Delrish Moss, before he would become a police officer himself, lived the all-too-often experience of a Black man being mistreated by law enforcement.
The Miami native was once called the harshest of racial slurs by a Miami Police officer. Another one searched his pockets without any cause.
It was those encounters that led Moss into his career in law enforcement that has lasted decades, including a high-profile job as the head of the Ferguson Police Department in the midst of unrest in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in 2014 and now as the new Miramar Police Department chief. But Moss has never forgotten his roots – the historic Black Miami neighborhood of Overtown.
Moss shares his story in Johanna Vega and Scott Barnett’s new PBS documentary “Crossing Overtown,” an hourlong film that dives into an extensive, wide-ranging history of the neighborhood that was formerly called Colored Town, the civil rights movement and racial injustice in Miami, and the formation of Overtown’s own Black police force and courthouse – the first of its kind in the nation.
