The era's policing doctrine reached its finished form at the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Miami in November 2003. Armored, unbadged officers from forty coordinated agencies — funded by an $8.5 million earmark tucked into the Iraq war appropriation — met permitted marches with rubber bullets, tasers, and pepper spray, embedded police provocateurs in the crowds, and arrested hundreds, including elderly retirees from the AFL-CIO march. Police chief John Timoney, architect of the Philadelphia RNC response, gave the approach its name: the Miami Model.
Nearly every criminal case failed — a county judge who witnessed the streets said he had seen "no less than twenty felonies committed by police officers" — and the city paid out settlements for years. Miami closed the anti-globalization cycle that Seattle had opened: the movement's summit-hopping phase ended, but the model outlived it, reappearing at the 2004 New York RNC (1,800 arrests, a $18 million settlement), at Occupy's evictions, and in the federal response of 2020 — the durable institutional legacy of four years of trade-summit protest.