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During November’s Free Trade Area of the Americas conference,
Miami lived under “martial law,” civil rights “were trampled,” and the
city took “the first step from freedom towards bondage,” according to a
draft report issued by the Miami-Dade County Independent Review Panel
that sharply criticizes police conduct.
“The overwhelming riot-clad police presence, when there was no
civil disturbance, chilled citizen participation in permitted and lawful
demonstrations,” concludes the draft report, which was issued last
week.
“It’s meant to be strong language,” IRP chair Jorge Reynardus, a
partner at Holland & Knight in Miami, said in an interview. “This is
not something that will go away. Miami will host similar events in the
future, with more protests likely. What we saw at the FTAA needs to be
checked.”
A spokeswoman for Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas said he had not
seen the draft summary. A county police spokeswoman said the
department’s lawyers are reviewing the draft and would not comment until
the review is complete.
The panel, a nine-member civilian board established by the
Miami-Dade County Commission in 1980, released the report after reading
police reports and hearing police testimony, as well as hearing the
accounts of labor leaders and other individuals who demonstrated at the
FTAA.
The draft report is available at Miamidade.gov/irp/.
The panel is scheduled to consider its final summary report on
police conduct during the FTAA conference at the panel’s next meeting on
June 24.
The Miami-Dade County Police Department acted as part of a
multiagency task force assembled in response to the FTAA conference
leaders’ security concerns. Their anxiety was shared by state and local
government leaders, who wanted the event to proceed smoothly so that
Miami would be chosen as the trade body’s permanent headquarters.
The police force, commanded by Miami Police Chief John Timoney and
including 2,500 officers from 40 different police agencies, was
organized to deal with protests against the proposed free trade agreement among 34 western hemispheric nations.
The demonstrations resulted in mass arrests, widespread complaints
of wrongful arrests and excessive use of force, and serious injuries to
protesters. There was little property damage, but many businesses were
seriously disrupted by the tough security measures.
Many of those who participated in or were in the vicinity of
anti-FTAA events say officers unjustly arrested them, used excessive
force — including clubbing them and shooting them with rubber bullets
and pellets — unlawfully prevented them from participating in licensed
protest events, illegally searched and seized their possessions, or
otherwise violated their rights.
Those with complaints include hundreds of retirees and labor union
members who say they were blocked by police from attending licensed
events. Civil liberties attorneys
say the police massively violated protesters’ rights of free speech and
assembly. A total of 231 people were arrested during the week of FTAA
events.
Bogus arrests
The Independent Review Panel’s report applauds those police
officers who “wisely limited their use of force to situations where all
alternatives had been exhausted.” But the report “strenuously condemn[s]
and deplore[s] the unrestrained and disproportionate use of force
observed in Miami during the FTAA.”
The draft report found that most arrests made by the Miami-Dade
Police Department “did not stand up to scrutiny.” As of May 26, of 82
arrests studied by the panel, all but 19 of those arrested had been
acquitted, nolle prossed, or otherwise disposed of without conviction.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Reynardus said. “It’s telling that so few resulted in findings of guilt.”
According to the draft report, the department failed, among other
things, to give anti-free trade demonstrators adequate time to disperse
after dispersal orders were issued and to follow standard operating
procedures for use of “less than lethal” weapons such as pepper spray
and pepperball munitions.
In addition, the police agency failed to train its officers to
respect the civil rights of protesters, bring in private sector
attorneys to serve as counsel on civil liberties issues, and equip its
officers with visible identification, the draft report said. In general,
the draft report says, “the proper identification of police officers is
essential for public accountability.”
The report explains the police misconduct in part by saying the
police agency placed too much emphasis during training on “anarchists,
anarchists, anarchists” — which “contributed to a police mindset to err,
when in doubt, on the side of dramatic show of force.”
The summary offers a harsh analysis of the county Police
Department’s most visible action, the breaking up of a peaceful mass
demonstration outside the county jail on Friday, Nov. 21, when
protesters gathered to criticize hundreds of arrests made the previous
day.
Police officials claim they ordered the crowd to disperse because
officers spotted two demonstrators collecting rocks, which they feared
were about to be used as weapons. But even if this were so, the summary
states, officers did not do what they were trained to do, which was to
isolate individual troublemakers. Instead, the report said, they “chose
to address the demonstrators rather than address the ‘problem
individual.’ ”
In addition, after police ordered the demonstrators to disperse
that day, the demonstrators were given insufficient time to comply
before being arrested. The summary states that “videotapes document
individuals being arrested even though they began to disperse prior to
the two-minute deadline announced by megaphone.” Several dozen
protesters were arrested, some of them many blocks from the jail.
On other use of force questions, the draft report states that
police use of “less than lethal” weapons “did not conform to established
standard operating procedures or more recent policy directives.” The
summary specifically cites a use of pepper spray “without exhausting
more reasonable means to control,” as well as “an initial failure to
complete a ‘Use of Force to Control Report’ on the deployment of three
rounds of pepperball munitions.”
The draft report clears the Miami-Dade police on several other
allegations. It finds that there was “no systematic problem with
prisoner processing,” “no evidence of sexual abuse” of prisoners, and
“no support” for the county department’s own report that courts
“assisted” them by staggering bond hearings to prevent protesters from
returning to the streets to engage in more demonstrations.
The city of Miami Civilian Investigative Panel is also
investigating police conduct during the FTAA conference. Unlike the
county investigative panel, the city panel has subpoena power. But the
CIP’s work has been delayed by funding problems and organizational
disputes with the city.
Both the city and county investigative panels criticized police for
refusing to disclose the overall operations plan, which has hampered
the investigative panels in evaluating police conduct.
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