FirstAlerts
Crime & Courts

Former Miami Gardens Police Officer Pleads Guilty to COVID-19 Relief Fraud

Alvin Bernard faces up to two years in federal prison after admitting to making false statements to obtain a $63,900 disaster relief loan.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 18, 2026, 8:23 a.m. ET
Developing · not yet checked for updates

This case is not concluded. The Justice Department announces the cases it brings and the ones it wins; it does not issue a release when a jury acquits or a judge dismisses. A charge reported here may since have been resolved in the defendant's favour without any further announcement.

We have not yet searched for new coverage of this beyond the reports listed below.

On August 17, 2026, 38-year-old Alvin Bernard of Miami Gardens guilty in federal court to making a false statement to the Small Business Administration to obtain a $63,900 COVID-19 relief loan, according to records from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. The case remains open and developing following his plea. According to court documents, Bernard was employed as a police officer with the Miami Gardens Police Department while serving as the sole manager and authorized representative of Vanity Properties LLC. Acting on behalf of the company, he submitted an online Economic Injury Disaster Loan application falsely certifying that Vanity Properties generated $127,881 in gross revenues for the 12-month period preceding Jan. 31, 2020. The Small Business Administration approved and disbursed $63,900 into the company's bank account based on the false claim. U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones stated that Bernard was sworn to uphold the law yet lied to obtain federal relief funds intended for businesses harmed by the pandemic. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Bernard faces a maximum sentence of two years in federal prison and has agreed to resign from the police department, surrender his Florida law enforcement certification, and permanently refrain from seeking recertification. The case is being investigated by the FBI Miami Field Office, the Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Secret Service.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 118 Aug 2026, 12:23current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.