MIAMI — Miami Beach police Capt. Steven Feldman was facing serious trouble.

In 2023, the FBI was investigating him for possession of child pornography, a case that began when Dropbox flagged three files that he had allegedly uploaded. He was placed on paid leave. At one point, according to three people familiar with the case, federal agents served a search warrant at his home.

The feds declined to bring charges. So did the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. But an internal affairs probe continued at the Miami Beach Police Department. Internal investigators found that Feldman and three other officers had exchanged hundreds of sexually explicit images and videos via WhatsApp. A few of the messages contained child porn, none of which were sent by Feldman, the report says. Many of the messages had been sent while the officers were on duty or working off-duty details.

Feldman, who joined the department in 2000, was a candidate for a promotion at the time. That appeared to be in jeopardy. But he ultimately made it past the scandal relatively unscathed. Feldman and the three other officers agreed to accept “letters of reprimand” for violating the department’s social media policy but received no other discipline.

Months later, Miami Beach police Chief Wayne Jones promoted Feldman to major, making him part of the chief’s executive team. Now, as Jones looks to retire in 2028, Feldman is speculated to be among Jones’ top picks for a successor.

Feldman did not respond to a phone call, text messages and an email requesting comment for this story.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, the commander who initially oversaw the internal affairs case had expressed to Jones that he believed Feldman should be demoted or even fired.

Not long after, the sources said, Jones moved the commander, along with several others who were assisting the FBI during its investigation, out of the internal affairs unit. That fueled a perception among some in the department that Jones was seeking to protect Feldman from more serious discipline, the sources said.

“Everybody with any knowledge of the case got transferred out (of internal affairs),” said one of the sources, who requested anonymity citing fear of retaliation. “That is unheard of, not only in internal affairs, but also in criminal investigations in general.”

The reassignment took place in October 2023, around the same time that the FBI closed its investigation and handed it over to Miami Beach police for any administrative action, records show.

Jones declined to be interviewed for this story. But in response to detailed questions, spokesperson Christopher Bess said the police department acted appropriately.

Bess defended the chief’s decision to reassign internal affairs investigators, saying the move was part of a broader batch of reassignments that Jones initiated seven weeks after becoming chief in September 2023. The reassignments were unrelated to the Feldman investigation, Bess said, and were memorialized in a department-wide email from Jones that Bess provided to the Miami Herald. The email indicates that more than 30 people from various departments were reassigned.

“These assignments were implemented as part of a broader organizational strategy focused on professional development, leadership exposure, and operational continuity across multiple divisions — not solely within Internal Affairs,” Bess said.

Bess also noted that, even after the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office closed out their case in late 2023, Jones directed an additional review by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, which “concluded that no criminal violations occurred under state law and recommended the matter be handled administratively.”

“Although both external agencies concluded that no criminal wrongdoing occurred, the Miami Beach Police Department conducted a comprehensive Internal Affairs investigation to determine whether departmental policies had been violated,” Bess said. “That investigation concluded that Major Feldman violated departmental policy, and disciplinary action was imposed in accordance with established procedures.”

Explicit WhatsApp chats

The FBI’s investigation was triggered when Dropbox identified a folder in September 2021 containing possible “child sexual abuse material,” including at least one video and one image, according to an internal affairs report. Dropbox notified the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which referred the case to law enforcement.

The content had been uploaded by an account with the name Steven Feldman and was later found to be associated with the Miami Beach cop, the report says.

It’s unclear what the FBI found in its raid of Feldman’s home or why the agency didn’t bring charges. The FBI denied a public records request from the Herald, citing privacy statutes, and declined to comment on the case.

Internal affairs investigators found that the files flagged by Dropbox as child porn had been sent to Feldman by other Miami Beach police officers on WhatsApp in 2016 and 2018, according to the report.

Feldman and three other officers — Hector Fernandez, Eric Schultz and Pedro Socarras — frequently exchanged sexually explicit pictures and videos through WhatsApp chats between 2016 and 2021, investigators found.

Feldman sent sexually explicit content in at least 11 instances, including six in which he was on duty and two during off-duty details, according to the report.

Fernandez sent over 400 messages with explicit content, more than half of which were sent while he was on duty, and Socarras sent at least 143 such messages, including dozens while he was working, per the report.

Fernandez, Schultz and Socarras did not respond to emails requesting comment on the case.

The exact nature of the content the officers exchanged isn’t clear. The internal affairs report given to the Herald was heavily redacted, with several full pages and other passages withheld. Miami Beach police cited a state public records exemption for criminal information provided by non-state agencies, in this case, the FBI.

The Herald did receive a copy of Feldman’s letter of reprimand, which noted in February 2024 that the FBI had contacted Miami Beach police a year earlier regarding “inappropriate content uploaded into Dropbox by one of our officers.” The letter didn’t note that the content had been flagged as child porn, nor that Feldman had allegedly uploaded it.

Still, Bobby Hernandez, the president of the Miami Beach Fraternal Order of Police — which represented the three other officers, but not Feldman — told the Herald he viewed the case as a “political hit job” by the internal affairs team that initially took on the investigation.

“What they did to him is flat-out wrong,” Hernandez said.

The allegations against Feldman seemed “horrible” at first, Hernandez acknowledged, but he emphasized that Feldman was cleared in the FBI investigation.

Hernandez said he has known Feldman since Feldman was a teenager in the department’s “explorer” program aimed at young people interested in law enforcement careers. Today, he said, Feldman is “probably the smartest individual on the command staff.”

“I think that’s probably why they tried to knock him off the top,” Hernandez said.

The next chief?

Over 26 years, Feldman has risen through the ranks of the Miami Beach Police Department despite some controversies, internal affairs records show. He hasn’t been disciplined beyond the letter of reprimand in 2024 and a written warning in a separate incident from 2017.

In 2007, an Arab officer accused Feldman and other officers of using racist slurs and making derogatory jokes about his identity. Feldman denied the allegations, and the internal affairs case against him was dismissed as “unsubstantiated.”

In 2015, more than a dozen of Feldman’s emails were flagged as inappropriate during a sweeping internal investigation into racist and sexist messages by numerous officers, according to records obtained earlier this year by the Herald. Feldman wasn’t disciplined.

In 2017, Feldman received a written warning for leaving his department-issued gun, personal gun, department drone and laptop unsecured in his police car, which was burglarized overnight outside his home.

Jones’ decision to promote Feldman months after the child porn investigation was “based on established merit and qualifications,” said Bess, the department spokesperson.

Bess wouldn’t address the possibility that Feldman could succeed Jones as chief. That decision, he said, “falls under the sole authority of the Miami Beach City Manager.”

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