People were expecting this kind of thing, of course, but now the stories are starting to come out: undercover infiltration of Occupy movements, preemptive arrests, and general implementation of the "Miami model" that has been so popular with law enforcement in recent years. (And was the strategy behind the bizarrely excessive law-enforcement actions during the 2008 Republican National Convention—though I didn't realize it at the time.)

The "Miami model" is the blueprint for the kinds of law-enforcement tactics and crackdowns on dissent that we complain about, not least because of their chilling effect on free speech—pre-emptive arrests, infiltration and surveillance, embedding large-scale media outlets with police, targeting reporters who haven't been embedded, using chemical weapons and physical punishment to disperse crowds instead of arrests, and (when arrests are necessary) keeping people in holding pens without charging them for as long as legally possible just to make sure they're off the streets but not actually moving through the justice system. The Miami model also favors bringing in officers from other cities, who are often unidentifiable, and therefore much less accountable for what they do.

The "Miami model" isn't just popular with U.S. police departments—it's becoming popular with Middle Eastern governments as well. John Timoney, the police chief who pioneered the Miami model during the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas summit meeting, has been hired to teach his methods to police in Bahrain. From the NYT:

After his appointment as an adviser to Bahrain’s police force was announced on Thursday, the Miami paper reminded readers that after the events of 2003, a Florida circuit court judge said he had seen “no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers” and called the force’s actions “a disgrace for the community.”