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Even though a grand jury chose not to indict the cop who killed Eric Garner, the video footage is a moral indictment in itself—how could police hear his pleas for air and fail to stop?
New York Daily News/Getty
CHILLING INDIFFERENCE
12.03.14
‘I Can’t Breathe!’ ‘I Can’t Breathe!’ A Moral Indictment of Cop Culture
The grand jury has spoken, but that does not change what Eric Garner cried out in the cellphone video taken as police pinned him to a Staten Island sidewalk.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Garner said again and again that August day.
And even though the grand jury has now chosen not to bring criminal charges in Garner’s death, the video footage that follows those cries constitutes a moral indictment not so much of what the police did but of what the police did not do.
“At that point, forget the cop side,” a longtime veteran police officer not party to the incident says of the moment Garner cries out. “The human side comes in.”
Yet the cops do not seem even to hear Garner.
“I don’t see anyone in that video saying, ‘Look, we got to ease up,’” says the veteran officer. “Where’s the human side of you in that you’ve got a guy saying, ‘I can’t breathe?’”
The veteran officer goes on, “Somebody needs to say, ‘Stop it!’ That’s what’s missing here was a voice of reason. The only voice we’re hearing is of Eric Garner.”
The veteran officer believes Garner might have survived had anybody heeded his pleas.
“He could have had a chance,” says the officer, who is black. “But you got to believe he’s a human being first. A human being saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’”
What may have saved Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo from indictment is that a close examination of the video shows he had had released his chokehold on Garner just before the 43-year-old father of six began crying out that he could not breathe. Pantaleo by then was shifting around to press the prone man’s head into the pavement.
None of the cops in the video are beating Garner. And in two hours of questioning by the grand jurors on November 22, Pantaleo apparently convinced them that he had not intended to injure Garner, only to place him under arrest. Pantaleo was held blameless even though the medical examiner had ruled the death a homicide resulting from “compression of the neck [choke hold], compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.”
“You’re not even hearing [the perp] at this point; you’re dealing with this non-human.”
But the absence of criminal charges does not make the indifference to Garner’s distress any more forgivable. There were still those cries, cries that rose again on Wednesday afternoon from the same grimy patch of pavement where Garner died, voiced by two dozen members of the community who stood shocked and angered by the news that no cop would be charged.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”
They added a chant that rose in Ferguson, where another grand jury had declined to indict Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
A 25-year-old man named Alexander Cooper strode up the sidewalk holding his 3-year-old daughter, Alexis, by the hand. He told her what he also would have said had they been walking in Ferguson, no matter what the differences between the two cases.
“I just told her that a black man was killed and there were no charges,” he said.
He added, “As I father, I want to live and watch my children grow.”
Cooper spoke of how pained he was that Garner will never get that chance with his own kids. Little Alexis pulled on his hand.
“I have my daddy right here!” she announced.
Cooper had little Alexis pose for a picture on the exact spot there Garner was pinned. Alexis did not know to act differently than she might for any other picture taken of her by her daddy. Her bright little smile in this place of senseless death constituted a challenge to all of us to make the future more in keeping with this sparkle of life at its most pure and innocent.
“I’m going to show it to her in the future,“ Cooper said of the picture. “I’m going to show her she was here.”
We can only hope that she will marvel at how much the city and country have changed.
Earlier in the day, before the decision became known, Jonathan Mejia and Natassia McClean had come up to this spot pushing a stroller that bore an even younger challenge of the future, their 6-month-old son, Jerimiah. Mejia looked at a rain-sodden sign reading “BIG ERIC R.I.P” and flowers left after Garner’s death that had wilted during the four long months of the grand jury’s investigation.
“I knew somebody else killed by the police,” 21-year-old Mejia said.
The couple had recently moved to Staten Island from the Bronx, where Mejia had been buddies with 18-year-old Ramarley Graham. Police had burst into Graham’s home in 2012 after seeing him in the street adjusting something in his waistband that might have been a gun. He was in the bathroom, perhaps trying to flush some pot down the toilet, when a cop burst in.
The cop shot and killed Graham, later saying the teen had reached for his waistband. No gun was found, and in this instance the cop was indicted. A judge then tossed the indictment out, saying the prosecutor had made an error in presenting the evidence. A second grand jury declined to indict the cop.
Mejia now stood where Garner died and spoke Graham’s name aloud.
“That was my friend,” he said.
This second tragedy reconfirmed in Mejia’s mind what the earlier killing had led him to conclude about the police and people of color.
“They don’t look at us like regular human beings,” he said.
The baby was dozing as Mejia and McClean pushed him on down the street, the parents not seeming to take any great comfort in the police having transformed New York into the safest big city in America in recent years.
In truth, the police routinely place themselves in great danger while continuing the bring crime in New York to record lows. And many of them live by words that Pantaleo at least professed in a statement released Wednesday through the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.
“I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves.” Pantaleo said.
He went on to say, “It is never my intention to harm anyone and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner. My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss.”
Nice sentiments from a guy who seemed deaf to Garner’s pleas that he was unable to breathe.
“The time for remorse was when my husband was yelling to breathe!” Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, told a press conference Wednesday.
Pantaleo comes from Eltingville, the overwhelmingly white section of Staten Island that was home to Police Officer Justin Volpe, who is presently in prison for sodomizing Abner Louima with a wooden stick in a stationhouse bathroom. Eltingville is not known for being progressive on matters of race, but Volpe’s family is said not to have been racist, and he had a black fiancé. Pantaleo is also not necessarily a manifest racist.
“The time for remorse was when my husband was yelling to breathe!” Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, told a press conference Wednesday.
Pantaleo comes from Eltingville, the overwhelmingly white section of Staten Island that was home to Police Officer Justin Volpe, who is presently in prison for sodomizing Abner Louima with a wooden stick in a stationhouse bathroom. Eltingville is not known for being progressive on matters of race, but Volpe’s family is said not to have been racist, and he had a black fiancé. Pantaleo is also not necessarily a manifest racist.
“I think it’s just cop culture,” a longtime Eltingville resident said on Wednesday.
That unfairly characterizes the many decent cops, but there is indeed one element of cop culture that tends to dehumanize or at least objectify suspected lawbreakers of whatever race. The instant you are deemed a candidate for arrest, you become not so much a person as a “perp.”
“You’re dehumanizing the person,” the veteran black police office says.
In the view of some cops, perps merit little concern or sympathy. This is particularly true when such cops are focused on effecting an arrest. The result can be indifference such as is so chilling in the Garner video.
“You’re not even hearing [the perp] at this point; you’re dealing with this non-human,” the veteran police officer says.
The veteran officer notes that even in the most extreme mixed martial arts bouts, a fighter can “tap out,” signaling he has had enough.
“Eric Garner didn’t have a chance to tap out,” the veteran officer says.
The whole incident becomes all the more shocking when you consider that Garner was being arrested for selling “loosies,” individual and usually untaxed cigarettes. The police had arrested him repeatedly in the spring and into the summer in response to orders originally with Chief of Department Phil Banks, third in command of the NYPD. Banks’s office had reportedly been receiving complaints from local storeowners about people selling loosies in the street. One caller had mentioned “a man named Eric.”
“They feel like they’re driven to produce, and producing means arrests,” the veteran officer says of fellow cops in such instances.
For reasons entirely unrelated to Garner’s death, Banks retired in October. He happens to be black, and his departure was seen as a blow to the NYPD’s efforts to establish better relations with communities of color.
With the grand jury’s failure to indict Garner and the recent accidental shooting of an unarmed young man by a jittery rookie cop in a darkened housing protect stairwell in Brooklyn, those relations have become decidedly tense, despite the city’s proudly progressive new mayor, Bill de Blasio.
Garner’s family and its supporters are hoping the U.S. Justice Department will indict Pantaleo on civil rights charges, as it did Police Officer Francis Livotti, who employed a chokehold on 29-year-old Anthony Baez 20 years ago in the Bronx, with fatal results. The Livotti case led to the NYPD’s prohibition against the use of chokeholds, which it defines as bringing pressure to bear on the airways.
On Wednesday evening, some residents of Staten Island boarded the ferry to join protesters who were gathering in Times Square, not far from Rockefeller Center, where the big event of the night was scheduled to be the annual Christmas tree lighting.
As a precaution against a possible disturbance, the ferry was escorted by a police boat, its blue lights flashing. The boat was named in memory of Det. Dillon Stewart, a black police officer who was shot to death in the line of duty in Brooklyn in 2005, leaving two young daughters. The whole city mourned Stewart’s loss and honored him as a hero in the ongoing effort to make New York safe.
There was no trouble on the ferry as it reached Manhattan and a few of the passengers boarded the subway to the protest uptown. The cry that rose up into the night signaled a moral indictment no matter what the grand jury had said.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”
Eric Thayer /Reuters
POWDER KEG
12.03.14
After No Indictment for Eric Garner Killer, Is NYC the Next Ferguson?
A New York police officer will not face criminal charges over the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died shortly after being arrested, the Daily News and New York Times have reported.
Garner died in July after a white police officer placed him in a chokehold banned by department regulations. After video of Garner’s death emerged, it quickly became a high profile case in New York but was overshadowed in the national media by the shooting of Michael Brown, less than a month later, in Ferguson, Mo.
Following Garner’s death, a grand jury was convened in September to determine whether there was enough evidence to warrant a criminal trial of the police officer at the center of the case, Daniel Pantaleo. The jury met in secret for months gathering testimony from witnesses, including from Pantaleo.
Pantaleo, who is white, used a chokehold to subdue the 43-year-old Garner, who was accused of illegally selling cigarettes on the street. A video of the confrontation shot by a bystander shows Garner surrounded by a group of police officers. “Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today!” Garner says to the officers surrounding him.
Later in the video, as Garner protests and refuses to be handcuffed, Pantaleo puts the 400-pound man into a chokehold and, along with three other officers, wrestle him to the ground. The video shows Garner screaming, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” as he’s being subdued.
Police on the scene called paramedics but Garner died a short time later.
Pantaleo’s use of the chokehold was a central issue in Garner’s death. The restraint is banned according to NYPD regulations but it is not illegal. Though the chokehold contributed to Garner’s death, according to the medical examinerinvolved the case, the move does not, by itself, break the law.
Aside from the legality of the chokehold, police critics held up Garner’s death as evidence of the over-policing of minority neighborhoods. Though violent crime in New York has reached historic lows, police critics argue that the drop has been bought by violating the civil rights of minorities through methods that subject black and Latino New Yorkers to routine harassment and violence at the hands of the police.
“The organizers of these demonstrations, their intent is to have orderly demonstrations, they don't want violence, they don't want vandalism. But it’s the disorganized that would be our concern, or the professional agitators, that we have no shortage of here in New York.”
After Ferguson, the grand jury process itself became a matter of debate. Police officers are almost never indicted in grand jury proceedings compared to the general population. No officer has been indicted in New York since 2012 whenRichard Haste was charged with manslaughter for the shooting death of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx. That indictment was then overturned by a second grand jury that decided not to bring charges against the officer.
Before Wednesday’s announcement, tensions over the case had simmered in New York without erupting. While the grand jury decision in Ferguson led to violent demonstrations and looting in the Missouri city and other parts of the country, the response in New York was more contained.
Last week, protests in the city briefly shut down major bridges and attempted to disrupt the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade but never gathered more than 1,000 demonstrators and resulted in relatively few arrests.
On Tuesday, before the grand jury decision was released, Police Commissioner William Bratton addressed the department’s preparation ahead of the announcement.
“I think that there will be an ability that people will get to have their voice heard without disturbance,” Bratton said. “We, on the other hand, on the police side, will naturally gear up to deal with any potential contingency that might occur.”
In an appearance Wednesday morning on CBS, Bratton focused on what he called the “professional agitators” within the protests. “The organizers of these demonstrations, their intent is to have orderly demonstrations, they don’t want violence, they don’t want vandalism. But it’s the disorganized that would be our concern, or the professional agitators, that we have no shortage of here in New York,” Bratton said.
Last week, the police had relatively few confrontations with protesters. Police were giving them “a little breathing room,” according to Bratton. “As long as they remain nonviolent,” he said last week, “as long as they don’t engage in issues that cause fear or create vandalism, we will work with them to allow them to demonstrate.”
That approach appeared to work relatively well, leading to little violence and few arrests. But with new protests growing larger in the wake of the Garner decision, the police “breathing room” approach may be discarded in favor of a more aggressive effort to break up demonstrations before they grow too large for police to contain or quickly disperse.
On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio, issued a statement about the grand jury’s decision. The statement expressed his sympathies with the Garner family and declared that, “Garner’s death put a spotlight on police-community relations and civil rights—some of most critical issues our nation faces today.” But de Blasio also addressed protesters directly with a mixture of sympathy and warning.
“We trust that those unhappy with today’s grand jury decision will make their views known in the same peaceful, constructive way,” he said, before stressing the police reforms he has overseen.
“We all agree that demonstrations and free speech are valuable contributions to debate, and that violence and disorder are not only wrong—but hurt the critically important goals we are trying to achieve together.”
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