Miami Beach charged spring break visitor with inciting a riot: His crime was playing music
On the second evening Miami Beach imposed its 8 p.m. curfew as part of a crackdown on spring breakers, an elite police unit crashed one pulsating street party packed with 400 or more people. Police reports describe an out-of-control scene after curfew in a residential area of South Beach — some people jumping on cars, others shattering
glass, vandalizing property, trespassing, blocking roadways and smoking weed.
Yet the few arrest reports from that Sunday night incident show police singled out one person as a chief instigator, charging him with inciting a riot — Javon Washington, a 30year-old from Indiana who recently moved to Miami.
His arrest report, summed up: He was playing music.
Washington, Beach police charge, was “observed playing music from a speaker, enticing those around to engage in unruly behavior.” The report blames him, and his music, for “enticing people to wreck vehicles” and “causing subjects to make obscene gestures toward officers and taunt officers.”
Police confiscated Washington’s speaker, handcuffed him, hauled him away and hit him with a handful of charges: violating a noise ordinance but also four felonies — resisting arrest without violence, breaching the peace, violating curfew and inciting a riot. That last one is a serious crime, a third-degree felony that could carry up to five years in prison on conviction.
Washington, an aspiring Chicago-born rapper who goes by Jae Murder on the music scene, denies he encouraged people to riot or that he jawed with officers. In an interview on Thursday with the Miami Herald, Washington insisted his speaker was off when police approached him — and was not even the powerful one blaring music at the scene.
“It’s a very small speaker. It’s a cheap $20 speaker from the flea market,” he said. “I think they just wanted anyone with a speaker. I think they were confused about who was controlling the crowd.”
While police say he also urged the crowd to get rowdy and resist police, one witness denied that to a Herald reporter on the scene at the corner of Euclid Avenue and Sixth Street that night.
“Literally, he was playing music and they arrested him,” the man, who would only give his first name of Kevin, said.
Asked to explain what Washington did to urge people to jump on cars, trespass and fuel the mayhem, Miami Beach Police spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez said the arrest form speaks for itself. The closest Washington’s arrest form comes to an explanation is when police say that “officers observed the defendant enticing the crowd with music from speakers.”
Miami Beach police have made more than 1,000 arrests since spring break throngs began spilling into the city in early February, a reaction from law enforcement and city political leadership that some Black leaders have criticized as excessive. But Washington’s music-driven charges stand out in the dozens of rolling street parties and clashes in the city over the last few months.
It came on the second night of the curfew and only a few hours after city commissioners gathered for an emergency meeting following a Saturday night of chaos on South Beach that again put one of the world’s most popular tourist meccas under an unwanted international spotlight.
In early February, the city already had implemented an emergency order that criminalizes some items that most other times are part of the typical tourist kit: backpacks, coolers and speakers. They’re all banned on the beach east of Ocean Drive. It’s an order that is usually enforced only during “high impact” weekends like spring break and Memorial Day and that draw mostly young, mostly Black crowds.
Only one other person was charged with inciting a riot on Sunday night. That arrest came an hour later and several blocks east inside the Entertainment District, which had been placed under the curfew. According to the arrest report, it had nothing to do with police concerns about music and a large crowd was not involved.
Quamier Nantambu Johnson, 25, was charged after police said he and two friends became abusive and aggressive towards two Miami Gardens police officers helping
Beach police enforce the curfew near Collins Avenue and Ninth Street just before 10:30 p.m. Sunday.
According to his arrest report, as Johnson and two friends passed by, he cursed and insulted an officer. When the officer told him to tamp it down and to leave the area because it was after curfew, police said Johnson threatened to harm the officer. Johnson was eventually taken into custody and charged with threatening the officer, resisting without violence, weed possession and inciting a riot.
Johnson, who as of Friday had been released from jail, could not be reached for comment.
Both incitement arrests came as police were pressed into more handson action by city leaders who viewed videotape of the bedlam that broke out Saturday, a night earlier, with cops firing pepper balls into crowds that had overturned tables at restaurants and damaged cars and had fights. Even the iconic Clevelander South Beach bar and hotel was forced to shut down.
This year’s spring break has generated plenty of controversy and fingerpointing about what or who is to blame for crowdcontrol problems — from cheap airfare and pandemic boredom bringing a flood of tourists, to police tactics and city policies that some critics see as biased against Black visitors, to the come-ondown-to-Florida message of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Earlier this week, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber — who has called for a total reform of the city’s Entertainment District — said the measures were necessary for public safety.
“There has been gun play, open brawling and other hazards. And all that in the midst of a pandemic where mask usage and physical distancing seems like an afterthought, if that,” Gelber said in a video message. “So we have to implement measures we would prefer not to deploy, but must.”
Stephen Hunter Johnson, chair of Miami-Dade County’s Black Affairs Advisory Board, believes one group is getting too much of the blame.
“There’s an undertone in that somehow all Black people are responsible for the actions of a few people who happen to be Black,” Johnson said. “I just don’t want the unnecessary scapegoating of Black people.”
For others, like Washington, the concern is personal — that the pressure on police to do something about wild weekends produced excessive charges that could cost them work or even wind up putting them in prison.
Washington, for one thing, was charged with breaking curfew — even though the street corner where police took him into custody was west of the Entertainment District boundaries where curfew was imposed. Interim city manager Raul J. Aguila admitted as much but said it was up to the Miami
Dade State Attorney “to determine the prosecution of those charges.”
Washington said he moved to Miami from Indiana to further his music career and had gone to South Beach to promote himself and hand out fliers. He acknowledged a past criminal record, saying he had two previous felonies, one a robbery when he was 17 in Chicago.
But now, he said he is scrambling to make a living while pursuing a rap career. He posts his music on SoundCloud like many hopeful artists but said he made his first Miami appearance on stage in December. For now, he said he works multiple jobs, including running food at a Miami restaurant and house painting. An incitement charge, he said, could derail all that. He’s already spent several nights in jail from the arrest.
“I don’t want the charge on my record,” he said. “It would really hurt me a lot.”
Charles Rabin: 305-376-3672, @chuckrabin