The description of events is sadly familiar. A white cop kills an unarmed black man. A grand jury, after hearing all the evidence from a prosecutor, declines to indict the officer. Protesters take to the streets demanding justice. No, this isn’t the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It’s the death of Eric Garner in New York City — and the details surrounding it are even more appalling.
Unlike in Ferguson, we have video evidence of Garner’s death. The 43-year-old black man was illegally selling cigarettes on the underground market when multiple police officers approached him to place him under arrest. Garner objected, telling the officers he wasn’t doing anything wrong. As Garner continued talking, officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold — which is against NYPD rules — and dragged him to the ground as three other cops leaned on top of him and attempted to cuff him. Initially, Garner resisted, although not in a threatening manner. But after he was brought to the ground, that resistance ended. Despite that, Pantaleo then held Garner’s head against the pavement as Garner yelled multiple times that he couldn’t breathe. Soon after, Garner, who had asthma, died.
This happened on July 17. In August, Staten Island’s District Attorney Daniel Donovan Jr. convened a grand jury to determine whether Pantaleo should be indicted. On Wednesday, they declined to indict him.
Liberals and conservatives alike were outraged by the outcome. Some conservatives even said that the case required an investigation by the Department of Justice. Liberals were equally appalled at the non-indictment.
Why do the left and right agree that officer Pantaleo should have faced criminal charges but disagree about the proper consequences for Officer Darren Wilson — the man who killed Michael Brown? A major reason is the video evidence. The facts are not up for dispute in the death of Garner as they were in Brown’s death. But that’s not the only reason. The hyper-partisan reaction to the events in Ferguson — which reflected very real differences about the role of race in America — masked the fact that the left and right both see problems with excessive force by police and a criminal justice system unable to hold them to account.
Figuring out what to do next is no simple matter. How should we reform our laws and criminal justice system so that the officer Pantaleos of the world don’t get a free pass? Better yet, how can we implement reforms so that the Michael Browns and Eric Garners of the world don’t end up dead in the first place?
But the fact is the current system isn’t working, and everyone knows it. The hard part is fixing it. Maybe now, we can finally start doing that.
From Kevin D. Williamson, at The National Review.
… Here we have a dilemma: One of the ways in which the NYPD has been able to help effect a dramatic reduction in crime in what once was a crime-plagued city is by cracking down on the humble, street-level offenses that contributed to the city’s prior atmosphere of general lawlessness: street-corner prostitution and drug-dealing, the squeegee men, vagrancy, etc. And that has been a good thing for New York by any meaningful measure.
On the other hand, we can be sure that even our best police departments — and the NYPD is the nation’s best big-city police outfit — will make mistakes and will inevitably have a share of miscreants in the ranks. If we assume that even under the best conditions, even first-rate police departments will see things go wrong in some reliable share of interactions … there are few if any hard-and-fast rules or criteria that can be relied upon at all times; instead, we are left with the messy and amorphous standards of prudence, of “reasonableness” as understood under the law.
And we cannot ignore that the law is an awfully flexible thing, in reality. Michael Milken, contrary to the myth, was never convicted of insider trading, and the so-called junk bonds he dealt in turned out to be a pretty good investment. He pleaded guilty to some relatively minor reporting violations, for which he went to prison; what he was really convicted of was being a rich jerk that nobody liked, a guy whose personality was too grating even for Wall Street. Martha Stewart went to the lock-up for similar reasons.
If the rich and famous can be so easily crushed metaphorically, it is no surprise that a guy peddling loose cigarettes on a street corner should find himself crushed literally – “compression” of his chest and neck is what killed Eric Garner.
In a sane world, selling cigarettes would not be a crime. … Muggers, rapists, drunk drivers – assuming due process, we can toss them in the darkest oubliette for all I care.
But street-corner loosie peddlers? That strikes me as an occasion for restraint among those doing the restraining.
From Jack Hunter, at Rare.
Police officers killing black men without any repercussions has been happening for a long time. Sometimes the police are justified in using deadly force. Sometimes they are not.
But no one really knows. Police officers are never held accountable. No one is ever indicted. No one is ever found guilty.
With Michael Brown, the idea that police brutality directed at black citizens is a widespread problem wasn’t clear to enough Americans, because the details of this particular situation weren’t very clear. Many sympathized with officer Darren Wilson.
With Eric Garner, it becomes a lot clearer.
Whatever crime Eric Garner might have committed, no reasonable person believes he deserved to die for it.
We all heard repeatedly that Brown was a “thug,” as some sort of justification for his death. But as Rare’s James Antle observed, “Even if Brown wasn’t an angel, few of the crimes he was alleged to have committed — to say nothing of vague non-criminal offenses like ‘being a thug’ — are not, and should not be, capital offenses.”
Many Americans — and particularly black Americans — were outraged by the failure to indict Darren Wilson because they saw it as just another example of a black man dying at the hands of police and the cops getting off scot-free.
Whether this was actually true was less important to many than the fact that it had happened … again.
How many times have black Americans heard why police won’t indict? How many times have the families of slain young black men, heard why their brother, son, father or friend was probably in the wrong and the police officer was in the right, based only on the perspective of law enforcement?
Many have criticized the protesters in Ferguson and across the country for having an emotional reaction, and they did. It’s an emotional issue. It’s an issue that deeply affects the black community that not many see beyond that community.
For many, the Ferguson controversy was a way to hopefully change things.
Michael Brown mattered. Oscar Grant mattered. Cory Maye matters. John Crawford mattered. Tamir Rice mattered.
Eric Garner mattered. Black lives matter.
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot is an imperfect symbol for a tragic reality.
From Sean Davis, at The Federalist.
The grand jury’s decision not to bring any charges against the officer who killed Garner is inexplicable. It defies reason. It makes no sense. Unlike the Michael Brown case, we don’t have to rely on shaky and unreliable testimony from so-called eyewitnesses. We don’t need to review bullet trajectories or forensics. All we have to do is watch the video and believe our own eyes.
New York’s statutes on manslaughter are pretty unequivocal. Just going on the plain language of the law, the police officer who killed Garner certainly appears to be guilty of second-degree manslaughter at the very least. … So an officer used a banned practice that is known to lead to the deaths of people who are subjected to it? That certainly seems to satisfy the second condition of a second-degree manslaughter charge. And again, I have to stress that the entire incident was caught on tape. The evidence is unequivocal. And yet, no indictment.
Why, it’s almost as if the grand jury system is just a convenient means for prosecutors to get the outcome they want wrapped in a veneer of due process. Want to indict a ham sandwich? Consider it indicted. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was indicted for vetoing a spending bill, but a New York prosecutor can’t indict an officer who killed another man in an incident that was completely captured on video? Come on.
John Edwards was right: there are Two Americas. There’s an America where people who kill for no legitimate reason are held to account, and there’s an America where homicide isn’t really a big deal as long as you play for the right team.
From Eugene Robinson, at the Chicago Tribune.
… There are two big issues here. One involves the excessive license we now give to police — permission, essentially, to do whatever they must in order to guarantee safe streets. The pendulum has clearly swung too far in the law-and-order direction, at the expense of liberty and justice.
As I wrote Tuesday, we are so inured to fatal shootings by police officers that we do not even make a serious effort to count them; the Michael Brown case illustrated this numbness to the use of deadly force. Garner’s death is part of a different trend: The “broken windows” theory of policing, which holds that cracking down on minor, nuisance offenses — such as selling loose cigarettes — is key to reducing serious crime.
Police officers, whose brave work I honor and respect, are supposed to serve communities, not rule them.
The other big issue, inescapably, is race. The greatest injury of the Brown and Garner cases is that grand juries examined the evidence and decided there was no probable cause — a very low standard — to believe the officers did anything wrong. I find it impossible to believe this would be the result if the victims were white.
Garner didn’t even fit into the “young black male” category that defines this nation’s most feared and loathed citizens. He was an overweight, middle-aged, asthmatic man. Now we’re told that the man who killed him did nothing wrong.
Eric Garner was engaged in an activity that warranted no more than a warning to move along. But I recognize that he also committed a capital offense: He was the wrong color.
From Jamelle Bouie, at Slate.
… In our current conversations on police violence, many observers have focused on the moral value of the victims — do “black lives matter”? This makes sense. Because black Americans bear the brunt of police violence, they are also the ones most burdened by a legal system that refuses to hold officers accountable. What’s more, as Adam Serwer notes for BuzzFeed, this is compounded by potent and prevalent stereotypes about black Americans and crime. “Police are people, after all, subject to the same flaws and vices as the rest of us. America’s police departments tend to be whiter than the general population, and nearly half of whites believe ‘many’ or ‘almost all’ black men are violent,” writes Serwer.
But while we should ask the legal system if “black lives matter,” we should also ask police departments to explain themselves and their training. Take away the implicit racial bias, the unfair treatment, and pervasive overpolicing, and you’re still left with a world where police are empowered by law to use force and are ready to use it without serious provocation. And worse, this is bolstered by a police culture that expects absolute obedience from ordinary citizens, regardless of the circumstances or situation. “(H)ere is the bottom line,” wrote veteran officer Sunil Dutta in an August op-ed for the Washington Post, “if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton, or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.” If any reaction — even the nervousness and fear that come with a police stop — is legitimate grounds for violence, then violence is practically guaranteed. And given the heavy policing in black and Latino communities, this means minorities are at the greatest risk for victimization.
Changing the culture of policing to de-emphasize violence and leave room for ordinary human behavior won’t be easy, but it’s possible. And it doesn’t have to lead to more crime. In Philadelphia this year, police have shot and killed just three people, compared with 12 by this point in 2013 and 16 by this point in 2012. What changed? The culture, and specifically, the department’s approach to the use of force. After a local news story found a spike in officer-involved shootings despite a drop in crime, the police commissioner invited federal officials to examine the department’s practices as part of a “collaborative review.” …
If police departments are as committed to protecting communities as they claim, then they should welcome these steps. Bad cops — violent cops — hurt the profession as a whole. They create mistrust, and it make it hard for good officers to do their jobs. And on the other end, a legal system that won’t prosecute bad officers or hold them accountable for errors — or even record and document police shootings — is one that generates anger and hostility.
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