Three weeks ago activists, representatives and observers packed the Miami City Commission chambers to express their grievances on how they say the police mishandled Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit protesters last November.

On Thursday, February 5, at 5 p.m. the Miami Police Department tells its side of the story.

Miami Police Chief John Timoney will present the Miami Police Department’s “after action report” to the Civilian Investigative Panel, a board tasked with overseeing the actions of the MPD, at Miami City Hall at 3500 Pan American Drive.

The after action report, long promised by Timoney following mass arrests during the November 20 and November 21 FTAA demonstration, was not made available to the SunPost by deadline.  However, Timoney has long maintained that the MPD and officers from the 39 other law enforcement agencies performed well in quelling the unrest he insisted was started by radical “coalition” demonstrators.

“This is just a meeting where the police chief will be presenting the police department’s after action report,” said Carol Abia, support staff for the CIP. 

The CIP will also examine materials already provided to the CIP by the police department: interlocal agreements between Miami and various other law enforcement agencies, as well as video shot by the police officers themselves.

Aside from a representative, the Independent Review Panel, a similar board tasked with overseeing the Miami-Dade Police Department, will not be attending this meeting.  Duhamell Desire, a communication affairs specialist for the IRP, said the board’s future action on the matter “depends on what will happen on the 5^th.”

Unlike the IRP, the CIP has subpoena powers.

Yet to some activists the powers of the CIP are not adequate.  Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Miami Activist Defense, said the CIP should have the power to not only to directly change the policy of the MPD but also fire anyone responsible for what he called “a police riot.” 

“No activities that happened in that two-day period warranted the police action that happened,” Hermes said.

Between November 9 and November 22 there were 231 FTAA-related arrests.

During the January 15 meeting demonstrators, attorneys, journalists and union leaders lined up before the joint CIP-IRP board to complain about police actions in Downtown Miami.  Grievances ranged from allegations that the police action effectively silenced activists’ rights to have their views heard to arbitrary arrests to police rushing into public forums and shooting and beating anyone who looked like a demonstrator. “We liked to use the term ‘hunting activists,’” Hermes said.  Some speakers even demanded Timoney’s resignation.

Previously Timoney insisted that much of the arrest activity was sparked by what he called “coalition” demonstrators bent on committing “direct actions” to disrupt the FTAA talks focused on creating a free trade zone in the Western Hemisphere.  (Critics claimed the FTAA would allow corporations to exploit labor.) On the morning of November 20 Timoney insisted that such a “direct action” took place when protesters marched up to a fence barricading the Intercontinental Hotel, where the FTAA summit took place, and attempted to take it down with grappling hooks. 

Timoney had also claimed that radical protesters attacked police from behind sanctioned union demonstrations, effectively using union members as human shields. He also blamed various union leaders for colluding with radical elements bent on taking down the fence.

One subject not addressed by Timoney: how police handled property taken by arresting officers during the FTAA demonstrations.  According to attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and various press accounts, property ranging from signs to bicycles was simply left on the side of the road.

Meanwhile, on the legal front, a press release from Miami Activist Defense claimed to have obtained another legal victory when Judge Beth Bloom dismissed charges of “failure to obey a police order” and “resisting arrest without violence” against Gan Golan, a 30-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate student who, along with 200 other people, demonstrated in front of Miami-Dade County Jail on November 21.  MAD claimed that Miami-Dade police officers arrested more than 60 people during the jail demonstration.  (Two weeks ago MAD publicized the “nolle prosse” of legal observer Ernesto Longa, the first FTAA-related case to come before a judge, after one of two police officers failed to show up to the court.)

Detective Robert Williams, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade Police Department, told the SunPost that police only moved in after demonstrators had moved out of a designated protest area and spilled into a public street and even into the jail area itself. 

But Hermes said that Lt. Jeffrey Schmidinger testified during the Golan trial that police moved in on the demonstrators before the allotted time for them to disperse had expired. Since Schmidinger is listed as the one who gave the dispersal order in several arrest forms, “this goes a long way toward creating the context for the unlawful arrest for  cases yet to go to trial,” said Hermes, who added that MAD is now examining the transcripts from the Golan trial.

Hermes might want to look at the transcript a little closer, according to Ed Griffith, spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorneys Office.  “That is absolutely not correct,” he said.  “According to what I’ve been told, [Schmidinger] told them [the demonstrators] to disengage and head east.”  The demonstrators started to do that—and then they turned around and headed back toward the Miami-Dade police phalanx.  It was then that police moved in on the demonstrators, Griffith said.

As for Golan himself, Griffith said that according to prosecutors the jury was ready to convict.  “All six jurors would have voted to find him guilty but for the judicial order.”

Griffith said he has heard of an FTAA-related jury case that went before Judge Karen Mills-Francis that resulted in a guilty decision for a James Samaro.  For further details Griffith referred the SunPost to Mills-Francis’s office.

According to a Mills-Francis employee Mills-Francis sentenced Samaro to rehab and to pay court costs for the charge of loitering and handed down a “withheld adjudication” judgment.