[IP] excellent article on police vs. peaceful demonstrators
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 10:11:53 -0500
From: kenneth_cukier@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: excellent article on police vs. peaceful demonstrators
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Dave,
This is one of the most disturbing reports I've read on the issue of US
civil liberties and police power vs. peaceful demonstrators (in this case,
senior citizens and union members). It's also one of the most responsibly-
and thoughtfully-reported pieces I've come across, part of a new series on
"Lost Liberties" in Salon. (One wonders why the Post, Times and Journal
aren't covering the topic so rigorously....) Perhaps something for IP?
Best,
Kenn
Kenneth Neil Cukier
Research Fellow
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cell: +1 617 943 3552
Work: kenneth_cukier[#] harvard.edu
Personal: kn[#] cukier.com
______________________________________
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/12/16/miami_police/?ref=null
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Dec. 16, 2003
Salon / Lost Liberties series
"This is Not America"
In Miami, police unleashed unprecedented fury on demonstrators -- most of
them seniors and union members. Is this how Bush's war on terror will be
fought at home?
Editor's Note: This is the first installment of "Lost Liberties," a series
of stories that will be published in the months ahead exploring the erosion
of civil rights and personal freedom in the United States since the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
On Saturday, Nov. 22, a few dozen police on bicycles rode by the warehouse
that activists protesting Miami's Free Trade 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.
The tensions in Miami began well before the first protester arrived. Unlike
other American cities that have hosted large protests, Miami had a clear
stake in the demonstration's central issue: It is competing with Panama
City, Cancun and other cities to become home to the FTAA's secretariat.
Thus, when Western Hemisphere trade ministers gathered at Miami's
Intercontinental for the November trade talks, police had to show they
could handle the kind of anti-globalization activists who have often
trashed cities hosting economic summits.
On Sept. 5, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff of the ACLU attended a briefing that the
police held for local business leaders at the Intercontinental Hotel.
Rodriguez-Taseff was shocked that Asst. Police Chief Frank Fernandez's
PowerPoint presentation openly endorsed the controversial trade agreement,
telling the audience that it would bring 89,000 new jobs to the area and
add $13.5 billion annually to Florida's Gross State Product.
"In situations where the police don't like the protesters' message, they
definitely treat protesters as the enemy," says Rodriguez-Taseff.
"Essentially what happened," she adds, "is that the police went from being
the neutral protector of liberty and property and safety, which is what
their job is supposed to be, to being the enforcer of a political goal of
the political and business communities."
The week of the protests, John Timoney, the Miami chief of police,
socialized with the trade ministers and publicly taunted demonstrators. On
Wednesday, Nov. 19, the day before the main protest march, Miami Herald
reporter Oscar Corral followed Timoney onto a boat taking ministers to
Miami's Vizcaya park. After the ride, Timoney said, "If they [anarchists]
don't do anything by tomorrow night, pardon the expression, but they look
like pussies." (Or, "p-----," as the Herald reported it.)
Taking a page from the Iraq war's media strategists, Timoney had reporters
covering the demonstrations "embed" with the police. Reporting for the
Guardian newspaper, journalist and "No Logo" author Naomi Klein wrote, "As
in Iraq, most reporters embraced their role as pseudo soldiers with zeal,
suiting up in combat helmets and flak jackets." Several reporters who
didn't embed were hauled off to jail in mass roundups during the protests.
Anger and fear about anarchists had been building up in the city all
autumn. Al Crespo, a 61-year-old Miami photojournalist who specializes in
covering demonstrations -- he recently published a book of photographs
called "Protest in the Land of Plenty" -- says he first realized something
was awry when his 87-year-old mother called him in hysterics weeks before
activists began arriving in Miami.
"I'm Cuban, and my mother listens to a lot of these Cuban radio stations,"
he says. "She knows what I do, and she called me up one day in a real
panic, with the belief that I was going to be killed on the streets of
Miami. She was hearing that it was communists coming, and these people were
going to blow up the city."
Meanwhile, the police were preparing to face off against a violent enemy.
Asst. Chief Fernandez's PowerPoint presentation listed three groups of
protesters headed to Miami: "The Green Group (non violent, union based)";
"The Yellow Group (mostly non violent, fringe elements)" and "The Red Group
(anti-government, anti-establishment)." The slides also identified the
lime-green baseball caps donned by the legal observers who accompany most
major protests. According to Rodriguez-Taseff, when the slide appeared,
Fernandez said, "These are their lawyers. They're there to antagonize
police."
Marc Steier, a New Jersey lawyer who works for the National Lawyers Guild
-- a kind of radical ACLU -- arrived in Miami in mid-November to open a
temporary office for Miami Activist Defense, a legal collective formed to
represent demonstrators. He and a colleague were setting up their computers
on Nov. 15 when they got their first phone call: Police, a woman activist
reported, were hassling a kid walking down the street.
Just then, Steier says, a volunteer named Henry whom he knew from previous
protests arrived, and Steier dispatched him to the scene with a camera, a
tape recorder and a lime green hat. When Henry arrived, cops on bicycles
were questioning a kid dressed all in black. He turned out to be a local
goth who knew nothing of the FTAA.
Then the police crossed the street to where three men, part of a pagan
group in town for the demonstrations, were watching. They were friends of
the woman who called Steier's office, and one of them was holding her
backpack while she used the phone down the street.
"There was nothing about them that would give a casual observer any
indication that they were anything but tourists," says Steier, who later
interviewed all of them after they were released from jail.
The police asked one man for I.D., which he gave them, and then demanded to
search the backpack he was holding. He refused to consent, because it
didn't belong to him. At that point, a police vehicle pulled up. According
to Steier, the uncooperative pagan was arrested and put in the patrol car,
and his backpack was dumped out on the police car's hood.
"The second male sees what's going down, and he starts to be a little more
compliant," says Steier. The cops, Steier said, asked for "your name, where
you're from, how you got down to Miami, whether you're an anarchist,
whether you're here to cause trouble and break things." Finally, the second
pagan asked if he was free to go. "'Actually, you're under arrest,' said
the police."
The police proceeded to arrest the third man and the woman when she
returned from the phone. All were charged with obstructing a sidewalk.
Throughout it all, Henry had been on his cellphone with Steier. Suddenly,
he lost contact: Henry had been arrested, too -- charged with obstruction
of justice.
Between the 15th and the 20th, the day of the major protest, Miami Activist
Defense received dozens of reports of people being arbitrarily detained,
searched, photographed and questioned about their backgrounds and their
connections to anarchism.
The most authoritative first-person story about such random seizures came
from Celeste Fraser Delgado, a reporter for Miami New Times, who was
arrested Thursday evening on Miami Avenue as she walked toward the
protest's welcome center with a group of protesters she was profiling.
"Throughout the day I'd witnessed police provoke protesters," she wrote.
"I'd seen young people cuffed and lined up along the street, but I thought
they must have done something bad to be detained. Surely the police would
see that we were doing nothing wrong and let us go. Surely they would
recognize my role as a working member of the press."
Instead, Delgado's hands were cuffed behind her back. Her pleas to the
police to check her credentials were ignored, though they took her black
leather backpack with her press pass and notebook inside. She was told they
would be returned to her. Instead, they were dumped out and left on the
street.
She knows that because John de Leon, an ACLU lawyer, happened to be in the
area after her arrest. He was on the phone with Rodriguez-Taseff when he
noticed that the street was littered with backpacks, cellphones and
wallets. He was collecting the protesters' things when he found Delgado's
press credentials.
Delgado was released Friday afternoon, after the charges against her were
dropped. Of the more than 90 arrests made at the protests on Thursday, the
Miami prosecutors threw out 20 due to lack of evidence. Rodriguez-Taseff
says it's "unheard of" for so many cases to be dismissed as groundless.
The total number of arrests in Miami wasn't particularly large -- according
to Lt. Schwartz, 231 people were taken in on FTAA-related charges the week
of the summit, compared to 631 arrested at the Seattle anti-globalization
protests in 1999. Then again, there were nearly five times as many
protesters in Seattle as there were in Miami. There was also rampant
vandalism during the 1999 demonstrations, and almost none during the FTAA.
Indeed, since the protests, Miami officials have crowed about the lack of
damage done to their city. That leaves the arrests looking like some sort
of extralegal "preventive" or "preemptive" action.
It was Thursday afternoon that madness broke loose in Miami. There had been
a scuffle that morning between demonstrators and police near the fence
police had erected around the Intercontinental Hotel, and the city had been
locked down since around 10 a.m. But things didn't get really bad until
about 4 p.m., when a few hundred people left the officially sanctioned
union march to confront the police lined up along Biscayne Boulevard.
It's not clear what made the police charge forward, rhythmically beating
their big wooden clubs against their shields. Predictably, many protesters
say there was no provocation, but Lt. Schwartz maintains that the police
were pelted with "rocks, feces in plastic bags and bottles of urine." Three
officers were admitted to a nearby hospital for injuries sustained during
the protests, and the Miami Police Department reports that a total of 18
were injured.
Al Crespo, the photojournalist, admits that some protesters "acted out,"
but says that, in covering over 100 protests over the last six years, he's
never seen a police reaction as ferocious and disproportionate as what he
saw in Miami.
"There's a real parallel between these kind of events and the events in
major American cities after championship football and basketball games," he
says. "A large number of people come out in the streets, and there's always
young people who, for whatever reason, just have a need to get in a cop's
face. Whether you're rooting for the Chicago Bulls or you're in Miami
supposedly protesting against free trade, these kind of events always
attract people who have a real need to act out some internal psychodrama,
and oftentimes that's what sets something off."
Once the police were set off, though, it's hard to justify what they did
based on protester provocation. Several hundred policemen, armed with the
latest crowd-control weaponry, were arrayed against a sparse lot of
scraggly kids on the broad boulevard. Instead of batons, the police carried
wooden sticks the length of baseball bats, and as they marched forward,
they swung them at whoever couldn't get out of the way in time. Video taken
at the scene shows a boy in shorts being knocked down, and when his friends
try to pick him up, they're beaten back with the wooden sticks.
At one point, a young man kneels down a few feet in front of the phalanx,
his hands in prayer position. Five or six police charge him with their
shields, then shoot rubber bullets at him as he runs away.
That, says Crespo, is what was most unusual: the police firing on people as
they retreated.
Before Miami, one of the more violent protests Crespo had seen was at the
2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. "What happened in Los Angeles,
which had not happened in any other city up until then, is that the police
came out, took a position and just opened up fire. It looked like
reenactment of a Civil War battle," he says.
"In Miami they did that, but then they proceeded to march down the street
and chase these people, chase them for blocks," he said. "These were people
trying to get away, and they kept marching and shooting."
Witnesses say that all protesters were targeted, not just those that were
causing trouble.
When the violence started and the air grew thick with tear gas, Stewart
Acuff, the AFL-CIO's organizing director, organized a line of union
peacekeepers to take everyone who wanted to avoid a confrontation with
police up a hill toward the amphitheater where the march had begun.
"We had hundreds of people we were trying to move up near the amphitheater.
There were seniors, unions members, young people, environmentalists. Every
one of them made a conscious decision not to be in the stuff happening in
the street." But the police followed them. "The cops came up the hill,
tear-gassed us and shot people with rubber bullets. They pepper-sprayed a
senior citizen in his 70s who was sitting in a chair completely away from
any kind of problem, without provocation."
It was, says Acuff, "a police riot."
"They had trained for six months and they were prepared for a fight and
they wanted a fight," he says. "They were hopped up and wanted to go."
The ACLU is still working to tabulate all the injuries caused on Thursday
and on Friday morning, when violence again broke out at a jail solidarity
rally for those arrested on Thursday. (At that event, Crespo photographed a
family being forced onto their bellies by a riot cop as they exited a
nearby cancer center.)
Thirteen protesters were admitted to a local hospital, but many more sought
treatment from the medics working at the protest. In an e-mail, Dr. Ron
Rosen, a veteran street medic, reports, "On Nov. 20, I treated numerous
patients including several with head wounds caused by pepper balls and
rubber bullets, and several with wounds to the areas over the spleen, liver
and kidneys also caused by rubber bullets and baton blows."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Seventy-one-year-old Bentley Killmon was unaware that Miami was becoming a
war zone when he boarded a bus Thursday morning. Killmon's father was a
police officer, and he didn't bear any grudge against cops. "I respected
the badge until that morning," he says.
A former flight navigator and engineer for Pan Am who retired after 36
years on the job, Killmon opposes the FTAA because he believes
globalization creates a "race to the bottom" as industries move to find
cheap labor, decimating the livelihoods of workers left behind. "I was
protesting what has happened to the middle class and to the poor," he says.
Killmon, who lives about 100 miles north of Miami, was on one of 24 buses
chartered by the Florida Alliance of Retired Americans. The group's state
organizer, 34-year-old Larry Winawer, was responsible for getting Killmon
and another 1,100 or so retirees to the protest and home again, and he'd
arrived in Miami Wednesday night.
Right away, it felt wrong. "As you're heading down Biscayne Boulevard" --
the street where the union march took place on Thursday, and where police
faced off with protesters -- "you see swarms of police in riot gear,"
Winawer says. "There were armored personnel vehicles, helicopters hovering
at very low altitude with searchlights sweeping the area. Right away it
felt like you were not in America but in some type of occupied city."
Winawer didn't sleep much that night, and was up on Thursday at 4 a.m. to
make sure that all ran smoothly with the seniors he was responsible for.
The day's official activities were centered around the Bayfront
amphitheater. From 10 to 11:30 a.m., there was a seniors breakfast and
rally scheduled, with speakers talking about the effects of the FTAA on
American retirees and families. The official union rally and march began at
noon, also at the amphitheater.
Winawer had negotiated with police beforehand to allow his buses to drop
the seniors off near the escalators leading to the auditorium. Two early
buses got through, but by 10 a.m., chaos had begun to engulf downtown
Miami, and the area around the amphitheater had been shut down. Thus the
buses had to drop their passengers off as much as a mile away. A few buses
didn't make it into the city at all -- the police told them to turn around
and go home.
A mile "may not seem like much," says Winawer, "but we had people who were
85, 90 years old." Then, he says, as they made their way to their rally,
lines of police officers would detain them without telling them why.
Of the 1,100 seniors on his buses, Winawer says about 600 made it to their
event.
When the rally was over, Winawer had to see the seniors back to their
vehicles, which were all parked far away. Killmon was in the last group of
people he escorted, but when they arrived, his bus had already left. So
they headed toward the Holiday Inn, where Winawer was staying.
Winawer was wearing a bright orange vest and an Alliance for Retired
Americans T-shirt, and had staff credentials around his neck. Yet several
times, he and Killmon were turned back by police lines, and finally told to
walk west along downtown Miami's railroad tracks. There were about 10 other
people going the same way.
"All of a sudden, heading east is a line of police in riot gear," says
Winawer. "There were at least 50 -- they had guns drawn and were yelling at
people to get down."
He still sounds incredulous as he recalls it. "He's a 71-year-old man and
I'm wearing my orange vest and credentials. I said, 'He's a retiree and I'm
trying to help him get to his bus.' We each had three or four guns on us
telling us to get down, facedown in the dirt. Ben didn't get down fast
enough and he got a knee in his back."
Hands cuffed behind them, they were put on a bus and left for three hours,
then driven to a parking garage where FTAA prisoners were being held in
wire pens. "I've worked with livestock before, and these were like stock
pens," said Killmon.
In the pen with him, says Killmon, was a steelworker named Rick who had a
bad shoulder, the result of an injury he'd sustained falling off a roof.
"His hands being handcuffed behind his back was extremely painful," Killmon
says. "He kept asking to be released so he could bring his hands around in
front of him, and they would not do it. The pain got to the point that he
lost control of his bowels and urinary tract."
"He'd asked at least two dozen different officers for help," says Winawer.
After another three hours, they were taken to Miami's TGK jail, where they
were processed and put in holding cells. It was after 3 a.m. before either
was allowed to make phone calls. Killmon says he went at least seven hours
without a sip of water.
On Friday, the charges against Killmon were dropped. Winawer was charged
with disobeying a police officer. They weren't released until early
evening.
Both were in handcuffs for between 11 and 12 hours. Three weeks later,
Winawer's hands were still bruised and partly numb. Killmon says he's fine
as long as he doesn't try to lift his left arm higher than his shoulder.
"I believe in social justice issues, but I'm not a screaming radical," says
Winawer. Since Miami, he says, "some people have asked, 'How do you feel
about law enforcement?' I feel fine about law enforcement. What happened to
us was not anything resembling law enforcement. I respect the job that
police have to do, but I have no respect for the job that they did."
Both Winawer and Killmon are planning to join civil suits against the city.
"Ben and I are living proof that civil rights are being erased in this
country," Winawer says, still sounding astonished.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
While Winawer and Killmon were in prison, another confrontation was
unfolding outside.
Crespo, expecting it, was there with his camera. "Just like there's a
morning and an afternoon, there's always a jail solidarity, so we went to
the jail," he says. With him was a local public television crew who were
doing a segment on him and his work.
"The protesters had gathered at the parking lot of the state attorney's
office," he says, two blocks from the jail. "They're just kids. There was
nothing mean-spirited about them. Their friends are locked up and they
wanted to show solidarity."
There were between 150 and 200 people there, and Brenna Bell, a 28-year-old
attorney from Oregon, acted as a go-between with the police. At first, she
said, the commander seemed reasonable, but within 20 minutes, he told her
that everyone had to disperse.
"At that time, most everyone started leaving the area," says Bell. "I
stayed behind watching to make sure that everyone left OK. I never heard
the police give the order to disperse that they threatened to give, but
people started walking."
Yet as people left, she says, a huge line of riot police -- as many as 300
-- followed them. Then, about three blocks from the protest, seven or eight
people sat down and announced they weren't going anywhere. They were
arrested, and 50 or 60 people stopped to watch. Then she and others started
walking east, flanked on two sides by police.
At that point, the police finally issued an order to disperse, but at the
same time, they started closing in. Video from the scene shows people
chanting, "We are dispersing. We are dispersing." But the police wouldn't
let them. "That's when I knew it was going to be bad," says Bell. The
police rushed in, shooting pepper spray and rubber bullets. "It was utter
chaos," she says. She was sprayed and shot in the back of the leg, and sent
off to jail. She wasn't released until 2 a.m. on Sunday.
Still, it could have been worse: "I talked to a couple of women who were
strip-searched by male officers," she says. "It's such a powerless
situation."
One of those women was Ana Nogueira, a producer for the radio show
"Democracy Now!" Nogueira was rounded up at the same protest as Bell. Like
Celeste Fraser Delgado, she kept telling the arresting officers that she
was a journalist.
One cop was hesitant, she says, but then another told him, "She's not with
us." He meant she wasn't embedded.
At the jail, "When I got out of the patrol wagon, I repeated that I was a
journalist and that I was wrongly arrested. I asked, 'What do I do?' The
officer told me to shut the fuck up."
Her clothes reeked of pepper spray, so the police made her stand under a
huge cold-water outdoor shower.
Then she was taken into a tent with one female officer and one male
officer. The back of the tent was open, and other male officers could see
in. "They told me to take off all my clothes and put them in a trash can,
and that I was not going to get them back." She asked the male officer to
leave first, but all he would do was turn around. Then, when she was naked,
he turned back to face her.
"Then they put me in prison garb, and that's when I was taken and
processed," she says. "I was one of the lucky ones. I know other
independent videographers who didn't get their cameras back."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
While stories about the FTAA protests proliferate, the Miami police are
showing no signs of remorse. In their view, even peaceful protesters had it
coming for cavorting with anarchists.
"Peaceful protesters in some cases made friends with the devil, knowing
full well they were anarchists," says Lt. Schwartz. "If someone says, 'I
came down to protest peacefully but yes, I'm aware there are anarchists in
my group and I welcomed them in,' they're certainly putting themselves in
an awkward position. If anarchists are starting to cause problems and throw
things at cops, just because I'm a peaceful protester, but I'm standing
right next to this anarchist, that I couldn't be subject to police
enforcement, I think that's naive.
"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what was going on in the
street, the confrontation between anarchists and police," he says. "If you
chose to stay in the midst of that and then felt your First Amendment right
was hurt, you're not being honest with yourself."
Schwartz's comments just compound Winawer's outrage. "All his statements
begin with 'if,'" he says. "And I might agree with him if those things
happened. But there are no ifs here. There's reality. And the reality is
that I and Ben Killmon were nowhere near any other individual, period. We
were arrested for doing nothing except walking where the police told us to
walk in an effort to find his bus.
"I've never been in trouble with the law before, and I have no ax to grind
with the police, but this was just wrong," Winawer says. "And the bombast,
it adds insult to injury. It's one thing to have done it. It's another
thing to put your head in the sand and deny that it ever happened."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer: Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in
New York.
Copyright 2003 Salon.com
END
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