JOHN TIMONEY – King Hamad’s, Fascist Pick for Torture State Reform

JOHN TIMONEY – King Hamad’s, Fascist Pick for Torture State Reform

13 November, 2009 – by One People’s Project (Anit-fascist Project)

NAME: John Timoney
HOME BASE: Miami, Florida

This just might be the biggest dirt bag to wear a badge today. With his tactics against protests from New York to Philly to Miami, John Timoney has turned every police department he has ran into a garden variety Weirmacht. After what he did in Miami, however, he and many of his officers should be on the inside of a jail cell, but instead he is giving advice to other police departments on how to deal with protestors. This nets him praise among the right, and that should be the first sign that something is wrong with him.

Born in Dublin, Ireland coming to the US at the age of 13 and raised in Washington Heights, Timoney joined the New York City Police force on July 15, 1969. Rising through the ranks rather quickly, he was at the rank of Deputy Inspector when he became notorious in 1988, leading police to attack the homeless, housing activists, squatters and massive numbers of their Tent City supporters in Tompkins Square Park. In 1994, the year Rudolph Giuliani became mayor, Timoney was tapped to be second in command of the NYPD, and nothing said ‘happy days’ more to the brutal police officers out there more than the words ‘Mayor Giuliani’. In June of 1996, Amnesty International released a report titled Police Brutality in the New York City Police Department, which used official police statistics. In it, the organization noted that 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’. Timoney’s reign as First Deputy to the Police Commissioner saw a 50% increase of complaints in communities of color.

In 1998, Timoney became the police commissioner of Philadelphia, moving from one city with a racist repressive mayor to another that honors one from their history with a statue similar to the one of Sadaam Hussein we had seen toppled in news footage in 2003. In Philly, he tried to uphold that city’s legendary reputation of police brutality, which he must have been successful in doing because just like in NYC, complaints of police misconduct shot through the roof and reached record levels. The Police Advisory Commission said complaints for the fiscal year 2000 were the most they had received in a single year. The Commission made 13 disciplinary recommendations to Timoney as well as 17 opinions, but it had no real enforcement power and in the end Timoney implemented one recommendation, a one-day suspension. He would also pull stunts like issuing decisions before he receives the Commission’s recommendations. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer commission members have complained that Timoney had rendered their work useless, and it cost the city overall. The Police Advisory Commission’s Executive Director Hector Soto has called Timoney’s behavior ‘an attack on the concept of our commission.’ …more