Miami Beach officers in beach ATV crash in process of being fired

Late-night partying on South Beach is pretty much an everyday occurrence.Polycore zentai are manufactured as a single sheet,

But not when it's Miami Beach police officers allegedly doing the drinking and partying ¡ª and crashing into visitors on an ATV ¡ª instead of patrolling their beats.

On Tuesday, two days after police say an on-duty officer met a woman at a popular South Beach hangout, sped off down the beach with her on his ATV and then crashed into a man and woman near the shoreline, flustered city and police officials moved to cut their ties with the incident.

Officers Derick Kuilan and Rolando Gutierrez are to be fired, they said.

The officers, both with the department for about six years, were working Sunday morning but ended up at The Clevelander hotel at 10th Street and Ocean Drive before the crash,Save on hydraulic hose and fittings, according to police.

Confirmation on whether Kuilan, who drove the ATV, was drinking won't be known until the results of a blood test come back. But Mayor Matti Herrera Bower said a Breathalyzer test showed that Gutierrez had alcohol in his system Sunday morning.

"We rely on the police department to keep us safe and we rely that when they say they're working they're working," Bower said. "So for us to think that they're patrolling certain areas and for them not to be there, is to me a very terrible thing."

According to Bower, police and a witness, Kuilan was assigned to robbery detail on the beach Sunday and Gutierrez was assigned to patrol Mid-Beach. But at some point, the two officers met up at The Clevelander, where Adelee Sharie Martin, 27, was partying with a bride-to-be.

At around 5 a.m.,Customized imprinted and promotional usb flash drives. Kuilan and Martin jumped on a department ATV and peeled off South down the beach with the headlights off.

At 5:13 a.m., near Fourth Street, Kuilan lost control and slammed into Luis Almonte, of North Miami, and Kitzie Nicanor, from Washington State.

Martin flew from the vehicle. Almonte, 29, suffered a broken femur that required surgery. He remains at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. And Nicanor, a 28-year-old , underwent surgery at Jackson Memorial's Ryder Trauma Center, where police say she remains in stable condition.

Jonnathan Adames, a friend of Almonte's who was heading to meet him on the beach just before the crash, said he heard the thud from the impact and ran over to see Almonte bloody and screaming and Nicanor swollen and lying motionless with her eyes rolling back in the sockets.

He said Kuilan asked him to help with the victim but then quickly disappeared.

Miami Beach police say they can't confirm if he fled the scene. But they say he violated department policy by taking Martin on his ATV.

Police say they are moving to fire Kuilan and Gutierrez because they engaged in "conduct unbecoming [of] a police officer" and for actions amounting to "dereliction of duties." Both officers have been relieved of duty.

"I am disappointed and share the community's outrage about these incidents involving two of our officers," Police Chief Carlos Noriega said in a statement.

But for Almonte's family, outrage doesn't go far enough.

"Fired is not enough," said Almonte's brother, Isramil Almonte, 31. "Why are they still roaming around free?"

The Miami-Dade State Attorney's office is investigating the crash, but spokesman Ed Griffith would not address specifics.

"We are investigating the matter and gathering as much evidence as we can," said Griffith. "Ultimately,Not to be confused with RUBBER MATS available at your local hardware store our final decision is based on what the evidence tells us."

Sunday's crash isn't the first time Miami Beach police have injured or killed a beach visitor.

In 2003, a French woman was killed when a police SUV ran over her and her sister while they were sunbathing. Witnesses said that the officer, who was searching for robbery suspects, was not using a siren, and the two women did not see the vehicle coming.

No criminal charges were brought against the police officer, but the family of the victims reached a $1.5 million settlement with the City of Miami Beach.

In April 1999, another city vehicle ran over a pregnant woman on the beach at nearly the identical spot. The woman, Lupe Eyde-Tucker,This is interesting cube puzzle and logical game. and her unborn child survived, despite suffering a crushed pelvis, broken ribs and head injuries after being hit by a city beach patrol officer driving a Ford Bronco.

A Peruvian tourist was also run over in November 1993 by a Beach Patrol vehicle while sunbathing near 74th Street.

credit card online

In a word: no. There are too many moving parts, other players with a vested interested and complexity on the technical side.

Well at least not in the near term and there’s no assurance that Google will ever be able to overtake PayPal or even beat Square or Apple’s anticipated NFC solution (and it wouldn’t surprise me to see the latter buy the former).


The concept of Google Wallet is quite simple and one that’s been around for a while: can someone create a system than doesn’t require us to carry around multiple credit cards and even more loyalty cards?

In previous years, most consumers only had one or two credit cards, but in the past 20 years there has been an explosion of branded credit cards that are tied to loyalty programs, many of which are travel related. Brick and mortar retailers have been particularly aggressive offering cash discounts on the initial purchase.

This explosion of credit and loyalty cards is the exact challenge that Google Wallet is trying to address, quoting directly from the FAQs:

“Google Wallet is a mobile app that will make your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone, along with your coupons, and eventually, loyalty and gift cards. Our intention is that Google Wallet will be an open mobile wallet holding all the cards and coupons you keep in your leather wallet today.”

And, in typical Google fashion, it has extended this basic concept to the one thing that makes up virtually all of their revenues – advertising.

Google Wallet is explicitly linked to another emerging service called Google Offers which mimics the Groupon model, providing daily deal offers to subscribers.

But Google streamlines the process with Wallet, allowing a user to redeem the deal at a merchant by simply waving the phone over the register at the point-of-sale, rather than having to print (and not lose) the coupon.

A strong proposition to be sure from the consumer end. And from a supplier/retailer perspective the ability to market to the hundreds of millions of Google subscribers and provide a closed loop marketing model that builds on their AdWords spend is very attractive.

What was a little surprising is the way that this was rolled out..or wasn’t. One handset, the smallest major carrier, only a handful of participating merchants and a limited geographic rollout.

For such a major initiative it feels like they rushed this out before letting the dough rise. Hopefully Wallet won’t be a soufflé that falls. But it’s not any different than the recent Google Music locker service (sans any music company contracts) which felt like it was rushed out before Apple debuted their iCloud service, supposedly to be announced this week.

But there are a number of challenges that I believe will cause Google Wallet to only have limited impact on the travel industry and perhaps retail in general over the next two to three years.

1. This isn’t the only game in town

PayPal is far and away the leader in electronic payments. PayPal which accounts for $3.4 billion of net revenues for eBay saw a 300% increase in mobile payments through their platform this past holiday season putting them on track to exceed $700 million in total mobile payments for the year.How is TMJ pain treated?

On the hardware-centric front there’s also the Silicon Valley darling called Square,We are professional Plastic mould, founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, which instead of relying on NFC to close the deals leans on mag stripe reader hardware that connects an iPhone or iPad.Has anyone done any research on making Plastic molding parts from scratch?

While Google’s solution relies on a partnership with MasterCard, Square is partially funded by Visa. American Express has rolled out a mobile payments platform.

And don’t forget the wireless carriers are constantly looking for new ways to monetize their subscribers…and like Apple already have direct billing with their subscribers. In November 2010, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon – none of which are part of Google’s Wallet ecosystem – formed a smartphone contactless payment alliance called Isis.

2. The wrong use case for travel?

The interesting part about Wallet is that it is decidedly a point of sale technology, targeted at in person transactions. So some segments of within broader definition of the travel sector like restaurants and tour operators may benefit from the technology, although the latter is likely ill equipped to do so.

But of the traditional travel suppliers only hotels and car rental may see some modest uptake of the technology at checkout, with perhaps the greatest impact being the replacement of kiosks.

But with so many transactions simply closed out against the credit card on file, there’s not much benefit to be derived. Certainly air travel which is purchased in advance. Perhaps Wallet can support in flight transactions for ancillary services, but I expect limited utility otherwise.

Another unanswered question at this point is whether or not Google Wallet can even be used for travel purchases. Wallet’s cousin,what are the symptoms of Piles, Google Checkout specifically excludes travel purchases in its content policies. Curiously travel is singled out amongst more unseemly transactions such as “adult goods and services”, “miracle cures” and “weapons”.

Perhaps that will change with Google’s purchase of ITA.

3. Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Infrastructure

The software is the easy part. Getting NFC chips in phones is marginally harder as the component cost is quite low.

But where the train comes to a screeching halt is getting NFC-capable payment terminals at checkout counters of participating merchants.

The cost of such terminals is about $300. Not a lot of money, but the retailer is the one who has to foot the bill for it and the short term ROI is iffy unless there’s strong customer demand. But that means there needs to be a lot of phones with NFC chips inside which leads to the next point.

So, ironically, if Google Wallet is to be successful, it will require that a lot of its competitors to invest in NFC and be successful as well.

4. The other side of Critical Mass – devices

This is pretty simple – right now Google Wallet is only enabled on one handset – the Samsung Nexus S – which runs on the Sprint network (America’s smallest major carrier).

Unless and until it’s available on multiple phones across Verizon and AT&/T-Mobile (which I would expect in relatively short order), they’re stuck in neutral.

5. The Court System

This is a two-fold issue. Most immediately is the lawsuit from competitor PayPal that dropped hours after Google held its press event to launch Google Wallet.Quality air impact socket tools for any tough job.

PayPal is alleging that Google along with two former PayPal executives (primarily Osama Bedier who jumped from PayPal to Google earlier this year to become VP of Payments at Google) applied PayPal confidential trade secrets in developing Google Wallet.

They could be fighting a legal battle on another front if Google gets too aggressive in pressuring handset makers to incorporate the Wallet solution (hardware and software) as part of the Android Compatibility Test as they seemed to have done in the Skyhook Wireless case.

Conclusions

Overall there has been much talk about NFC within the travel industry – for payments, identification and check in (e.g. Apple’s famous iTravel patents) and as replacements for hotel keys. I for one have been on record as a bit skeptical.

NFC is a technology which has been around for a decade and like it’s kin, RFID has been the source of many a hockey-stick forecast (actually they all look the same; they just change the years at the bottom of the chart).

So what is your view on Google Wallet? Will it succeed? Will it play a significant role in travel? Please discuss in the comments.