Watching events unfold in Ukraine has been thrilling and inspiring. Every day since the election for president, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Kiev, the capital, to express their outrage over the what appears to be a stolen election.

Government police, while out in force, have not disrupted the protests. Demonstrators have been so numerous and determined they have closed government offices. Yet the police have not confronted them with guns pointed at their faces or pepper spray in their eyes or bean bag bullets shot into their backs or orange netting rounding them up for indiscriminate arrest, as we've seen here in recent confrontations between demonstrators and police.

Maybe American law enforcement can learn a thing or two about freedom of dissent from this former part of the Soviet Union?

These days, on our shores, repressive tactics over restraint is the preferred police response to large groups of Americans joining together to criticize the government. The excuse is always the need to prevent another disruption like that at the 1999 trade conference in Seattle or worries over the "war on terrorism." But the truth is that police and government have never had an easy relationship with massive protest movements and they now feel freer than ever to block and disrupt demonstrations and treat those who have the audacity to dissent as presumptive criminals.

The tactics of cornering peaceable protesters, surrounding them with orange netting and arresting them en masse was used extensively in New York City this summer during the Republican National Convention. One protester, 21-year-old Francesca Fiorentini, who is suing over this treatment and the 35 hours she spent in police custody, says she was told by one officer: "They don't want you out on the street when Bush is here."

This blatantly unconstitutional reaction to protesters has become a pattern. Policing agencies don't seem to care if they get sued later. They see their duty as shutting down demonstrations as opposed to protecting Americans who seek to exercise their rights. And this shift in thinking has been championed by one man in particular, John Timoney.

Timoney is now chief of police in Miami but in 2000, as Philadelphia police commissioner, he orchestrated the pre-emptive arrests and harsh treatment of protesters during the Republican convention. Now in Miami, he has burnished his reputation as an enemy of freedom by creating what is now known as the "Miami Model" of crowd control for the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in November 2003.

The FTAA Ministerial attracted about 8,000 active and retired union members and others in the antiglobalization movement who wanted to express their concerns over the antiworker nature of free trade. They were met with phalanx of 2,500 law enforcement officers from 44 agencies in black riot gear who turned the city into "a massive police state," according to Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America.

Videos and personal accounts of the downtown streets during the police-induced melee reveal people being arrested without cause and subject to the unprovoked use of force. All this was confirmed in a recent report by an independent review panel of Miami-Dade officials which found that: "Visitors who came to our city to peaceably voice their concerns . . . were met with closed fists instead of open arms."

In the end, the $24-million spent on security bought nothing less than the abandonment of the Constitution. And for this, not only did Timoney offer no apologies, but he went on NOW with Bill Moyers and charged that the news media was plotting against the police by questioning his tactics. He accused his interviewer of "doing the bidding" of the protesters.

If this nation were truly committed to its founding principles, public officials in Miami would have made outraged calls for federal and state civil rights investigations and they would have called for Timoney's job. But instead, the so-called "Miami Model" is now considered the exemplar - the blueprint - for police conduct during large-scale demonstrations.

When a Miami Civilian Investigative Panel and the county's review panel requested the police operations plan for the FTAA conference, police officials denied the public records request on the grounds that Miami's deployment is the national state-of-the-art law enforcement model for controlling protests. They said to release the plan would put at risk similar efforts across the nation.

In other words, mass illegal arrests, the indiscriminate use of pepper spray and mesh-covered lead pellets - one of which penetrated a documentarymaker's right temple - and the purposeful disruption of peaceable protests is the model to be exported for future use.

Ukraine has less to learn from us about freedom with every passing year.

© Copyright 2004, St. Petersburg Times

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