“Some Profoundly Un-American Responses”: The False Choice Of Protesting For Justice And Supporting Our Police
I’m one of the millions of New Yorkers who woke up heartbroken today thinking of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos who were shot dead yesterday while sitting in their car in Brooklyn by Ismaaiyl Brinsley.
As the news unfolded, we learned the briefest details of the two men’s lives such as the fact that Liu was married just two months ago, and that Ramos has a wife and a 13 year old son who “couldn’t comprehend what had happened to his father”, according to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio who met with the families before a press conference last night. I offered prayers for the men, and their widows and son.
Liu and Ramos were not the only victims of Brinsley’s deadly rampage yesterday. Earlier that day, the Atlanta resident had allegedly shot his former girlfriend in Maryland, who apparently now is in “serious condition“. After killing the two police officers, Brinsley fled and apparently killed himself in a nearby subway station.
The assassinations come at a particularly tense moment in America. Recent deaths of black citizens at the hands of police in Ferguson, Cleveland and here in New York have sparked protests and calls for investigation of racism within our policing and criminal justice system. I have been part of those protests. One week ago, I was in Washington, D.C. along with thousands of other Americans of all ages, races and religions who came together in peaceful protest and to listen to the mothers and wives of those men whose lives had been lost.
Never once did I hear any suggestion of violence against the police either in the march or from the microphone. The consistent call was to work with our elected officials, courts and police departments to improve our criminal system. The goal of this movement is justice — its means are non-violent, prophetic action. When I heard the news about the Ramos and Liu killings, I prayed that it was not linked in any way to the peaceful protests that I had been a part of.
But horrifically, the assassin made the connection himself.
He wrote on an Instagram account: “I’m putting wings on pigs today, They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner #RIPMichaelBrown”.
When I saw that I felt sick. And even sicker because the post had 17 Likes, meaning that 17 people read this obviously violent post and supported it and urged him on. And now they have blood on their hands as well.
Unfortunately, the person NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch blamed was not Ismaaiyl Brinsley, or any accomplices that may have known about his alleged intention to kill his ex-girlfriend and two police officers. Instead, he, Pataki, Giuliani and and other pundits declared that the people to blame were Obama, Holder, de Blasio and all those who have been involved in the nation wide protests.
“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Lynch said last night, “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.” Lynch went on to blame those who “incited violence on the street under the guise of protest.”
I guess he means me?
The response Lynch and some conservative commentators have had to the horrific killing of these two police officers and the alleged attempt to kill a woman is profoundly un-American. It is meant to chill any criticism or efforts to improve our country and only serves to divide an already deeply divided country and to increase tensions in an already tense time.
Instead of having the deaths of Liu and Ramos further tear us apart, could this serve as a moment of bringing us together? Liu and Ramos are reminders to any who would demonize the police, that our law enforcement is made up of people of all races and backgrounds, who have families and who feel called to this duty to protect and serve.
The families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were among the first to condemn the killing of Ramos and Liu last night. The protests around the #BlackLivesMatter movement was never against the police, but it was a call to acknowledge that we can do better as a society that continues to bear the scars of racism.
That effort must continue; we can and must do better as a nation. But it will only be successful if everyone comes together and recognizes one another as human beings, deserving of respect, dignity and life.
Instead of pitting the deaths of Liu and Ramos against Garner and Brown, we can join them together, understanding them as martyrs who inspire us on both sides of the blue line to work for a more just, safe and united America.
By: Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Executive Religion Editor, The Huffington Post, December 21, 2014
“Free Spirits With No Accountability”: 179 People Killed By NYPD, 1 Cop Conviction, No Jail Time
Over the last 15 years, NYPD officers have killed at least 179 people, according to a new investigation.
The New York Daily News found that in only three of those incidents, the officer involved was indicted and only once was the cop convicted.
In that one instance, when ex-officer Bryan Conroy was convicted in 2005 of criminally negligent homicide for killing Ousmane Zongo, Conroy didn’t serve any jail time.
Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, defended the NYPD officer’s actions.
“When there is a life-or-death situation on the street, be it an armed robbery, a homicidal maniac on the street or someone driving a vehicle in a dangerous and potentially deadly way, it is New York City police officers who step in and take the risk away from the public and put it on themselves,” Lynch said in a statement. “Our work has saved tens of thousands of lives by assuming the risk and standing between New Yorkers and life-threatening danger.”
To be sure, some of the incidents catalogued by the Daily News involved the justified use of deadly force by officers.
But, holding cops accountable when they are not justified in killing someone is difficult, because often the prosecutors tasked with bringing charges against officers also rely on good relationships with police to do their day-to-day work. DA’s also count on endorsements from police unions when they run for re-election.
The recent decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner chokehold case, has set off calls for laws requiring special prosecutors in cases involving possible police misconduct.
The idea behind any proposed legislation would be to keep local district attorneys out of cases where they might be biased in favor of the police department they work with regularly.
But some, like panelists involved in a recent Democracy Now discussion, said such reforms have been sought for years and have little chance of becoming law, at least at the federal level.
Harry Siegel, a columnist for the Daily News, pointed out that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who recently said special prosecutors could be necessary in some cases, had the chance to appoint a special prosecutor in the Garner, case but didn’t.
“I would note that Governor Andrew Cuomo, who’s now mumbling about all sorts of reforms, had the opportunity to appoint a special prosecutor here,” Siegel said on Democracy Now. “Andrew here, who’s now outraged by where we’re at, allowed us to get to this point.”
By: Simon McCormick, The Huffington Post, December 8, 2014
“What The Right Gets Wrong About Eric Garner’s Death”: Some Conservatives Would Like To Pretend This Isn’t About Race
The death of Eric Garner, and the decision by a grand jury not to indict the police officer who killed him, spawned bipartisan outrage, presenting a striking contrast to the party-line response that followed the non-indictment in the death of another unarmed black man, Michael Brown.
Unlike Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, there was no shred of ambiguity in the Garner case, which played out in the New York City borough of Staten Island. Video shows the officer placing Garner in an illegal choke hold, Garner gasping, “I can’t breathe,” and Garner collapsing. A coroner ruled the case a homicide. Garner’s only (alleged) crime: selling loose cigarettes on the street.
The immediate response on both the right and the left was one of disbelief and condemnation. Yet there was, and remains, a notable partisan split in parsing the Garner case. Though libertarians and conservatives are willing to acknowledge that his death was indeed a tragedy, many are unwilling to concede he died because of the color of his skin.
This is no small omission. Denying the racial implications of the Garner case absolves the need to address — or even recognize — the systemic victimization of black and brown people at the hands of the police in America. It is an exercise in magical thinking that fails to explain why, after adjusting for their share of the general population, blacks are 21 times more likely than whites to be shot dead by the police.
So how did the right frame Garner’s death?
New York Rep. Peter King claimed that police acted properly, and that Garner died only because he was “so obese.” Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) argued that taxes and politicians killed Garner, because they had “driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”
“I do blame the politicians,” Paul said Wednesday evening on MSNBC. “We put our police in a difficult situation with bad laws.”
Others on the right echoed Paul’s race-blind interpretation: Big government killed Eric Garner. Some went so far as to say that the case underscored the liberal folly of entrusting government with ensuring public wellbeing.
There is truth to the argument that a pervasive police mentality of unchecked aggression played a role in Garner’s death. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, which is that the subjects of excessive force are disproportionately non-white.
White police officers killed on average 96 black people every year between 2006 and 2012, according to a USA Today analysis. And though blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they comprised 32 percent of all felons killed by police in “justifiable homicides” in 2012, according to FBI data.
New York City adheres to this same pattern. White police officers are disproportionately likely to fire upon suspects, and blacks are disproportionately likely to be in the crosshairs, according to the city’s own data. In 2011, 85 percent of the people shot at by police were black or Hispanic, even though those demographics account for roughly half the city’s overall population.
An illuminating parallel to understanding the right’s strange response to Garner’s case is that of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who staged an armed standoff with the feds over grazing fees. Conservatives embraced Bundy’s crusade and exalted his threats of violent insurrection — at least until footage emerged of his racist ramblings. But that degree of hero worship has been non-existent in the right’s response to Garner, who, like Bundy, was targeted by law enforcement for alllegedly circumventing ostensibly oppressive taxation. As Peter Beinart put in The Atlantic, “Had Eric Garner been a rural white man with a cowboy hat killed by federal agents, instead of a large black man choked to death by the NYPD, his face would be on a Ted Cruz for President poster by now.”
There is an appalling, centuries-old tradition of whites ascribing superhuman powers to blacks. That trope was on full display in the testimony of officer Darren Wilson, who claimed self-defense in killing Michael Brown because his victim looked like a “demon” who was “bulking up” to run through a volley of gunfire. It was also on full display in the video of four police officers subduing Garner, one of whom felt the only way to handle an unarmed black man was to choke the life out of him. And it was on full display again in another video of cops and EMTs letting Garner lie prone on the sidewalk for minutes before carelessly dumping his body on a stretcher, like a slab of meat, as one of them quipped about his girth.
It is through this lens that the police response to Garner must be viewed. The conservative insistence otherwise is woefully, ignorantly incomplete.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, December 5, 2014
“Everybody Just Loves Danny”: Meet Dan Donovan, The Prosecutor Who Let Eric Garner’s Killer Walk
New York City has one mayor, two other citywide elected officials, 10 borough-wide elected officials, 51 City Council members, several dozen state lawmakers, and a dozen members of Congress representing its 8 million people.
And nearly all have been mugging for the cameras in the hours after a grand jury declined to indict New York City Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the strangulation of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who attracted police attention for selling single cigarettes.
All that is, except for Dan Donovan, the Staten Island district attorney who failed to win the indictment, and failed too to use the opportunity to get his face before the television cameras. Donovan, a four-term DA, is in many ways the anti-Bob McCulloch, the Ferguson, Missouri, district attorney, who used a similar moment to launch a prime-time diatribe against the media, social or otherwise.
Even those who have been leading protests against the verdict have praised Donovan.
“Personally, Dan Donovan and I are friends. I try to separate the job that he has done and our friendship,” said Debi Rose, a liberal city council member from Staten Island’s urban north shore. “In this particular instance, I find that because of the DA’s relationship with the police department, that outcome wasn’t surprising.”
To understand Donovan, and to understand how the Garner grand jury could reach the verdict, it is first necessary to understand something about Staten Island. Officially a borough of New York City, although it wants to deny it, Staten Island voted Republican in the 2013 mayor’s race, though Democrat Bill de Blasio won citywide by nearly 50 points. It is a place where its lone congressional representative, Michael Grimm, faces a 20-count indictment, threatened to throw a television reporter off a balcony, and still won re-election by ever larger numbers.
Donovan’s father was a longshoreman who struggled with alcoholism, and Donovan came up under the protection of the Island’s Republican machine. A one-time close friend of the now-disgraced former Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, he was hired by longtime Island powerbroker and Borough President Guy Molinari to serve as his chief of staff, and when Molinari retired, handing the reins of the Island to protégé Jim Molinaro, Donovan stayed on, using the post to run for district attorney.
He had never prosecuted a case, and was not, he liked to say, a legal scholar, but Donovan has proved to be a natural politician in the mold of the backslapping Irish pols of yore, easily winning re-election on Staten Island. The most controversy he has gotten into his tenure came when he recused himself from a case involving Molinaro’s grandson, a teenager who violated his probation. Molinaro was furious, taking out a full-page ad in the Staten Island Advance accusing Donovan of abdicating his responsibility and of a “miscarriage of justice.” Most Islanders, however, saw it as a prosecutor refusing to bow to political winds.
In New York, district attorneys have a tendency to grow moss-bound in their roles. Robert Morgenthau, after all, retired at age 90. Donovan has shown some further ambition, running for attorney general in 2010 on a platform that in part promised to reverse the office’s focus on Wall Street that Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer brought to it.
“My goal is not to destroy people’s lives and disrupt entire industries because there are a few people in there that are corrupt.”
Donovan however proved to be a lackluster debater and an unenthusiastic campaigner, and an even more reticent fundraiser, relying heavily on the largesse of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the support of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. At his concession speech, he told his staff to get ready to go work the next day.
Donovan had been privately concerned that running statewide would hurt his standing back home. Instead, the next year he won by 40 points.
And there are few people on Staten Island who see his presence diminishing in the wake of the Garner decision.
“He could have killed the guy himself and still would get re-elected,” said one Island Democrat. “Everybody just loves Danny. To them, the guy can do no wrong.”
There has been much talk in Island political circles that Donovan would run for Congress one day if Grimm is in fact forced to step down due to his legal troubles. Most politicos there, though, think that the way he handled the grand jury could only help him in a district with a substantial number of active or retired police officers.
“When the dust settles, I just don’t see it hurting him,” said Rich Flanagan, a professor of political science at the College of Staten Island. “This is no place for unreconstructed New York liberals.”
Molinari, the Island power-broker who launched Donovan’s career, agreed.
“[Garner] is saying ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,’ but how do you interpret that? They were trying to arrest him, he was resisting, and he is a big guy, so it took quite a few cops to do that, and a tragedy occurred. It can happen any place.”
By: David Freedlander, The Daily Beast, December 4, 2014
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