“Two Grand Juries, The Same Disappointing Result”: The Criminal Justice System Is One Of The Last Bastions Of Blatant Racism
No expressions of sympathy or regret can resurrect Eric Garner, the New York City man killed by police in July. Garner died after an officer placed him in what appears to be a chokehold during an arrest for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, an offense not usually regarded as a capital crime.
But, at the very least, officer Daniel Pantaleo (or his representatives) showed a spark of decency after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict him for any crime. “I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner,” he said in a statement. “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.”
That’s just one contrast to events in Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson showed no hint of sympathy for teenager Michael Brown or his family. “I don’t think it’s haunting. It’s always going to be something that happened,” Wilson said in a televised interview.
There were other equally stark contrasts. While Brown’s response to Wilson will always be the subject of dispute, bystanders recorded video of Garner’s arrest and posted it on the Internet, where it went viral. There is no disputing Garner’s tragic last words as Pantaleo’s arm lingers around his neck: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Even Fox News’ bellicose Bill O’Reilly was moved to observe that Garner “didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
But the greatest contrast between the deaths of Garner and Brown may have been in the reactions of elected and civic leaders. Backed by its politicians, Ferguson’s police force responded to criticism of Brown’s death with excuses, equivocation and armored personnel carriers.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio took to the podium to express sympathy for Garner’s loved ones, and equally important, a simple shared humanity. Compassion. Understanding. Empathy. “This is now a national moment of grief, a national moment of pain,” he said. Members of Congress — liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats — joined to criticize the grand jury’s decision.
That matters. All citizens, regardless of color or creed or religion, want to believe that the people who govern them share their fears, their hopes, their aspirations. Or, at the very least, that their leaders can understand their frustrations.
Even now, that’s not always the case in the United States, especially when it comes to law and order. The criminal justice system is one of the last bastions of blatant racism, a tangled net of explicit prejudices and implicit biases, of rank stereotypes and unfair perceptions, a web that ensnares black men disproportionately. Countless studies conducted by experts have borne out the view held by so many black Americans: We do not stand equally before the bar of justice.
Black motorists are subjected to more traffic stops than white drivers. Black men and women are arrested more often for drug offenses, even though we are no more likely to be drug users than whites. And the use of the death penalty tilts against black defendants and devalues black lives: It is more likely to be meted out if the victim is not white.
Has there been progress? Of course there has. The nation’s top law enforcement official, the attorney general, is a black man. But the nation’s criminal justice system started out in a hellishly low place — where officials were complicit in lynchings, where the wealthy extracted unpaid labor from black men by having them arrested, where black crime victims were ignored. De Blasio referred to that unfortunate history: “We’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism — we are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day.”
For all the striking contrasts between the reactions to the deaths of Brown and Garner, there was one stunning consistency: Grand juries saw no evidence of wrongdoing by a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man. Bear in mind that a New York City medical examiner, citing “compression of his chest and prone position,” ruled Garner’s death a homicide. Still, a Staten Island grand jury found nothing to suggest that Pantaleo committed any criminal offense.
Some things haven’t changed at all.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor, The University of Georgia, School of Journalism; The National Memo, December 6, 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
“Adding Insult To Injury”: First Mike Brown, Then Eric Garner; Prosecutors Can’t Be Trusted To Try Cops
A New York City man who was at most guilty of selling loose cigarettes on the street was tackled and placed in a chokehold by a police officer in late August. The man, Eric Garner, protested that he couldn’t breathe, but the officer with his arm around Garner’s didn’t let up. Today, a grand jury announced that it would not indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo.
The lack of indictment comes just a week after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, did not indict a police officer there, Darren Wilson, for his role in the shooting death of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. Both Eric Garner and Michael Brown are black and their deaths, within just days of each other in August, helped reignite a national conversation—as well as protests—about disproportionate police violence against the black community. At a time when black men are killed by police with disturbing regularity, Garner and Brown’s deaths added urgency to a long-simmering but woefully unaddressed crisis.
I’ll leave it to the legal analysts to rehash the evidence presented to the Pantaleo grand jury. Hopefully there will be a transparent accounting of what was introduced. But the fact that two grand juries in fairly rapid succession have failed to indict police officers involved in highly questionable deaths of unarmed black men should give us all pause. In Panaleo’s case, the grand jury’s refusal to indict him despite his use of dangerous and violent tactics doesn’t pass the smell test. Add in historic patterns of NYPD abuse against black men in New York—Amadou Diallo, Abner Loiuma, stop and frisk generally—and the lack of an indictment downright stinks.
Combined, the two cases suggest that more should be done to decouple criminal investigations of police abuse from the conventional prosecutorial system. Attorneys who usually work hand-in-hand with the police in pursuing other criminal cases can’t honestly be expected to be impartial and aggressive in then prosecuting those same officers. It’s worth noting that when prosecutors nationwide decide to bring charges before a grand jury, they usually succeed. In 2010, for instance, federal prosecutors sought indictments in about 162,000 cases and in only 11 cases did grand juries not return indictments. In the face of those statistics, these two non-indictments are glaring.
Even worse, the failure to indict the officers who killed both Eric Garner and Michael Brown deprives their communities of the transparency and accountability that trials ensure. No one is saying that the officers should be tried if there’s not sufficient evidence, but many legal analysts have agreed there’s enough in both cases to at least warrant a trial. There are questions about facts in terms of both Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s movements before their death, questions of fact that should be debated in a court. There are questions about the officers’ states of mind—questions that could be fleshed out and better understood if the cases went to trial.
But the lack of indictments, now twice in a row, seems to add insult to injury—that not only are black men routinely, disproportionately victimized by the police but they are victimized by a legal system that refuses to hold the police accountable.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2014
“The Political Situation In Ferguson Is Toxic”: Underlying Causes Of Ferguson Need To Be Addressed
Missouri is the Show-Me State.
It says so right on our license plates. We Missourians like to think this slogan captures our strength of character, our down-to-earth sensibility and skeptical savvy.
Very different qualities have been on display lately. Missouri has become synonymous with violence and misgovernment in the mayhem that has spiraled since the shooting death of Michael Brown in August.
We’re a national embarrassment. In the days following Brown’s shooting, protesters marched peacefully — and some looted — and police met them with excessive and militarized force.
After the St. Louis County prosecutor announced last week that charges would not be brought against Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, again protesters marched peacefully — not just in Ferguson, Missouri but across the nation — while others looted, rioted and set buildings aflame. This time there were actual soldiers on the streets of Ferguson to face down residents.
The killing of Michael Brown has become a politically divisive issue. In some ways it is a Rorschach test for racial and political points of view. Some regard Brown as one more casualty at the hands of a racist police force that demonizes all young black men as thugs. Others see him as a genuine thug who died in a scuffle that easily could have left a policeman dead instead.
In this charged atmosphere, nobody expected the grand jury’s decision to satisfy both sides — and it didn’t. The quality of the evidence it was shown, it has to be said, was not good. Accounts were contradictory, and in the end the jurors seem to have relied on Wilson’s account most of all.
The mass media coverage, especially the 24/7 cable TV treatment, has played Ferguson for all the drama it can provide. Eventually, the media will tire of the Ferguson story, yet the resentments will remain, as will the conditions that inspired them.
Nobody believes that Michael Brown will be the last unarmed black man to be shot down by a policeman with dubious cause. This happens everywhere in the United States. That’s why, in the days following the grand jury’s decision not to indict, protests and mass demonstrations were held in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, New York, Denver, Los Angeles and many other cities.
People of every race were among the protesters marching peacefully in solidarity with similar peaceful protesters in Ferguson. Not with the rioters, not with the lawless, but with the far greater numbers that have gathered, peacefully, every day since Brown died in early August.
The object of their frustration is policing that does more to agitate communities than to protect them. People have seen too many instances of questionable encounters between police and people winding up severely hurt or dead.
This is not a new storyline.
What’s new is that many of the protest events were not led by the usual suspects—civil rights leaders, politicians and media-versed clergy. It was young people, 20-somethings often either still in college or recently graduated, who organized protests by tapping networks cultivated previously through social media.
What comes next is crucial. Mass demonstrations serve a purpose, but organizing for change is what solves problems.
The first step in Ferguson ought to be a massive voter-registration drive. This was attempted but wasn’t successful in the initial days after the shooting. The appeal should be simple. Don’t like the elected officials you have? OK, vote them out. Feel that you’re not represented on the city council or in the ranks of the police? Standing in the street yelling won’t accomplish it. You need to make change happen, and voting is the first step.
The political situation in Ferguson is toxic. Like a lot of smaller towns in America, it generates a disproportionate amount of its revenue through fines. Despite a recent decision to eliminate some fines, the city still puts police in the structural role of the Biblical tax collector, stopping and ticketing citizens for relatively minor infractions, and issuing arrest warrants when they don’t or can’t pay their fines. It also so happens that a disproportionate number of tickets are given to black residents. This heavy hand, squeezing citizens for their hard-earned money, is not just or healthy for the body politic. But it’s hard to see how it will be reformed unless the majority in Ferguson first exerts its power and throws the bums out.
Everyday misgovernment does not inspire the outrage that a police killing does. But the resentment it causes year after year adds to the explosive charge when the spark is supplied. Ferguson may have flamed out. It could very well wind up a footnote, a trivia question for future generations. Or perhaps something else may happen. Maybe once all the cameras are gone, local residents, working with national civil rights organizations and others, will do the hard work of taking government back for the people.
Ferguson might then become a laboratory of democracy … and show the rest of the country how to do it.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, December 2, 2014
“Justice Is Not An Unreasonable Desire”: Eric Holder; Problems Exposed By Ferguson ‘Threaten The Entire Nation’
The problems put on display after the death of Michael Brown in the small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August “are truly national in scope and that threaten the entire nation,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech on Monday.
Holder, speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, said the nation needs to confront the broken relationship between many law enforcement agencies and the communities that they are supposed to serve.
“Broadly speaking, without mutual understanding between citizens — whose rights must be respected — and law enforcement officers — who make tremendous and often-unheralded personal sacrifices every day to preserve public safety — there can be no meaningful progress,” Holder said in prepared remarks. “Our police officers cannot be seen as an occupying force disconnected from the communities they serve. Bonds that have been broken must be restored. Bonds that never existed must now be created.”
Holder, who plans to resign as the nation’s top law enforcement official if the Senate confirms U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch as his replacement, visited Ferguson back in August. His Justice Department has launched an investigation into the practices of the Ferguson Police Department, in addition to a separate ongoing federal investigation into the shooting of Brown by former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson.
In his speech on Monday, Holder said that the “overall system of justice must be strengthened and made more fair” to ensure faith in the justice system.
“Without that deserved faith, without that reasoned belief, there can be no justice. This is not an unreasonable desire — it is a fundamental American right enshrined in our founding documents,” Holder said.
Calling 18-year-old Brown’s death a “tragedy,” Holder said it “sparked a significant national conversation about the need to ensure confidence in the law enforcement and criminal justice processes” and exposed rifts that “must be addressed — by all Americans — in a constructive manner.”
Holder condemned the looting and destruction that took place around Ferguson last week, saying it was “deeply unfortunate that this vital conversation was interrupted, and this young man’s memory dishonored, by destruction and looting on the part of a relatively small criminal element.”
Holder said that “acts of mindless destruction are not only contrary to the rule of law and the aims of public safety; they threaten to stifle important debate, ‘adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars,'” referencing a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “They actively impede social progress by drowning out the legitimate voices of those attempting to make themselves heard. And they are not consistent with the wishes of Michael Brown’s father, who asked that his son be remembered peacefully.”
Holder called on “those who seek to lend their voices to important causes and discussions, and who seek to elevate these vital conversations, to do so in ways that respect the gravity of their subject matter.”
“These are the moments that remind us of the values that bind us together as a nation. These are the times — of great challenge and great consequence — that point the way forward in our ongoing pursuit of a more perfect union,” Holder continued. “And these are the lights that will help us beat back the encroaching darkness — and the stars that will guide us, together, out of this storm.”
By: Ryan J. Reilly, The Blog, The Huffington Post, December 1, 2014
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