Filthy Pig Timoney in the News

Jackbooted thug John Timoney, famed for his role in instigating police riots in Philadelphia and Miami, and for his abiding enmity (unconstrained by either ethics or law) toward the anti-globalization movement, has been maintaining an especially high profile lately. Given his close ties to the highest circles of Homeland Security, his use of illegal surveillance and preemptive arrest on trumped up charges to combat protesters in Philadelphia and Miami, and his calls for the use of RICO to shut down the anti-globalization movement, I'm sure Timoney is destined to be the A. Mitchell Palmer of our time (before he's hauled in front of a revolutionary court in chains, anyway).

From Progressive Review:

MIAMI PLANS HARASSMENT OF CITIZENS

[This, of course, won't deter a single terrorist. It will, however, train citizens to be more accepting of invasions on their constitutional rights]

CURT ANDERSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Police are planning "in-your-face" shows of force in public places, saying the random, high-profile security operations will keep terrorists guessing about where officers might be next. Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez, who announced the program Monday, said as an example, officers might surround a bank, check the IDs of everyone going in and out, and hand out leaflets about terror threats. "People are definitely going to notice it," he said. "We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears.". . . The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security. Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target.


PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS, MAY 2003 - The next stop for former Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney is Iraq. Timoney, police chief in Miami since January, will help establish a civilian police force during a 10-day trip to the war-torn nation, the Miami Herald reported today. The Department of Defense yesterday tapped Timoney to help set up a police academy in the northern city of Kirkuk, an ethnically divided oil city torn by violence in recent weeks. Timoney's skills will be used to control anarchy that has erupted since U.S. forces overtook the Saddam Hussein regime. . . Timoney has done international security consulting, working in such countries as Brazil, Northern Ireland and Turkey.


ACCORDING TO AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL'S June 1996 report on the NYPD, which used official police statistics, in 1994, the first year that Timoney was second in command at the NYPD, the city saw "a 34% increase in civilians shot dead." In the same year, there was also a "53.3% increase in civilians shot dead in police custody" as well as "an increase in the number of civilians injured from officers' firearms discharge during the same period." Amnesty also reports that the New York City Civilian Review Board "reported that it received 4,920 new complaints in 1994, an increase of 37.43 percent over the previous year" When Timoney was the First Deputy to New York City's Police Commissioner, civilian complaints about police abuse rose by 50 percent in communities of color.

Timoney then moved on to become first in command of the Philadelphia Police Department. . . Complaints of police misconduct reached record levels in Timoney's Philadelphia: according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, reports to the city's Police Advisory Commission for the fiscal year 2000 were "the most the commission had had received in a single year."


DURING DEMONSTRATIONS against the criminal justice system in Philadelphia this past summer, the commissioner executed preemptive strikes in order to silence activists; his force illegally shut down a meeting spaces used by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and other groups. One raid was executed with a sealed warrant, and justified in a later affidavit which relied on research by the ultra-right wing FBI informant John Rees, and claimed that many of the protesters were funded by former Soviet bloc countries. . . During the Philadelphia demonstrations Timoney's men conducted rampant illegal infiltration and surveillance of activists. He also used State Troopers as infiltrators and agent provocateurs as a way of violating an injunction which prohibits the Philadelphia police from infiltrating political groups. His department lied about these tactics, until the Philadelphia Inquirer actually documented it.

AFTER A CONFRONTATION with demonstrators, Timoney bragged to the press "We jumped them." He let his strategy for handling demonstrators slip to the Washington Post: "You just have to make sure you keep one hand around one of their throats"


SAM SMITH, WHY BOTHER? - By the time of the GOP convention in Philadelphia, the government had dispensed with even the pretension of constitutional procedure. At the peak of the demonstrations, organizers reported:

- One officer dragging a man in the nude, grabbing a protester's penis, stepping on necks, jumping on a man's back, and slamming a face into a cell door. An officer who told a prisoner, "I'll fuck you up the ass and make you my bitch," slamming a man against wall repeatedly, punching a prisoner in the stomach, holding a prisoner's face in the trash with his knee in the prisoner's neck, throwing a prisoner against the wall.

- 4 cases of denial of access to medication: 1 person with HIV denied for 2 days, received on third day. 1 person with migraine, vomiting, denied all medicine. 1 hypoglycemic person denied access to adequate food.

- 4 counts of sexual abuse: dragging a man naked, wrenching a man's penis, twisting a person's nipples, man subjected to random search of genitals.

- 2 threats of rape from commanding officers.

A leader of the Ruckus Society was arrested while walking along a city street and charged with possession of an instrument of crime, obstruction of justice, obstructing a highway, failure to disperse, recklessly endangering another person and conspiracy. A judge set bail at $1 million. Joseph Rogers, a Quaker peace volunteer and President of the Mental Health Association of Southeast Pennsylvania, witnessed correctional officers tightening the handcuffs of protesters until their hands became blue. When Rogers asked the guards to loosen the cuffs, the guards replied, "This will teach them a lesson, this will teach them to come to Philly." Rogers was removed from his cell and cuffed from his left hand to his right ankle. "I told them I was diabetic but they threw me to the ground so they could cuff me. I was told to hop but my damaged knee prevented me. They dragged me to my cell."

Other arrestees reported being isolated, verbally abused, punched, kicked, thrown against walls, bloodied, and dragged naked across floors, in one instance through a "trash trough" containing refuse, spittle and urine. Said Paul Davis of ACT UP:

"I saw a man handcuffed to his cell door in a crucifixion position. He groaned and bellowed for 20 minutes that they were using metal handcuffs to smash his hands. I heard women screaming and being dragged along the floor. I saw a woman screaming in pain as a police officer said, 'You want more?! You want more?!'"