“No Voice Of Reason”: ‘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 Nov. 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 [chokehold], compression of chest, and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.”
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 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 to 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 fiancée. Pantaleo is also not necessarily a manifest racist.
“I think it’s just cop culture,” a longtime Eltingville resident said 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 officer 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 the indifference that appears 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 their 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 some 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!”
By: Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2014
“Let’s Talk About ‘Black On Black’ Crime”: African-Americans Long Oppressed By What Might Be Called “America On Black” Crime
OK, fine. Let’s talk about “black on black” crime.
That, after all, is where the conversation seems to inevitably turn whenever one seeks to engage a conservative on the American habit of shooting unarmed African-American boys and men. So it was exasperating, but nowhere near surprising, to see former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani go there last week on Meet the Press.
Asked by host Chuck Todd, during a discussion of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, about the fact that African-American communities like that one are often served by snow-white police departments, he offered some perfunctory words about the effort to produce more representative cop shops. But then Giuliani took a sharp turn off topic and into the brambles. “I find it very disappointing,” he told Todd, “that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. … I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.”
There followed a sharp exchange with another panelist, author and professor Michael Eric Dyson, which produced this parting shot from the mayor: “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.”
Somehow, he managed not to call Dyson “you people.” In nearly every other respect, Giuliani’s words reeked of a paternalistic white supremacy unworthy of a former mayor of America’s largest city — or even a sewer worker in its remotest Podunk. But again, this has become the go-to “reasoning” for those on the right — Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh — when asked to give a d–n about the killings of unarmed black boys and men.
That formulation is false for multiple reasons.
In the first place, being concerned over the shooting of unarmed black men hardly precludes being concerned over violence within the African-American community. Giuliani and others suggest a dichotomy where none exists.
In the second place, they ignore the obvious: When black people commit crimes against black people, they face prosecution, but when police officers (or certain neighborhood watchmen) commit crimes against black people, they face getting off with little if any punishment.
In the third place, what exactly is “black on black” crime?
Do black people kill one another? Sure they do. Ninety percent of black murder victims are killed by black assailants.
But guess what? White people kill one another, too. Eighty-three percent of white victims are killed by white assailants. See, the vast majority of violent crime is committed within — not between — racial groups. Crime is a matter of proximity and opportunity. People victimize their own rather than drive across town to victimize somebody else.
So another term for “black on black” crime is “crime.”
But there is crime and there is crime.
Redlining, loan discrimination and predatory mortgages have stripped generations of wealth from the African-American community. What is that if not robbery?
The Republican Party practices policies of voter suppression. That’s the assault and battery of African-American political rights.
Mass incarceration criminalizes the very existence of black men and boys. That’s the rape of equal justice.
Unarmed people are killed by those who are purportedly there to protect and serve them and the “just us” system looks the other way. That’s the murder of basic human rights.
It is touching that Giuliani and others are so concerned about black-on-black crime. But African-Americans have also been long oppressed by what might be called “America on black” crime.
When do you suppose they’ll be ready to talk about that?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, December 1, 2014
“What Does ‘Black-On-Black Crime’ Have to Do With Ferguson?”: The Issue Isn’t Us; It’s How White America Views Blackness
The answer to the question posed in this post’s title is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not one thing. Nada. Zip. Zero.
The “Black-on-Black crime” moniker is racist rhetoric functioning under the guise of concern for the state of Black America. People of all races — Blacks included — seemingly love to discuss how not killing our own and being more respectable will alleviate the effects of racism.
It’s dangerous, however, to tell Black people to dress better, work harder or be respectable because it diverts attention from the gaze of the oppressor to the behavior of the disenfranchised. It showcases how deep anti-blackness runs within our society. This highly misinformed line of thinking negates the complex historical implications surrounding a white cop killing an unarmed Black teenager.
Authority has a long history of not respecting Black people so why some folks think becoming more respectable will solve anything is confusing. Our respect means nothing to those who see no value in Black life. They don’t care for or want our respect — they want our compliance. They want our submission.
“Black-on-Black crime” highlights the fear surrounding Black masculinity, the lack of Black femininity, and perceived inherent Black criminality. And, when Black people are shamed for committing the same crimes at almost the same rates as whites, it illustrates how much the white supremacist gaze has been internalized.
The term, which originated in the 1980s, cites Black people as a problem as opposed to poverty, poor educational opportunities, proximity and other factors that lead to increased crime rates within all communities — regardless of color.
Research conducted by David Wilson explains how the media picked up on a new wave of violence within Black communities — which was undoubtedly fueled by job loss, debased identity and “rampant physical decay”– and constructed the misperception that intraracial crime was a malady only plaguing Black America.
But racial exclusivity is apparent in the majority of violent crimes. Around 91 percent of Black victims are murdered by Black offenders while 83 percent of white victims are killed by another white person, based on the most recent FBI homicide statistics.
The “Black-on-Black” crime argument alludes that there’s nothing normal about Black intraracial crime. “White-on-white” violence is simply called crime. Why is Black intraracial violence depicted as some rare Pokémon in crime discussions when it is only slightly more prevalent?
Flawed white perception is not assuaged is these talks — Black behavior is, instead, attacked. This places Black folk in a “Catch 22.” No matter how “respectable” we are or become, as long as our skin is Black we will never amount to white standards though we are expected to be a reflection of them.
Respectability will never be a solution because the issue isn’t us; it’s how white America views blackness.
Mike Brown’s death, and the subsequent lack of justice, isn’t about the myth of “Black-on-Black crime.” It’s about how Blacks are disproportionately, and often unjustly, targeted by law enforcement. It’s about how systemic racism frames the way in which Black people, especially men, are viewed. It’s about how Black corpses are criminalized and put on trial but their white killers often go unindicted.
The circumstances surrounding Mike Brown’s death represent a much larger racially oppressive government and police structure that excuses white killers but refuses to humanize black victims due to the inherent guilt attributed to black people and blackness.
And when you tell Black people to be more respectable and not kill one another, you’re identifying us as savage brutes who deserve to be gunned down due to this assumed lack of humanity.
The protests in Ferguson do not show the supposed intrinsic animalistic nature of Black people. They showcase a community — and reflect a nation of people — tired of constantly being at the mercy of a justice system that sees no value in their livelihood.
Ferguson is illustrating what happens when people are fed up with being targeted. Ferguson is spearheading a movement. Stop detracting from that with baseless “Black-on-Black crime” discussions.
By: Julia Craven, The Blog, The Huffington Post, November 30, 2014
“If You’re Not At The Table, You’re On The Menu”: Republicans Fear Paying A Price For Attacks On Interests Of African Americans
North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis didn’t have any problem jamming through a so-called “voter ID” law that was intended to take away the voting rights of thousands of North Carolinians — including many African Americans.
But the moment Democrats or civil rights organizations exhort African Americans to go to the polls and stand up for their right to vote — and prevent Tillis from being elected to the U.S. Senate — the Republicans squeal like stuck pigs.
“Oh, that’s unfair, that’s playing the racial card,” they say. Wrong. That’s being held accountable for policies that intentionally attack the interests of African Americans and millions of other ordinary voters.
With Tillis as speaker, the North Carolina legislature passed “Stand Your Ground” legislation similar to the law that allowed the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida. But the GOP thinks it is utterly unfair for him to be tied to the real-world consequences of his actions in government.
Community and civil rights organizations throughout the South — and around the country — are exhorting African American voters to go to the polls in the mid-term elections by pointing out that when African Americans don’t vote they get outcomes like Ferguson, Missouri. And they are dead on. Sixty-seven percent of the city’s 21,000 residents are black, but only 12 percent of the voters in the last municipal election were black. The result: a city council with only one African American member and a police force of 53 officers — of which only three are black.
There could be no better example of what African Americans get if they don’t vote. Yet the Republicans think that reference to Ferguson is “inflammatory.”
It’s not the least bit “inflammatory.” It simply means that the African American community intends to stand up for itself in the political process.
It is tribute to the fact that the leaders of African American organizations realize that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu — and that goes for all of us.
Democrats and everyday Americans of all backgrounds should take a lesson from the way African American leaders are standing up for President Obama. They are pointing out in radio spots and mailings that while it is perfectly legitimate to criticize the president in a democratic society; many of his Republican and right-wing critics have crossed the line to disrespect. They are telling African American voters: “It’s up to us to have the president’s back — vote.”
Republicans don’t like to hear that. In fact, the corporate CEOs and Wall Street billionaires who control the Republican Party — in coalition with groups of tea party extremists — don’t want most ordinary Americans to wake up and go the polls.
That doesn’t just go for African Americans. They are hoping that Hispanics, women, working people, and young people of all sorts stay home and forget there is an election. That way they hope they can elect a Republican Senate so that if a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court they can prevent President Obama from appointing a justice that is not in Wall Street’s back pocket.
They want a Senate that can work with the tea party-controlled House to hold the president and the country hostage unless they are allowed to slash tax rates for big business, eliminate the Medicare guarantee, cut Social Security benefits, gut the regulation of Wall Street, dramatically restrict women’s right to choose and limit access to contraception. And none of that is an exaggeration. Those are the positions they put right on their campaign websites.
If you are reading this article and haven’t voted, make a plan right now for how you plan to vote before Tuesday. In most states you can vote by mail, vote early at many locations or — of course — go to your precinct on Tuesday and cast your ballot.
Figure out now what time you plan to vote and how you plan to get to the polls or the early vote location. Don’t put it off.
Many critical elections in state after state are on a knife’s edge — they will be decided by a handful of voters.
Tens of thousands of Americans have given their lives — on battlefields far away and in struggles for voting rights here at home — so that every single American can have the right to have a say in determining our country’s leaders.
If you think that it doesn’t matter — or that it won’t affect you, or that your vote won’t influence the outcome — you are simply wrong.
In the end the big issues that completely shape our individual lives and the future of our society are decided by who votes.
Will there be job opportunities for our kids? Will a small group of Wall Street speculators be allowed to sink our economy once again like they did in 2008? Will you have the right to control your own reproductive decisions? Will your monthly Social Security check be cut? Will we leave our kids a planet that is so filled with carbon pollution that we can’t grow enough food or our cities are regularly swamped by monster storms like Hurricane Sandy? Will ordinary people finally get wage increases from our growing economy or will all of the growth continue to be siphoned off by the wealthiest one percent?
If you don’t plan to vote, are you really willing to allow the billionaires and CEOs to get what they want? Are you willing to let them steal your family’s security while we sleep through the election?
Don’t let it happen. Get up off the couch and go vote. Better still, call your neighbors, your sons and daughters. Tell your spouse to vote. Volunteer with a campaign to get other people out to vote — it works.
The plain fact is that if we don’t vote it won’t just be some politician who loses an election. If we don’t vote, we lose.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, October 31, 2014
“Who’s Buying The Midterm Elections? A Bunch Of Old White Guys”: White Men Make Up 65 Percent Of Elected Officials
This is the year of the mega-donor: just forty-two people are responsible for nearly a third of Super PAC spending in the 2014 election cycle. Super PACs, meanwhile, are outspending the national parties. The list of would-be kingmakers includes Tom Steyer, the former hedge-fund manager who’s poured out $73 million to elect environmentally friendly Democrats; Michael Bloomberg, who’s distributed upwards of $20 million on behalf of both sides; and Paul Singer, the “vulture-fund billionaire” and powerful Republican fundraiser.
Take a look at the list of top donors. They might have distinctly different political agendas, but they have one thing irrefutably in common: they’re almost exclusively old white guys. Only seven women made it into the forty-two, and not a single person of color.
One of the things highlighted in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, is how poorly America’s political leadership, from city councils to the US Senate, reflects the diversity of the country. According to data compiled by the Reflective Democracy Campaign, white men make up 65 percent of elected officials—more than twice their proportion in the general population. Only 4 percent of our political leaders are women of color. As Jelani Cobb writes in The New Yorker, the midterm elections won’t right this imbalance between demographics and political representation, no matter which party wins the Senate.
In fact, the midterms suggest that white men are gaining clout, at least behind the veil. As campaign-finance laws erode, political power is increasingly concentrated among the billionaires playing the strings of the electoral marionette—a pool that looks less diverse even than Congress. (Given the prominence of dark-money groups, it’s likely that some of the biggest individual players in the midterms are anonymous. But there’s no indication that secret donors are any more diverse than others.)
It’s shrinking, too. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of individual donors increased each election cycle. This year, the pool contracted from 817,464 individual contributors in 2010 to 666,773 as of late October, according to a new analysis from CRP. “Despite only a slight increase in the cost of the election, outside groups, which are overwhelmingly fueled by large donors, are picking up more of the tab, candidates are cutting back on their spending, and there are fewer large (over $200) individual donors contributing overall to candidates and parties,” reads the report.
Politicians should be accountable to the electorate, which is growing more diverse. But the fact that candidates are growing more dependent on a narrow group of contributors means that they may be responsive to a limited set of concerns. There are many factors blunting the political impact of demographic changes, but certainly laws that amplify a less diverse group of people’s voices over others’ in an election is one of them.
The unfettering of big money also makes it harder to elect minority candidates. “Why is it that the Congress we have right now doesn’t look anything like the rest of the country? A lot of it has to do with our campaign-finance laws and the fact that there’s so much money in the system and you need so much money to run for office,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program and the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s no question that it makes it more difficult for people who aren’t connected to these very wealthy donors to run for office.”
Candidates raise money from people they know, Norden explained, and American social circles are deeply segregated. Three-quarters of white Americans, for example, don’t have any non-white friends. Neighborhoods remain segregated by race and class. “If you don’t have a lot of money to begin with, you’re not interacting with the people who can provide that money,” said Norden.
A number of structural changes have been proposed to right lopsided representation, many of them focused on increasing turnout among minority voters. Those suggestions are particularly salient in response to the GOP’s campaign to pass laws that make it more difficult for low-income people and people of color to vote. But turnout won’t affect the diversity of elected officials if the pool of candidates isn’t diverse to begin with. As long as the financial bar for running a viable campaign keeps rising, it’s going to be more difficult for people of color, women and low-income people to appeal for votes at all.
There’s some evidence that public campaign financing increases proportional representation. Connecticut implemented a voluntary public-financing system in 2008, which provides a fixed amount of funding to candidates who rely on small donors. A study by Demos found that the program led to a more diverse state legislature and increased Latino and female representation. Another study found that the percentage of women elected in five states with public financing was significantly higher than the national average. Unfortunately, in several states recently politicians have set to dismantling, not strengthening, public financing.
“It’s really clear that that’s a major barrier to women and people of color, in particular, that can happen on all levels, even the local level,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, about the growing power of outside money. Still, she noted that there’s been little research into the specific ways in which the influence of money in politics has a disproportionate effect on minority candidates. “Adding a race and gender lens to the money-in-politics conversation is a really important thing,” she said.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, October 31, 2014
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