“The Eric Garner Case’s Sickening Outcome”: When Being The Wrong Color Becomes A Capital Offense
I can’t breathe.
Those were Eric Garner’s last words, and today they apply to me. The decision by a Staten Island grand jury to not indict the police officer who killed him takes my breath away.
In the depressing reality series that should be called “No Country for Black Men,” this sick plot twist was shocking beyond belief. There should have been an indictment in the Ferguson case, in my view, but at least the events that led to Michael Brown’s killing were in dispute. Garner’s homicide was captured on video. We saw him being choked, heard him plead of his distress, watched as no attempt was made to revive him and his life slipped away.
This time, there were literally millions of eyewitnesses. Somebody tell me, just theoretically, how many does it take? Is there any number that would suffice? Or is this whole “equal justice before the law” thing just a cruel joke?
African American men are being taught a lesson about how this society values, or devalues, our lives. I’ve always said the notion that racism is a thing of the past was absurd — and that those who espoused the “post-racial” myth were either naive or disingenuous. Now, tragically, you see why.
Garner, 43, was an African American man. On July 17, he allegedly committed the heinous crime of selling individual cigarettes on the street. A group of New York City police officers approached and surrounded him. As seen in cellphone video footage recorded by an onlooker, Garner was puzzled that the officers seemed to be taking him into custody for such a piddling offense. He was a big man, but at no point did he strike out at the officers or show them disrespect.
But he wasn’t assuming a submissive posture as quickly as the cops wanted. Officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold, compressing his windpipe — a maneuver that the New York Police Department banned two decades ago. Garner complained repeatedly that he was having trouble breathing. The officers wrestled him to the sidewalk, where he died. An emergency medical crew was summoned, but officers made no immediate attempt to resuscitate him.
The coroner ruled Garner’s death a homicide. He suffered from asthma, and Pantaleo’s chokehold killed him.
The Staten Island prosecutor presented evidence against Pantaleo to a grand jury; the other officers involved in the incident were given immunity in exchange for their testimony. On Wednesday, it was announced that the grand jury had declined to indict Pantaleo on any charge.
This travesty — there’s no other word for it — came just nine days after a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for Brown’s death. Demonstrators took to the streets across Manhattan. What else was there to do but protest? Set aside the signs that say “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Bring out the signs that say “I Can’t Breathe.”
There are two big issues here. One involves the excessive license we now give to police — permission, essentially, to do whatever they must 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 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-age, 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.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 3, 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
“A Culture Where Avoidable Force Becomes Inevitable”: Justice Department; Cleveland Police Use ‘Unnecessary’ Force
Cleveland police have routinely engaged in “unreasonable and unnecessary” force, including a half-hour police chase involving 100 officers that left two unarmed African-Americans dead when police mistook the car backfiring for gunshots and shot each of them more than 20 times, a Justice Department investigation revealed Thursday.
The probe, part of an ongoing series of “pattern or practice” investigations into the nation’s police departments, also found that Cleveland police often needlessly shot residents, struck them with head blows and subjected them to Taser weapons and chemical spray.
Taken together, the incidents in Ohio’s second-largest city, the Justice Department concluded, have led to a situation where “avoidable force becomes inevitable.”
Attorney General Eric Holder, in announcing the Cleveland findings a day after he opened a separate investigation into the chokehold death of an unarmed black man in New York, recommitted his office to the Obama administration’s Building Community Trust initiative.
The effort is designed to “foster strong, collaborative relationships between local police and communities they protect and serve,” the attorney general said.
In Cleveland, Holder said, the issues of police and community relationships are “complex and the problems longstanding.” But, he said, “we have seen in city after city where we have engaged that meaningful change is possible.”
Faced with the federal probe’s findings, Cleveland police and city officials have signed a statement of principles committing them to mending police-community relations. Holder said the plan will lead to a consent decree that would be “court-enforceable,” with an independent monitor to oversee improvements and ensure that reforms are made.
Similar agreements have been reached after Justice Department investigations into police departments in other communities in states including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Louisiana.
The Cleveland probe was opened after a local newspaper, the Plain Dealer, revealed in May 2011 that six officers accused of brutality had used force on 29 suspects during a two-year period.
By: Richard A. Serrano, The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, December 4, 2014
“The Heart Of American Exceptionalism”: When The U.N. Committee Against Torture Says You Have A Police Brutality Problem…
As everyone waits to see if the actual torture report will ever be released, the uptick in American police shootings hasn’t gone unnoticed by the international community, either:
The U.N. Committee against Torture urged the United States on Friday to fully investigate and prosecute police brutality and shootings of unarmed black youth and ensure that taser weapons are used sparingly.
The panel’s first review of the U.S. record on preventing torture since 2006 followed racially-tinged unrest in cities across the country this week sparked by a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury’s decision not to charge a white police officer for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
The committee decried “excruciating pain and prolonged suffering” for prisoners during “botched executions” as well as frequent rapes of inmates, shackling of pregnant women in some prisons and extensive use of solitary confinement.
Its findings cited deep concern about “numerous reports” of police brutality and excessive use of force against people from minority groups, immigrants, homosexuals and racial profiling. The panel referred to the “frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals.”
Conservatives will accuse the U.N. of hypocrisy in tut-tutting America while doing little about major human rights abusers like Iran or China. But that’s hardly the point. America shouldn’t be in the position of saying, “Oh yeah? Well that dictatorship is worse!” The United States holds itself up as a beacon of justice and freedom. And when it comes to police shootings, America stands out from other industrialized countries as nearly barbaric.
A cursory and incomplete tally shows United States police officers kill at least 400 people a year in shootings, and the real figure is probably much higher. About a quarter of those involve white officers killing black people.
By contrast, police killings in European countries tend to fall into the single or low double digits.
Something is seriously wrong there, and either way you look at it, it cuts to the heart of American exceptionalism. Either our police forces are far too ready to use violence, or the American people are somehow far more dangerous and violent than those in other countries, or some combination of both. Or there are simply far too many guns and too many people who are too eager to use them.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, November 29, 2014
“Don’t Mythologize Christopher Dorner”: The Right Sentiment, Condolences For The Victims, Condemnation Of His Actions
I am no stranger to people’s glomming on to deadly criminals and celebrating them as heroes. Bonnie and Clyde were killed just south of the town where I grew up. There was that movie made about the couple, as well as a musical and more songs that I can count. And every year the town celebrates the duo and their killing with a festival and a shootout.
Last year, one Web site promoting the festival read: “Bring your family and friends and join us each year as we remember the historical ambush of the infamous outlaws Bonnie & Clyde, with fun festivities, great food, music and authentic re-enactments.”
But as romantic as people try to make the criminal couple and the circumstances of their death, they still can’t erase the wrong the duo did.
The same is true for Christopher Dorner — the former Los Angeles police officer and fugitive accused of killing several people, including one police officer and a sheriff’s deputy — who died this week in a cabin fire while on the run.
A rambling manifesto Dorner issued had many gripes, but chief among them were that racism, abuse of power and corruption ran rampant in the Los Angeles Police Department and that he had been fired for reporting it.
Now Dorner is being compared to movie heroes, has a song written about him and has a long list of fan pages on Facebook.
But make no mistake: Christopher Dorner is no hero. Here are some of the other things in Dorner’s manifesto.
He says of his planned attacks on other officers:
“The attacks will stop when the department states the truth about my innocence, PUBLICLY!!!”
He threatened that he would “use the element of surprise where you work, live, eat and sleep,” and discover the officers’ “residences, spouses workplaces, and children’s schools.”
He continued: “To those children of the officers who are eradicated, your parent was not the individual you thought they were.”
Through his own words, Dorner forfeits any aspiration to the title of hero.
Some commentators have tried valiantly to thread an impossibly small needle in separating what Dorner did, which all people of good conscience despise, from the serious issues he raises.
Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University professor, said on CNN:
“This has been an important public conversation that we’ve had about police brutality, about police corruption, about state violence. I mean there were even talks about making him the first domestic drone target. This is serious business here.”
Hill continued:
“I don’t think it’s been a waste of time at all. And as far as Dorner himself goes, he’s been like a real life superhero to many people. Now don’t get me wrong. What he did was awful, killing innocent people was bad, but when you read his manifesto, when you read the message that he left, he wasn’t entirely crazy. He had a plan and a mission here. And many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people. They are rooting for somebody who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching ‘Django Unchained’ in real life. It’s kind of exciting.”
I agree that the issues of police brutality and corruption should now and always be part of the conversation, particularly when discussing police departments with a bad history when it comes to minority and other vulnerable communities.
But I do not see a need to explain why people — particularly many on social media — are mythologizing Dorner. Rooting for a suspected killer who makes threats against even more innocent people and their families is just horrendous. It’s not exciting; it’s revolting.
Hill later apologized for his choice of words. I applaud him for doing that.
Still, too many people online have portrayed Dorner’s actions as righteous retribution. But nothing can change the fact that those actions are wrong.
Fighting for justice is noble. Spilling innocent blood is the ultimate act of cowardice. Dorner is not the right emblem for those wronged by the system.
This is not a game or a movie. This is about real people who lead real lives and their real families who dug real graves. Let’s give everyone involved time to mourn. Let’s have the respect to not honor the person believed to be responsible for the mourning.
According to KTLA in Los Angeles, Dorner’s mother issued a statement that read in part: “It is with great sadness and heavy hearts that we express our deepest sympathies and condolences to anyone that suffered losses or injuries resulting from Christopher’s actions.” They said it continued: “We do not condone Christopher’s actions.”
That’s the right sentiment: condolences for the victims and condemnation of Dorner’s actions. Period.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 15, 2013
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