Miami Beach Police Chief Wayne Jones (center) speaks during a press conference at police headquarters on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026.
Alie Skowronski
askowronski@miamiherald.com
Days before they were set to vote on granting a two-year extension to Police Chief Wayne Jones last month, elected officials in Miami Beach received packets at their homes containing copies of inappropriate emails sent more than a decade ago by Jones and other officers.
The documents, sent anonymously, show officers sending and forwarding inappropriate and offensive content, including nude images and disparaging jokes and comments about women, Muslims and Black people, between 2010 and 2012. Several of those officers later rose to the top ranks of the department, including Jones and the chief he succeeded.
The emails were originally unearthed during a sweeping internal affairs investigation, which revealed in 2015 that Miami Beach officers had exchanged hundreds of racist, sexist and pornographic messages via their city email accounts. State prosecutors also investigated, although no charges were filed.
But Jones and most of the other officers featured in the packets weren’t named at a press conference or in media reports at the time. Only three officers faced discipline, even though a document in the packets indicates that investigators flagged emails from Jones, his predecessor Rick Clements and others as inappropriate.
The packets sent last month offered no explicit indication of the anonymous sender’s intent. But commissioners who received them told the Miami Herald they took note of the timing, as they considered whether to extend Jones’ tenure as police chief until August 2028.
Three of Jones’ past emails were included in the packets. In one from 2012, Jones, who was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant the previous year, received a photo of a woman with her breasts exposed. The sender wrote: “I’ll just take a bite of this. I’ll pass on the stone crabs.” Jones then forwarded the email to himself.
In another instance from two years earlier, Jones was forwarded an email with the subject line, “They Call Her the Crusher.” A still image of a video showed a clothed woman with large breasts. Jones replied: “LMAO…”
In a third message, sent in 2010, Jones forwarded an email from his city account to his personal account with the subject line, “Women: Explained by Engineers.” Below was a series of jokes, including a fake math equation whose conclusion was, “Woman = Problems.”
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Wayne Jones is sworn in as police chief at the New World Symphony in Miami Beach on Aug. 31, 2023. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com
Emails from some of Jones’ colleagues were more inflammatory.
In one, after an officer forwarded colleagues a series of images of women’s exposed genitals with the subject line, “Do not lick the screen,” Clements — then a captain, who would later serve as police chief from 2019 to 2023 — replied: “Are these Catholic girls?”
A 2010 email from Rick Clements, who would later become the Miami Beach police chief.
In another email, Clements responded to a message in which a fellow officer joked that the colors of a complaint log made it look like a “baboon’s ass.” Clements replied: “Coming off Memorial Day weekend, I’m not quite sure how to take that.”
The comment seemed to be a reference to majority-Black crowds during Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach, known at the time as Urban Beach Week.
A 2010 email exchange involving Clements.
Commissioners made no mention of the packets at a Feb. 25 meeting where they offered Jones effusive praise before voting to grant him the extension. The matter is up for a final vote Wednesday.
Commissioner Alex Fernandez told the Herald he saw the packets as an attempt to distract from Jones’ success leading the department.
“Chief Jones has delivered double digit reductions in major crime, achieved full staffing for the first time in decades, and helped drive homeless numbers to historic lows,” Fernandez said. “When the record is so strong and morale is this high, the only thing left for critics is the gutter politics of anonymous mudslinging in a desperate attempt to tarnish an exemplary record.”
Jones said in a statement to the Herald on Tuesday that the city’s former police chief Dan Oates had “ensured the situation was handled appropriately and all were held accountable.” Oates served as chief from 2014 to 2019.
“While the motivation behind the circulation of these packets at this particular time is unknown, I will not allow it to distract from the important work our men and women do every day to keep our community safe,” Jones said.
Former Miami Beach Police Chief Dan Oates, left, poses with incoming chief Rick Clements at Miami Beach City Hall on July 1, 2019. Charlie Ortega Guifarro Miami Herald archives ‘Strong emphasis on professionalism’
Jones, 57, became the first-ever Black police chief in Miami Beach in 2023. Under his leadership, he said, the department has “placed a strong emphasis on professionalism, accountability, and inclusivity.”
“We have strengthened policies, enhanced training, and advanced initiatives such as the 30×30 Initiative, which seeks to increase the representation of women in policing,” Jones said. “During this time, we have also achieved important leadership milestones, including the promotion of the department’s first female Commander of Police, the first Black female Captain of Police, and the first Hispanic female Major of Police.”
Jones and City Manager Eric Carpenter both declined interview requests from the Herald.
Miami Beach police spokesman Christopher Bess told the Herald “a review was conducted” of the packet in recent weeks, and he noted that the emails uncovered during the past internal affairs probe were “unfortunate and unacceptable.”
“However, the matter was thoroughly investigated and addressed under the department’s leadership at that time in collaboration with the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office,” Bess said.
Miami Beach Police Chief Dan Oates (center) speaks alongside State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle and Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine at a press conference regarding inappropriate emails by members of the Miami Beach Police Department on May 14, 2015. WALTER MICHOT Miami Herald archives
The city manager was also made aware of the packet, according to city spokeswoman Melissa Berthier.
“While the content described is clearly inappropriate and does not reflect the standards we expect, this matter was addressed more than a decade ago and disciplinary action was taken,” Berthier said.
Today, Berthier added, the city routinely uses automated tools “to ensure no inappropriate content is being sent or received” through the city’s email system.
‘It was very painful’
The records recently sent to city commissioners include emails from Jones, Clements, former Deputy Chief Paul Acosta and Maj. Steven Feldman, as well as a captain, a lieutenant and a sergeant. None of them were formally disciplined in connection with the past email scandal.
One document in the packets was a chart that listed more than two dozen officers and the number of concerning messages sent from their city email accounts. Two emails from Jones, 10 from Clements, 10 from Acosta and 14 from Feldman were flagged, the chart indicates.
In one message, Acosta thanked someone for sending him a link to a video from the porn site Bang Bus. In another, Feldman forwarded an email containing a joke that no one cares about the deaths of Muslims. One officer sent an email forward featuring photos of Black people with insulting captions, including an image of someone’s feet captioned, “GhetToes.”
A joke about Muslims was included in a packet of internal Miami Beach Police Department emails.
Clements, who now leads the Miami Dade College School of Justice, did not respond to requests for comment about the emails that he received and sent when he was a captain.
Bess, the police department spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment on behalf of individual officers who remain with the department, but said the officers whose emails were highlighted “met individually with [former] Chief Oates and received verbal counseling” at the time.
Since then, he added, the department “has strengthened policies, reinforced professional standards, and enhanced training protocols to ensure conduct of this nature does not occur again.”
The entire department also received “cultural diversity and sensitivity training,” according to Berthier, the city spokesperson.
Last week, Oates told the Herald that his standard for discipline during the original investigation was, “If you sent these [inappropriate] emails to anyone else in the organization, that was a discipline offense.”
But he also stressed that he only pursued discipline against officers whose cases he believed the department could win in arbitration.
Alex Carulo, a police captain, was fired for actions that included sending colleagues a meme of so-called “Black Monopoly,” in which every board game square was a police officer saying “Go to Jail.” His firing was upheld in court.
Angel Vazquez, a police major, agreed to retire after investigators found that he distributed an image from the autopsy of Raymond Herisse, a Black driver who was killed by Miami Beach police in a controversial Memorial Day shooting in 2011.
A third officer, Capt. Richard Gullage, received a one-week suspension for forwarding some of the emails and retired soon after.
For the rest of the department, Oates said he held a series of meetings at which officers watched the entire press conference that he and prosecutors gave about the emails.
Officers who received inappropriate emails were also called into individual meetings with Oates and his deputy chief, he said. And a new policy was rolled out requiring cops to report improper use of the internal email system.
“It was very painful for the organization,” Oates said. “But I’m confident that the people who engaged in the wrongdoing were held accountable.”
Miami Herald
Aaron Leibowitz covers the city of Miami Beach for the Miami Herald, where he has worked as a local government reporter since 2019. He was part of a team that won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside. He is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.