# Miami



## Guest (Nov 28, 2003)

Wondered if folks had heard much about what happened in Miami last week? They had one of those big trade summits (wasn't the WTO--think it was some kind of expansion of NAFTA), and there were 10 or 20,000 protesters. And apparently the chief of police there, John Timoney, thought he was a general playing war. There weren't any windows broken--sounds like the demonstrators were a lot better behaved than the average crowd at UMASS after a Sox game--but there were lots of arrests, lots of tear gas and rubber bullets, taser guns, and all kinds of crazy shit. People from the Steelworkers union--and I have friends who are Steelworkers who are furious about the whole thing--got hit with rubber bullets, a guy from some Retired Americans group got arrested when he was trying to go away, and busloads of union members didn't make it to the protest at all because their buses weren't allowed into town. It seems like bad policing that anyone could tell would just rile people up.

John Timoney, the Miami police chief, is a former Philly chief and was a private consultant for a while. He's been a talking head on the news a lot about security issues, too, so he seems to think he's quite a big shot. And what bugs me most is that I've heard that he has a contract to do security at the Democratic Convention in Boston, which means he might try to order cops up here to use the same kind of dumb policing that he did down there. Anybody heard anything about this, or about him?


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