Meanwhile, we show the Brits how to handle protesters

In Miami, less than 15,000 demonstrators against the FTAA talks have been attacked by police. Compare to the 200,000 in London who have been handled relatively gently by police, with few altercations.

The talk was that they were expecting something on the order of Seattle and over-reacted to the situation.

Tom Hayden reports for Alternet:

Protestors seemed to skirmish with heavily armored Miami police outside the Riande Hotel Thursday morning, but nothing is at it seems this week. These "anarchists" were undercover police officers whose mission was to provoke a confrontation.

The crowd predictably panicked, television cameras moved in, the police lines parted, and I watched through a nearby hotel window as two undercover officers disguised as "anarchists," thinking they were invisible, hugged each other. They excitedly pulled tasers and other weapons out of their camouflage cargo pants, and slipped away in an unmarked police van.

On the other side of the impenetrable police barricade, a young woman with a video camera was bent over, vomiting from pepper spray. The nonviolent revolutionary Starhawk stood blinded for 10 minutes as friends washed her eyes. Others knelt paralyzed on the street.

A few hours later, hundreds of peaceful protestors – and a few shocked reporters – sitting quietly in Bayfront Park on Biscayne Boulevard were sprayed like unwanted pests by officers who described themselves as Robo-Cops.

So began a day that could be explained as a planned overreaction by the City of Miami, the Governor of Florida and his supportive brother in the White House.

...Under a newly adopted ordinance, groups of seven or more people are forbidden to stop on a sidewalk for longer than 29 minutes without a permit.

...[T]he entire downtown was shut down by hundreds of officers in response to the arrival of a nonviolent march by 200 farm worker supporters from Ft. Lauderdale, 34 miles away.

...Newscasters embedded Iraq-style among the police provided a complementary narrative rationalizing the show of force. For example, when a young white woman holding her fingers in a V-sign was shot point blank with a rubber bullet, the local ABC commentator said without the slightest evidence, "She took a rubber bullet in the stomach, she must have done something. You wanna play, you gotta pay."

...[T]he telling comparison that should be made is not with Seattle 1999, but with the anti-WTO protests in Cancun, Mexico, just two months ago. There a Mexican police force with a long record of human rights abuses protected the WTO Ministerial with no offensive force, no gassing, no beatings and virtually no arrests. Protestors outside the fences in Cancun were far more aggressive than in Miami today. It was the first significant de-escalation of state violence in the history of anti-globalization protests. Miami and U.S. police officials were there as observers, but chose not to repeat the non-violent peacekeeping example of Cancun.

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz called the police presence "a model for homeland defense."

...As to protests scheduled for Friday, [Police Chief John Timoney said,] "If they engage in lawful activity, we're gonna arrest them." He didn't notice the misstatement – if indeed it was one.