By Michelle Goldberg
December 16, 2003 | On Saturday, Nov. 22, a few dozen police on bicycles rode by the warehouse that activists protesting Miami's Free Trade Area of the Americas summit were using as a welcome center. The big protest had taken place on Thursday, Nov. 20, and most demonstrators had already dispersed. Some were in jail, others were nursing their injuries. But the cops wanted to deliver a final message to those still around. "Bye! Don't come back here!" shouted one. A pudgy officer gave the finger to an activist with a video camera. "Put that on your Web site," he said. "Fuck you."
It was the end of two days of what many observers called unprecedented police vindictiveness and violence toward activists. Certainly, complaints about the police have become a standard ritual after each major globalization protest. But what happened in Miami, say protesters, lawyers, journalists and union leaders, was anything but routine.
Armed with millions of dollars of new equipment and inflamed by weeks of warnings about anarchists out to destroy their city, police in Miami donned riot gear, assembled by the thousand, put the city on lockdown and unleashed an arsenal of crowd control weaponry on overwhelmingly peaceful gatherings.
Videos taken at the scene show protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and beanbags, and pepper-sprayed in the face. Retirees were held handcuffed and refused water for hours. Medics and legal observers, arrested in large numbers, say they were targeted. A female journalist, arrested during a mass roundup, was made to strip in front of a male policeman. A woman's entire breast turned purple-black after she was shot there, point-blank, with a rubber bullet.
Afterward, many observers said the same thing: "This is not America." Civil libertarians, though, worry that -- in an era when legitimate homeland security fears have begun to edge over into hysterical paranoia about "anarchists" -- it might offer a glimpse of where America's response to protest is headed.
"There is a pattern developing cross-country with regards to the interaction between police and protesters," says Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "That pattern sadly involves the police viewing protesters as terrorists and treating protest situations as crisis situations akin to war or combat."
Protesters descended on Miami because they object to plans to create a free trade zone stretching from Alaska to Argentina, which they say will hurt poor workers, put downward pressure on wages and weaken environmental regulations. Police in Miami were determined not to permit a repeat of the chaos that has marked other trade summits worldwide. They were bolstered by an $8.5 million appropriation that President Bush tacked onto the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill to pay for FTAA security.
As a result, they fielded about 2,500 battle-ready police to face off against around 10,000 demonstrators, most of them union members and retirees. City officials have since congratulated themselves on the small amount of property damage in Miami. But protesters say that in making sure no Starbucks windows were shattered, police trampled their constitutional rights.
The scale of civil liberties abuses in Miami is just starting to reverberate outside the city and the activist community that flocked there. On Tuesday, Dec. 16, the AFL-CIO and the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans are holding a public hearing in Miami on "police repression of FTAA protesters." The ACLU has received 134 reports of protester injuries, including 19 confirmed head injuries, and plans to file at least three and possibly as many as 12 lawsuits against the city.
The United Steelworkers of America is calling for a congressional investigation into how police turned Miami into "a massive police state." Amnesty International and the Sierra Club are also demanding government probes. The Sierra Club issued an open letter to President Bush saying, "The fundamental constitutional rights of all Americans are in jeopardy if the intimidating tactics used by the Miami police become the model for dealing with future public demonstrations."
And they could become exactly that. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz called the cops' performance "a model for homeland security." Officials from across the country, including members of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, showed up to observe how Miami handled the demonstrators.
According to Lt. Bill Schwartz, spokesman for the Miami Police Department, law enforcement officials traveled to Miami from Georgia and New York to learn tactics to deal with upcoming protests in their cities. In June, President Bush will host the G-8 summit -- which brings together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia -- on Georgia's Sea Island. Then, on Aug. 30, the Republican convention begins in New York, bringing tens of thousands of protesters and "the highest levels of security this city has ever seen," as a New York police spokesman told the Village Voice.
Upon his return from Miami on Thursday, Nov. 20, Bill Hitchens, director of Georgia's Department of Homeland Security, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "I certainly think this is a precursor for what we could see" at the G-8 summit. Speaking of the Miami police, he said, "We need to do much the same as they did."
Meanwhile, John Timoney, the Miami police chief known for calling demonstrators "punks" and "knuckleheads," is handling security for the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Timoney is already infamous among activists for his handling of the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, where protesters complained of indiscriminate arrests and police violence.
How did such a small demonstration became such a bloody melee? And how did so many law-abiding people suddenly find themselves in a place that didn't look anything like the America they thought they knew?
"I no longer consider Dade county to be part of the United States," says Bentley Killmon, a 71-year-old retiree who was held handcuffed for 11 hours after he was swept up by the police as he wandered around downtown looking for his bus home.
