Category Archives: Miami

I wasn't there myself, so I can't testify from personal observation, but there are a lot of accounts floating around of vastly excessive police behavior during the recent FTAA meetings. The city's power structure — never known for its enlightenment — is just tickled pink that no one was killed and nothing tangible was damaged. The intangible cost to our freedom is not something most of them seem very concerned about.

You can get a good flavor of what's going on — and what (in the sense of an independent investigation) is unlikely to happen — by reading these columns from the Miami Herald. Thank goodness for the columnists: other than this AP news story, AFL-CIO asks for probe of police conduct, the news coverage has been largely supine . Hurry, these may only be online for a few days:

• Jim DeFede, The power of the police needs watching
• Michael Putney, Citizens' panel should review complaints
• Jim DeFede, FTAA security review shouldn't be done by cops
• Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, ACLU: 'In the name of maintaining order, Chief Timoney suspended the constitutional rights of law-abiding people.'

Best quote is from DeFede,

Several people, including police officials, kept referring to the protesters as ''out of towners.'' They said the police correctly decided to ''prioritize'' the rights of local business owners over the rights of out-of-town protesters.

I was surprised to hear it articulated so plainly from police officers. I said I didn't realize they could choose who was deserving of rights and who wasn't. Shouldn't the Constitution apply to everyone? Isn't there some middle ground between the lawlessness that overran Seattle in 1999 and the police state that engulfed Miami last month?

…

Last month the police decided ''out of towners'' could have their rights violated.

Who's next? Poor folks in Wynwood? Overtown? Liberty City?

Exactly.

FTAA IMC. It looks from this page as if the police in Miami are on a hair trigger — which fits with everything we've been reading in the local press for the last couple of weeks. It would be tempting to dismiss this web page as agitprop — and it may be — but certainly the cops came armed for bear.

The mainstream media reports, Thousands march peacefully after early clashes. It starts off with how great things are, but the further you go into the article, the less great they sound — although so far at least there have been no major incidents, just many minor ones.

Even the boosterish Herald reports,

Among those arrested today: Marc Steier, an attorney with Miami Activist Defense, which defends the rights of protesters. He said he was seized by police early this morning and charged with obstruction of justice as he attempted to assist protesters.

''I didn't last 25 minutes on the street,'' he said.

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Just after dropping off the kids this morning, I hit the wrong button on the car radio this morning — wait! there's a point to this story! it's not just pointless self-indulgent diaristic blogging! — and the radio flips from NPR, where it usually lives, to AM, where I never go. And I find something strange.

Local AM radio around here usually is below awful. But instead of shock jocks, or wall-to-wall ads, or mindless sports talk, or crime-and-wrecks, what I hear is a calm, measured voice, speaking in long sentences, expressing complex ideas. And the voice….the voice is saying things I thought you didn't get to say on the radio. Especially not in Florida.

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All of a sudden there's this very loud noise all around. People in neighboring homes, shouting, cheering?, jeering?, it's 11pm at night, this is not usual behavior in my usually quiet neighborhood.

Then I flip to ESPN.com and I understand: the Marlins have won the Series.

(I guess that means the owners will be coming back to the taxpayers again, to demand we pay for their stadium.)

Perhaps after the recent wave of heat-related deaths in Paris it will be clear just how evil this alleged conduct at the Krome immigrant detention center is: Worker claims 'day after day' he was ordered to turn off AC. We're not talking just making people sweat here:

'I don't know how someone didn't die in there because of the heat,'' Novoa said Wednesday in a telephone interview. 'Imagine 110 people in a room. There are no windows, only a door, locked with no air conditioning. Those poor Haitians… . When they saw me, they said `Please don't do that to us. You are killing us.' You have no idea how it made me feel.''

When he entered one of the buildings, Novoa said it had a stench of human feces and body odor.

Krome—perched on the very southern edge of settled greater Miami, nestled right up near the last of the open land and the Everglades—is a notorious facility in this community, one we like to pretend isn't there. It is the site of repeated human rights violations (e.g. sexual abuse, attempts to deny detainees access to counsel, and general evil). It is amazing that in this community, more than most of America a cauldron of immigrants, we tolerate this. But of course, we're mostly powerless, as Krome is not run by the locals but by the feds, and not just any feds but one of the two or three most loathsome bureaucracies in the US federal government, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Stories like this—and even if this one turns out to be exaggerated or false, it's only one of many—strain my general belief that evil institutions can turn good people bad. Perhaps a refinement is in order: could it be that one of the reasons that certain evil institutions are so evil is because they drive out the good people and attract those who either cannot find work elsewhere or who positively enjoy the evil?

Nor is this a story of a heroic whistle-blower: the matter is public only because a worker objected to being disciplined for failing to go along with it.