The killing of Eric Garner happened ten years ago this month. The sad, infuriating truth is that it could happen all over again. It took a decade of extraordinary, patient pressure by activists to secure even a small measure of justice. Since then, City Hall and One Police Plaza have gone back to the usual business of dismissing, crippling, or slow-walking investigations of NYPD misconduct.
Garner’s death was the product of a botched NYPD operation, intended to restore order in Tompkinsville Park at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Bay Street in Staten Island. “There were people in the park who were abusing drugs, and it was a spot where we had asked for additional police coverage to try to make sure that the people in the park were safe,” Debi Rose, who represented the area in the City Council back then, told me recently. “It was supposed to be a crackdown on quality-of-life infractions.”
Such matters are the basic business of urban policing and almost never require the use of deadly force. But in July 2014, a crew of officers arrived and focused on Garner, who was known in the area as a peacemaker and had just finished breaking up a fight in the park. When Garner complained that cops had been hassling him, five officers swarmed the unarmed man, slamming him to the pavement to make an arrest. One of the officers, Daniel Pantaleo, leaped on Garner’s back and placed him in an illegal choke hold, never letting up, as a bystander’s video shows Garner gasping, 11 times in a row, “I can’t breathe.” The officers give no first aid to the dying, handcuffed man.
The city’s medical examiner ruled the killing a homicide, and protestors took to the streets demanding that Pantaleo be fired. Choke holds had been banned by the NYPD decades........