Lawsuit challenges security model
used against Miami FTAA protesters
By Shawn Gaynor
Asheville, NC, Mar. 31(AGR)— Bentley Killmon is a 71-year-old
union retiree who participated in the permitted AFL-CIO rally and march
in conjunction with the FTAA meetings in Miami last fall. He claims
he was accosted without warning by approximately 50 to 60 officers as
he walked with a group of 15 to 20 individuals, trying to find their
bus after the rally. He was forcibly shoved to the ground, handcuffed,
and arrested.
His story matches dozens of others who were forcibly arrested for peacefully
and lawfully expressing their disagreement with US trade policy. Killmon,
together with 20 other plaintiffs are suing the organizers of the security
effort surrounding the FTAA Miami trade talks. Though anti-globalization
activists have long accused police of dealing with dissent in a heavy
handed, and even unlawful manner, complaints surrounding police response
to protest in Miami claim that the effort represents a new approach
to policing large demonstrations dubbed “the Miami model”–
an approach that relies on preemption and force over rule of law.
The civil lawsuit filed Mar. 25 in federal court challenges that the
“Miami model,” named the City of Miami, Mayors Manny Diaz
and Alex Penelas, Police Chief John Timoney, State Attorney Katherine
Fernandez-Rundle, Secretary of Homeland Defense Tom Ridge, US Attorney
General John Ashcroft as defendants, claiming that these forces conspired
to deprive protesters in Miami of their constitutional rights.
Unabashedly, defendant John Timoney announced that defendants’
actions were based on the policy that the “easiest way to prevent
violence and disturbance at the FTAA Summit was to use a heavy police
presence to limit protest.”
“This lawsuit blows open the unlawful way in which police profiled
and targeted activists and people who were in Miami to protest the FTAA,”
said Carol Sobel, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense
Committee. “Anyone who fit the police description of being anti-FTAA
was subject to harassment, abuse, and unlawful arrest.”
The lawsuit states that it “challenges the mass false arrests of,
and unreasonable force against, lawful demonstrators during the recent
protests of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in November 2003
in Miami.” It also conveys how “Law enforcement coordinated
an all out assault on the First Amendment, engaging in widespread political
profiling, and swept the streets of anyone viewed as being an anti-FTAA
activist, effectively suspending the Fourth Amendment in the city for
ten days.”
The lawsuit also attacks the local and state statutes used to arrest
hundreds of people as unconstitutional, as well as the way in which
they were used to illegally stifle mass protest.
Despite the millions of federal dollars used to implement the coordinated
campaign by law enforcement, illustrated in the lawsuit, and the continuing
expenditure to try cases, the State Attorney’s fervent efforts
have yet to result in more than one misdemeanor conviction. Less than
half of the over two hundred cases remain.
Though the plaintiff group currently consists of 21 people, the prosecution
expects that number to increase as more allegations become known and
are added to the suit. There has been no offical response from the defense
concerning the lawsuit.
