Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

UNCIVIL LIBERTIES
RNC2K figure faces new complaint on police tactics
BY STEVEN STYCOS

John Timoney, the police official who claims that housing activist Camilo Viveiros assaulted him with a bicycle during the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, is facing new accusations of violating protesters’ civil rights.

Amnesty International (AI) has called for an investigation of police tactics used against demonstrators in November during Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in Miami, Florida. Timoney, who is now chief of the Miami Police Department and who orchestrated the police response to the November protests, was criticized in August 2000 when, as Philadelphia’s police chief, he oversaw the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators, including Viveiros, at the Republican Convention. After repeated delays, Viveiros, a Providence, Rhode Island, resident who works as an organizer for the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants, is scheduled to go on trial in April 2004.

In Miami, police fired rubber bullets and used batons, pepper spray, tear gas, and concussion grenades against largely peaceful anti-globalization demonstrators, AI charges. They also detained 250 demonstrators and disrupted an AI event by surrounding the area and denying people access to it. Among those arrested was a Miami New Times reporter who says she was falsely accused of throwing rocks at police. "The level of force used by police does not appear to have been at all justified," AI declares in a statement.

Leaders of the United Steelworkers of America, whose members will soon face the fallout from President George W. Bush’s repeal of steel tariffs, also criticized the police tactics. And the AFL-CIO, according to the New York Times, is threatening to sue because police violated "virtually every agreement" made with the labor organizations before the protests. (In a letter to the AFL-CIO, Timoney said he would review the police’s actions, adding that his department reneged on agreements because the federation allowed nonunion, potentially dangerous protesters into its events.)

The police tactics in Miami resemble those used in Philadelphia three years ago, when 423 demonstrators were arrested, mostly during the Republican National Convention’s first days, and held on bail of up to $1 million. The tactics disrupted planned demonstrations by keeping key leaders in jail, and police confiscated puppets and other items designed to dramatize activists’ political beliefs. Of those arrested, 77 were never charged, according to the R2K Legal Collective, the group coordinating protesters’ legal defense. Forty-three were charged with felonies, but 37 of these cases were thrown out or reduced to misdemeanors, according to an R2K report. Most of those misdemeanor charges were thrown out, or the defendants accepted plea bargains involving no jail time.

Viveiros and co-defendants Eric Steinberg of Memphis, Tennessee, and Darby Landy of Raleigh, North Carolina, are the last RNC2K protesters to face trial. Known as the Timoney Three, they are charged with assaulting Timoney and two other police officers while the officers were arresting demonstrators at a downtown street corner following an anti-death-penalty march. Viveiros denies the assault. However, in a previous interview with the Phoenix (see "Rough Justice," News and Features, January 19, 2001), Timoney said he was sure that the Fall River native attacked him with a police bicycle.

Since Viveiros’s arrest, supporters in New England, San Francisco, and Philadelphia have raised money for his legal defense and written letters to judges attesting to his fine character.


Issue Date: December 19 - 25, 2003
Back to the News & Features table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group