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

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

Amnesty International is calling for an investigation of police tactics used against demonstrators in November during Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in Miami, Florida. Timoney, the police chief in Miami, was criticized in August 2000 when, as Phildelphia’s police chief, he oversaw the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators, including Viveiros, at the Republican convention. After repeated delays, Viveiros, a Providence 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, Amnesty charges. They also detained 250 demonstrators and disrupted an Amnesty 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," Amnesty declares in a statement.

Leaders of the United Steelworkers of America, whose members are soon to suffer 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 actions, adding that the department reneged on agreements since the federation allowed non-union, potentially dangerous protesters into its events.)

Pattie Horton, administrative coordinator for the Providence-based activist group Direct Action for Rights & Equality (DARE), attended the demonstrations, but reports not seeing any police misconduct. Police, however, were massed at every street corner during a march that she participated in. "I saw tons and tons of police with their combat gear on," she relates. "You would have thought there was a war going on." The Times reported that the federal government supplied $8.5 million to help with police costs.

The police tactics in Miami resemble those used in Philadelphia three years ago. Four hundred and twenty demonstrators were arrested, mostly during the Republican National Convention’s first days, and held on bail reaching $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 a collective report. Most misdemeanor defendants had their charges thrown out or they 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, but in a previous interview with the Phoenix (see "Liberty denied," News, January 18, 2001), Timoney said he was sure that the Fall River native attacked him with a police bicycle.

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