By Tom Price
The National Lawyers Guild joined anti-FTAA activists to file a federal lawsuit March 25 in an attempt to turn back new, preemptively violent police tactics like the ones used in Miami, Florida last year. In that Nov. 17-21 demonstration several ILWU members joined tens of thousands protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas trade deal. Peaceful marchers, including pensioners and widows, faced some of the most vigorous police repression in a generation as thousands were corralled, detained or falsely arrested. Prosecutors have charged 231 demonstrators, 28 with felonies.
Miami’s mayor, Manuel Diaz, called the tactics “a model for homeland defense.” Others see a new trend of forcing unfair trade deals down citizens’ throats at gunpoint.
The suit “is brought to challenge the mass false arrests of, and unreasonable force against, lawful demonstrators,” according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Miami. “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 for 10 days.”
Real suffering lies beneath the formal language of the complaint. Police hurled Bentley Killmon, a 71-year-old retired member of the Airline Pilots Assn. and a Korean War vet, to the ground in an extremely brutal manner. He is the lead plaintiff. Videographer Carl Kesser, suffered near-fatal injuries when police shot him with a beanbag that lodged in his skull. According to the Steelworkers Union, police slammed the elderly wife of a retiree from Grantsville, Utah face down and held guns on her after she verbally protested the brutal treatment of another demonstrator.
During one of the Dec. 11 arrest hearings Judge Richard Margolius asked the state’s attorney how many cops had been arrested. “None,” the prosecutor replied.
“That’s a pretty sad commentary, from what I saw,” the judge said. Margolius said he witnessed at least 20 police felonies on the streets during the demonstrations.
Local and federal authorities dubbed police tactics the “Miami Model” because it should be a model for future demonstrations, according to Robert Ross, attorney for the plaintiffs.
“This is a very dangerous precedent. It may happen to other groups,” Ross said. “What we do in this suit will affect all forms of dissent in the future.”
The suit is an attempt to stop this tactic before it spreads to other cities. ILWU Local 23’s Gail Ross was there and expressed her fears for American civil liberties.
“Every time a crowd gathers over something they don’t like they’re going to start using bigger tactics and more guns, literally and figuratively, and if we give away these rights to gather in the streets they will keep chipping away our civil rights,” she said. “They will keep using ‘terrorism,’ and in our fear we think ‘maybe they’re right, maybe we do need all these protections,’ and before we know it all our civil rights are gone.”
The federal assistance to the police—$8.5 million out of the Iraq war budget—paid for weapons and communications. Federal authorities displayed an unprecedented level of participation in domestic civil repression. Homeland Security and the Justice Dept. actively assisted in the planning and in the interrogation of people arrested. For these reasons, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge were included as defendants in the suit. The suit also charges the City of Miami, its mayor and police chief, the county and various other municipal entities.
Activists and the NLG filed the suit under federal Title 42 U.S. Code, Section 1983. That law is the modern version of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, one of the first civil rights laws. Its purpose was to secure the rights of recently freed slaves and allow federal court the authority to enforce those rights and assess criminal penalties for violation. Unfortunately, the modern version lacks criminal penalties.
Besides monetary compensation for the injuries and for punitive damages, the lawsuit also seeks to legally prohibit the Miami model of preemptively and violently restricting free speech.
“We are trying to enjoin practices and procedures that have been implemented at these large demonstrations, the use of arrest without probable cause as a crowd management tool,” Robert Ross said.
If approved by the countries involved, FTAA would extend the disastrous NAFTA scheme to the whole hemisphere. Workers have opposed the FTAA and other corporate trade pacts because they tend to drive wages down and impose corporate control over local economies. Like NAFTA, FTAA allows for corporate privatization of another country’s public facilities and allows foreign corporations to sue to overturn domestic laws that interfere with profits.
As we go to press, the suit is in the paper-serving stage. Plaintiff Killmon will undergo arthroscopic surgery on the shoulder that police injured during his arrest. Videogra-pher Kesser will sue separately for damages. Months after the demo Gail Ross still recalls it with considerable passion:
“I was totally blown away with what I saw there,” she said. “I felt I was in an occupied country. That’s what it looked like on the streets. The police truly thought they could get away with whatever they wanted. They thought they were accountable to no one.”
