death ever sink in?”