Eric Garner’s last words
By Doug Porter
The national chattering class finally found a dead black man they can get behind yesterday as a grand jury in Staten Island refused to indict the policeman who was videotaped choking Eric Garner.
Since videos exist showing both the arrest and the subsequent four minute delay before officers attempted CPR, it’s not possible to easily weasel out of the conclusion this was -at a minimum- a case of criminally negligent homicide, as concluded by Fox legal expert Judge Andrew Napolitano.
The “best” lame excuses coming out of the flat-earther set were that Garner died because he was obese or that the “nanny state” laws taxing tobacco were to blame. Nobody’s called him a “thug”–yet.
Largely peaceful demonstrations (there were arrests for acts of civil disobedience) happened around the country, and are expected to continue into the weekend. Today I’ll share some of the reactions appearing in the news and social media.
Here’s the first few paragraphs of the Associated Press story appearing on page 4 of today’s UT-San Diego:
A Staten Island grand jury cleared a white police officer Wednesday in the videotaped chokehold death of an unarmed black man stopped for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, triggering protests by hundreds of New Yorkers who likened the case to the deadly police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.
As the demonstrations mounted, Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington that federal authorities would conduct a civil rights investigation into the July 17 death of Eric Garner at the hands of police Officer Daniel Pantaleo.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan said the grand jury found “no reasonable cause” to bring charges, but unlike the chief prosecutor in the Ferguson case, he gave no details on how the panel arrived at its decision. The grand jury could have considered a range of charges, from reckless endangerment to murder.
Here’s an earlier Associated Press story written prior to the grand jury decision:
The medical examiner has ruled that the chokehold of a police officer on a New York City man last month caused his death.
Medical examiner spokeswoman Julie Bolcer said Friday that Eric Garner’s July 17 death has been ruled a homicide.
Bolcer says his death was caused by “the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” She says asthma and heart disease were contributing factors.
Chokeholds Banned by NYPD 20 Years Ago
Here’s the Washington Post Wonkblog on the background of the chokehold:
For the second time in as many weeks, a grand jury decided not to indict a police officer for the use of excessive force. This time, however, the weapon of choice was not a gun, but a set of hands, used in an apparent chokehold on an asthmatic Staten Island man named Eric Garner — a tactic that, as it turns out, is forbidden by the NYPD.
This is what the NYPD patrol guide says, per the New York Law Journal:
Members of the New York City Police Department will NOT use chokeholds. A chokehold shall include, but is not limited to, any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.
That’s explicit. And it has been the department’s policy since 1993, shortly after an five officers were put on trial (four of whom were acquitted) for killing a 21-year-old by “traumatic asphyxia.”
From FiveThirtyEight.com
Lawless Lawmen
Columnist Charles P. Pierce at Esquire looked at the role law enforcement currently plays around the country:
There are a whole lot of reasons for this, and we should decide if we’re still having national conversations about any of them, but one of the primary ones is that, in many places and in many cases, there is a fundamental contempt for the law among the people empowered to enforce it. And this is not just about the laws regarding ventilating your fellow citizens in the street, or choking them to death on camera. It is about the paperish regulations already in place to prevent what happened to, say, Amadou Diallo from happening to Michael Brown or Eric Garner. For example, the technique through which Daniel Pantaleo ended the life of Eric Garner has been forbidden by departmental regulations since 1993. The official autopsy on Eric Garner said that he died from being asphyxiated through the use of this technique. It called his death a homicide. And it is on video. You can see it. The chokehold is the first club out of Officer Pantaleo’s bag. Did the departmental regulation stop him? Did Eric Garner’s well-publicized killing — and Pantaleo’s well-publicized suspension — stop his brother officers from using a similar technique on a pregnant woman? No, these things only forced Pantaleo and his lawyers to come up with a creative explanation…
…This flaunting of both departmental rules and federal law on the part of local police departments is the clearest indication that they consider themselves beyond the law they are sworn to enforce. And why shouldn’t they? The systems by which they are supposed to be held accountable are intolerably weak, where they are not broken altogether. Where are the stiff fines for the police chiefs who ignore the requirements of federal law? What good are departmental sanctions when officers get filmed blithely using techniques that those sanctions supposedly banned two decades ago? It has become plain that, in far too many cases and in far too many places, local police departments have made of themselves what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 concerning the use of British troops to enforce the law in the colonies — “independent of and superior to the civil power.” Once there, these departments operate with impunity according to the informal dynamics of American law and American justice that were born when the country was. And, among other things, that means more Eric Garners and Michael Browns and Tamir Rices, the latter a 12-year old shot down by a cop in Cleveland who’d been hired anyway despite the fact that responsibilities of being a cop in a suburb were too much for him. Makes me wanna holler, too.
Here’s Charles M Blow, writing in the New York Times, on the attempts by many pundits to dismiss or discount the racism in this country at the core of these events.
Today, too many people are gun-shy about using the word racism, lest they themselves be called race-baiters. So we are witnessing an assault on the concept of racism, an attempt to erase legitimate discussion and grievance by degrading the language: Eliminate the word and you elude the charge.
By endlessly claiming that the word is overused as an attack, the overuse, through rhetorical sleight of hand, is amplified in the dismissal. The word is snatched from its serious scientific and sociological context and redefined simply as a weapon of argumentation, the hand grenade you toss under the table to blow things up and halt the conversation when things get too “honest” or “uncomfortable.”
But people will not fall for that chicanery. The language will survive. The concept will not be corrupted. Racism is a real thing, not because the “racial grievance industry” refuses to release it, but because society has failed to eradicate it.
Racism is interpersonal and structural; it is current and historical; it is explicit and implicit; it is articulated and silent.
#CrimingWhileWhite
The issue of racism in law enforcement made it into Twitter in a powerful way, with thousands of posts illustrative of the double standards in how laws are enforced.
From Mic.com:
Following a grand jury’s decision to let a white police officer walk free for the death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old black man and father of six in New York City, the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite began trending on Twitter. While real-life protests were occurring simultaneously across New York City, the hashtag became a powerful indictment of white privilege and the law. The hashtag was started by Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon writer Jason Ross, who shared his story of a childhood run-in with the law.
#CrimingWhileWhite illustrates how differently the system treats white Americans and black Americans like Eric Garner, who was choked to death for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, and Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot and killed for wielding a toy gun.
Here are a few examples of that meme:
Age 18 Blew pot smoke in cop’s face stumbling out of a party, whisky bottle in hand. Punishment “Run along now, be safe” #CrimingWhileWhite
— Cat Thomson (@Kitcatalicious) December 4, 2014
At 13 I stole a car with my friends & drove it 2wks before we got busted. Only one charged was black. #CrimingWhileWhite
— Cecily Kellogg (@Cecilyk) December 4, 2014
RT “@pyrophore: Gee, I wonder what would happen to a group of Black guys if they did this? #CrimingWhileWhite pic.twitter.com/KTZxsSyyUh”
— Angel Rivera (@AngelRiveraLib) December 4, 2014
Retirement for SeaWorld’s Corky Orca?
Local activists are urging people to join them to Proclaim December “Corky Orca Retirement Month” as the sad 45th Anniversary of the capture of the oldest orca in captivity approaches on December 11, 2014. Friday evening (4:30- 6pm) they’ll be working with the the Overpass Light Brigade, posting a lit up “RETIRE SEAWORLD ORCAS” on the Clairemont Dr/I-5 overpass, above the SeaWorld exit sign. Saturday morning (10am-1pm) they’ll be picketing at SeaWorld San Diego, focusing on the same theme. Here’s the Facebook page.
Looking Back to the Future
Cosmos magazine has posted an 1974 video of SciFi author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke expounding on the role of computers in the 21st century.
Wow. Was that guy smart, or what?
On This Day: 1970 – Cesar Chavez was jailed for 20 days for refusing to end United Farm Workers’ grape boycott. 1980 – The bodies of four American nuns slain in El Salvador two days earlier were unearthed. Five national guardsmen were later convicted of the murders. 1988 – Roy Orbison gave his final concert in Akron, OH. He died two days later.
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Doug Porter
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Here are stats for San Diego County
If you haven’t yet, see the front page of today’s N.Y. Daily News.
Here’s the best comment so far:
“It’s not ‘To Protect and Serve’, it’s ‘Submit or Die.’
Police are taught to take control and they will not back down, even if it means killing unarmed, non-violent suspects.”
Tellin’ it like it is.
FWIW, goofing on conservatives, for recognizing police brutality won’t build coalitions bigger than your regular progressive readers. Breathing a sigh of relief, that more people are standing up for what’s right, will. I choose the latter.
While #ICantBreathe is an interesting meme #PleaseJustLeaveMeAlone resonates much more with me. Cops need to start leaving more people alone.
While I agree with your desire, it ain’t never gonna happen. It’s just the “cop mentality” to interfere with and control others.
Even the “good” cops are subject to the same mentality.
Do you think that “us v them mentality” comes from civilians? If the police really did “serve and protect” there would be no division between us all. Whatever solution to the problem must come from LEOs because they see any suggestions from civilians as interfering with their job/authority/power.
This is nothing new, it’s just worse now than it’s ever been.
BTW, you coulda just wrote seperate :-)
“Even the “good” cops are subject to the same mentality.”
I have to disagree with that. At least based on good cops I personally know. Whether or not good cops are the majority or not probably varies from department to department, city to city, county to county, etc. That being said there ARE good cops who do not hold that mentality.
The head of police union in New York was featured on Chris Hayes show tonight saying two things:
1. the hold used by Officer Pantaleo was not a choke hold, it was a “seatbelt” hold (ie, like the seatbelt part that goes over one shoulder and under the other); and 2) Mayor de Blasio by stating his own concern for his own son and the need for reform was “throwing the police of New York under the bus.”
I was just screaming at the screen. This guy did more to undermine every good
cop and law enforcement official in one day than anyone in the entire country. He is now the poster guy for all that is wrong in that police department.
It is incomprehensible how someone who purports to represent police as a labor force could or would think that trying to minimize the killing of Eric Garner using an illegal choke hold by describing a different type of hold that was not used (the report showed the video in split screen next to him as he tried to describe how it was not a choke hold…absurd to every human being watching and listening!) is going to somehow make the Grand Jury decision sound reasonable or exonerate the officers involved in this tragedy.
Then it is reported that apparently four of the other police officers involved in the take down were given immunity by the prosecutor for testimony before the grand jury. Not sure if that included the big guy slamming Eric Garner’s face into the sidewalk with his foot while Garner is pleading that he can’t breathe.
This is not about just the choke hold. This is about a lawless gang with badges essentially murdering a man for allegedly selling cigarettes. Some more guilty than others, maybe….but all of them were part of this lynching (“to murder (an accused person) by mob action and without lawful trial, as by hanging”-Websters). In this case an arm was used instead of a noose, and, yes, I think it was motivated at least in part in much the same way that lynchings were in another time and place in our country).
We need to recognize, and be thankful for all the law abiding cops. I know many that I respect and trust without reservation. But they need to now step out and say “No More” — we as sworn officers will no longer remain silent or protect those who violate our rules of conduct. It endangers our mission and ourselves and our brothers and sisters and our neighbors. The last thing they needed this week was that yahoo representing them with denial and vile.
This good cop/bad cop argument is another trap, something like false equivalence in major news. We all have to agree there are plenty of people who come out of the Navy and the neighborhoods and go into the Police Academy with the best intentions. It’s what happens in the stationhouses that fucks them up; mom and pop in Tierrasanta (no offense intended) don’t get a chance to see it.
Don’t give anybody the benefit of a doubt, if they’re furtive they’re guilty, if they’re other than white you can’t know what they’re thinking… many recruits just get the beat down after a while.
I reported police for what seemed like a long, long time. Some good cops trusted me, and spoke about what they knew. SDPD had a street-clothed narc officer who was murderous, and I was warned off any attempt to report on him. Internal Affairs were desk guys who just wanted to leave at the end of their shift without trouble. There was a video that briefly aired on local channels before it disappeared. It clearly showed he was dropping his gun when he was showered with bullets and killed.
I did a story on Ed Lawson, who became for a while a talk show host after he’d been stopped 23 times because he was black and wore dreadlocks and walked everywhere he went. He was taken downtown to jail some of those times, no doubt because he knew the law and insisted on quoting it to the bad cops who’d interfered with his life.
There Are Bad Cops Because: the culture is macho, the money isn’t spent on in-service reeducation, and too many bad cops are promoted by an institution that calls itself a brotherhood.
No one here has mentioned the proposal to fit patrol officers with ‘body’ cams……
Is the information going to be ‘streamed’ in real time over a ‘secure’ link to the nearest cell tower? or is it going to be recorded on a chip to be uploaded later.. for ‘editing.’ Hmmm
I do believe it will ‘improve the behavior of both citizens and officers’ (as some pro pundits allege ) but like the Red Light cameras; will come into disfavor as acts of agents of Big Brother begin to surface and attorneys obtain footage with the Freedom of Information Act to prosecute (or defend) their clients in court….
Alas… Give them a few years but I think the body cams will go the way of the Red light cameras despite their obvious benefits: Scrapped due to Public dis-favor over ‘data abuse.’
Good question and observations David. SDPD has been using street cameras in “high crime” areas, e.g. El Cajon blvd where prostitution, drug dealing etc has been observed. I assisted met with the officers in charge when they requested additional state funds to add cameras to the program.
I met with PD representatives and asked about the chance of the info from these cameras being made available to the public, including streaming in real time so people could observe their neighborhood. It’s been a few years so I don’t recall the exact response, but it was not encouraging.
I pointed out that people on public sidewalks have no expectation of privacy, but they seemed unwilling to make what they considered evidence of crimes available to non-law enforcement personnel.
Unless/until this changes, citizens still need to exercise their right to document interactions with police. If you do so, and are asked to stop, the reply is: I have the right to observe and document your actions. These observations do have an effect, and do have an important place in our justice system.