Tag: Eric Garner

What’s The Point Of Body Cams?

Uri Friedman talks to criminologist Barak Ariel about the impact of putting body cameras on officers:

The technology is “surely promising, but we don’t know that it’s working,” Ariel told me. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve drugs until they’ve been studied extensively, he explained, and governments should take a similar approach with body-worn cameras. It’s a solution that has yet to be proven.

Ariel should know. He’s currently researching the effects of body cameras on policing everywhere from Brazil to Ghana to Israel to Northern Ireland, and finding that some police departments (and police unions) love the idea and others hate it. Nearly all of these tests have yet to be completed, but Ariel recently co-authored a study on the practice in Rialto, California, where he found that police officers who weren’t wearing cameras were twice as likely to use force as those who were. During the 12-month experiment, the police department also saw a reduction in citizens’ complaints compared with previous years. The researchers concluded that the benefits of wearing cameras trumped the costs.

But Ariel insists that there isn’t enough evidence so far to generalize the finding and assert that body-worn cameras offer a net benefit to community policing.

Jason Koebler contends that “lack of indictment in the Garner case doesn’t fundamentally change the police body camera argument, and shouldn’t be used as an argument for or against body cameras one way or another”:

Body cameras are not a cure-all, and they don’t treat the underlying problem of police brutality or power tripping. But, well, they’re better than nothing, and they’re a good first step toward creating a culture where cops think before they act.

The main thrust of the argument behind police body cameras has never been the idea that video evidence can be used to convict a cop of murder in court or even that they can be used as evidence at all. Instead, body cameras create an environment where police intrinsically know they are being watched, that there’s at least the possibility that they’ll be held accountable for their actions.

Rebecca Leber spells out why video evidence often doesn’t make a difference:

Police still have wide leeway for using deadly force. Juries remain deferential to officers’ judgements of when to incapcitate a person or fire their weapons. As Amanda Taub has explained at Vox, “That means that to press criminal charges in a police shooting, the prosecutor has a heavy burden to overcome. The officer is likely to claim that he believed the suspect was a threat and made a split-second decision to use force. The jury is likely to believe him, even if his decision was a bad one.” At The Nation, Chase Madar pointed to the case of Kajieme Powell, John Crawford III, and Milton Hall, all of whom were shot by police and all of whose deaths were filmed on camera. None resulted in charges.

In other words, body cams can help—but they still don’t entirely fix police abuse. Juries still show officers extreme deference, even when police violence gets caught on tape.

Matthew Pratt Guterl reflects on the countless videos of police brutality circulating online:

[T]hese videos do more than simply provide convincing evidence for lawsuits. They show the willful resistance and inventiveness of poor and racially marginalized Americans. In settings that are emotionally charged and dangerous, ordinary people are acting as interpreters and recorders of history—of police brutality racism, yes, but also of our cops’ post-9/11 militarization and depersonalized policing strategies. There are other cameras out there—dispassionate security cameras and dashboard cams, and body cameras showing the police officer’s perspective—but witness videos are as close as we, the viewers, get to the victim’s perspective. While the cameras stop nothing, they do allow us to see.

Did The Nanny State Kill Eric Garner?

In Robert Tracinski’s opinion, the thing “most important about the Garner case is how stupid the reason was for arresting this guy”:

[H]e was being busted for selling single, “loose” cigarettes in order to evade heavy taxes on tobacco products. Basically, he was arrested for doing something that, in a previous era, thousands of people would have been doing in New York on any given day: selling goods on the streets of the city without any particular permission. It’s a low-grade form of entrepreneurialism.

But not in the nanny-state New York of today. In a city where everything is taxed and regulated and you can’t put trans-fats in your food or buy a soda that’s too large, it makes perfect sense that they would harass a guy for selling cigarettes on the streets without permission. After all, they’re bad for people. Somebody might die.

The meat of his argument:

We should remember that whenever the police use force, there is the danger that they will kill someone, whether through malice, poor judgment, poor training, or sheer accident. From time to time, they’re going to shoot the wrong person or wrestle a guy to the ground without knowing that he has serious health problems and can’t survive this kind of rough handling. That is one good reason (among many) to make sure that police are only authorized to interfere with someone whose actions are a threat to the lives and property of others, and not just to enforce some dumb, petty regulation.

The contradiction of the left is that they want to inject government into every little aspect of our lives and mandate that the police confront us all the time over everything—and then they scream when some of those confrontations go wrong. In this way, they are not only hoping for a new series of contentious, racially charged killings. By extending the reach of government and the omnipresence of police power in our lives, they are creating the conditions that make those cases inevitable.

A. Barton Hinkle wants to lower taxes accordingly:

Thanks to New York’s laughably high cigarette taxes ($4.35 state plus another $1.60 in the city) and higher prices generally, a pack of smokes in New York City costs $14 or more. That creates a powerful incentive to smuggle smokes in from states such as Virginia, where you can buy a pack for a third of that price. Fill a Ford Econoline van with a few hundred cartons and you can make a nice five-figure profit in a weekend. Some people do.

The robust cigarette smuggling irritates officials in New York, because they miss out on a lot of tax revenue. The trade irritates officials in Virginia for the same reason, because smugglers buy wholesale to avoid the retail sales tax. There’s an easy fix for all of this: Cut New York’s cigarette taxes.

Vinik responds to such complaints:

Are cigarette taxes smart policy? There are benefits to the law—it reduces smoking and makes Americans healthier—and consequences to it—the costs of it fall disproportionately on the poor. There are also value judgments involved: libertarians will argue that the law is an undemocratic intrusion into the private lives of U.S. citizens. Liberals believe the health benefits of cigarette taxes outweigh any loss of freedom. That argument has been ongoing for years.

He finds that “Eric Garner is not dead because New York City imposes high cigarette taxes. He’s dead because a cop put him in a chokehold, in violation of NYPD rules, and held his head against ground.” But J.D. Tuccille sees the issue differently:

You want a society taxed and regulated toward your vision of perfection? It’s going to need enforcers. … Those enforcers aren’t an equal problem for everybody. They spare the people who pay them to look the other way. They give a pass to friends and relations. But they often take a dislike to individuals or whole groups that rub them the wrong way or cause them extra grief. Poor minorities, in particular, are always on the short end of the stick when it comes to dealing with cops. When they break petty laws, they don’t often turn enough profit to grease police palms enough to be left alone, they don’t have the political power to push back, and at least some of the enforcers have a hard-on for them anyway.

Government, at its core, is force. The more it does to shape the world around it, the more it needs enforcers to make sure officials’ wills are done. “The law is the law,” says New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, but it’s creatures like him who make so much damned law.

Why Do NYC Cops Use Banned Chokeholds?

Chokeholds

Roberto A. Ferdman asks:

The answer might be because the department is not enforcing the rule stringently. A recent study (pdf) by the review board says that:

Put simply, during the last decade, the NYPD disciplinary decisions in NYPD administrative trials of chokehold allegations failed to enforce the clear mandate of the Patrol Guide chokehold rule. In response to these decisions which failed to hold offending officers accountable, the CCRB and NYPD Department Advocate’s Office [internal affairs] failed to charge officers with chokehold violations pursuant to the mandate of the Patrol Guide chokehold rule.

By failing to properly punish officers who have used a banned method of apprehension, the department effectively shapes the understanding of the rule by officers, the study says.

Josh Voorhees is unsurprised that Pantaleo wasn’t indicted:

While the officer’s use of the banned maneuver received significant scrutiny in the court of public opinion, it likely received much less in the court of law. As Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argued earlier this week, there is a difference between an act that is banned in the NYPD’s rulebook and one that is deemed criminal. “There is no explicit law that criminalizes the use of a chokehold on someone either by a police officer or someone else,” wrote O’Donnell.

Grand jury proceedings happen behind closed doors, so we may never know exactly what convinced at least 12 of the 23 jurors to vote against an indictment of any kind. But by deciding—despite the damning video—that there was not enough evidence to justify the case going to trial, the jurors are effectively declaring that Garner’s death was, at worst, a horrible mistake, one that might amount to misconduct but that falls short of murder or manslaughter.

Update from a reader:

I’m a lawyer in NYC (I hate it nearly as much as you do). You quoted Vorhees quoting a John Jay professor claiming “There is no explicit law that criminalizes the use of a chokehold on someone either by a police officer or someone else.” That’s just wrong. Section 121 of the Penal Law (pdf) provides:

§ 121.11 Criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation

A person is guilty of criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation when, with intent to impede the normal breathing or circulation of the blood of another person, he or she:

a. applies pressure on the throat or neck of such person; or
b. blocks the nose or mouth of such person.

Criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation is a class A misdemeanor.

The Garner grand jury certainly could have indicted for that.  Note too that it doesn’t matter whether it was a chokehold, meant to impede breathing, or a headlock, meant to impede blood flow.  Both are crimes.  I’ve seen some chatter on Fox News making a big deal out of the difference, Hannity included.

The NYT lists some “of the most notable deaths since 1990 involving New York Police Department officers.” Friedersdorf provides further context:

Even with the NYPD’s history of killing people with chokeholds that violate policy, hundreds of non-lethal violations of that policy every year, indisputable video evidence of multiple officers blithely ignoring the fact that a colleague was violating that policy, and their subsequent dishonesty about the chokehold when filing a report on the incident, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton still had the brass to say earlier this year that “he would not support a law to make chokeholds illegal, insisting that a departmental prohibition is enough.” He also said, “I think there are more than sufficient protocols in place to address a problem.”

In context, that’s sufficiently absurd to cast a shadow over the man’s honor. It’s hard to believe it won’t come up when New York City is sued for negligence. At minimum it undermines Bratton’s credibility. “Every time this happens,” Hamilton Nolan observes, “there’s a lot of talk about ‘training’ and ‘changing the culture’ of the police.” Yet chokeholds persist. “What will change this situation,” he adds, “is putting police officers in jail for killing and abusing people. And it’s abundantly clear that our current laws are too lax to accomplish that. The laws need to change.”

Historical context suggests he is absolutely right.

Did Broken Windows Theory Kill Garner?

Kai Wright marshals the evidence pointing to yes:

As WNYC’s Robert Lewis reported back in September, Pantaleo is a poster boy for broken windows policing. He’s been on the force since 2007, and in that time records show him as the arresting officer in 259 criminal court cases. They are overwhelmingly for minor crimes like pot possession; just 24 of them were for felonies. “Two-thirds of Pantaleo’s cases that made it to court ended with a dismissal or a guilty plea to a disorderly conduct violation,” Lewis reported, “which is a little more serious than a speeding ticket. He is one of the most active cops on Staten Island.”

This is what broken windows cops are supposed to do.

They beef up their ranks in priority neighborhoods and get in folks’ faces over anything and everything. I’ve lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for about a decade. Our neighborhood has for many years been on NYPD’s list of target spots for broken windows—“impact zones,” as they’re called. It’s unexceptional here to swap stories of run-ins with bizarrely unreasonable cops—telling us stop lingering by the subway entrance, to get out of the street, to move along. Eric Garner’s frustrated response to that constant harassment will appear routine to anyone who’s lived in neighborhoods like ours. He’d just broken up a fight, and now here was NYPD in his face, again. “Every time you see me you wanna arrest me,” Garner snapped. “I’m tired of it. It stops today.”

Justin Peters is on the same page:

The cornerstone of effective policing is discretion. If the cops enforced every single law on the books in every single precinct at all hours of the day, New York City would become a police state. Is that what de Blasio and Bratton want?

For mayors and police commissioners, being “tough on crime” means actively implementing some specific policy. But given that violent crime seems to be declining on its own regardless of what they do, there’s a case to be made that de Blasio and Bratton are only making things worse. Here’s a suggestion for a new policing policy for New York City: First, do no harm.

“The Acquittals Of Their Killers Are Not Mistakes”

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/540225070090964994

Brian Beutler responds to TNC’s above tweet about the Eric Garner case:

[I]f Coates is right, then at least some of the effort expended on making police officers wear cameras has been misdirected. It should be redirected toward the source of the impunity, which isn’t the quantity or quality evidence, but the officials that so freely disregard it.

If prosecutors and police departments are too tightly linked for due process to mean anything, then puncturing the impunity requires breaking the link. One way to do this would be for citizens at the state and local level, through ballot initiatives, to take the authority for presenting evidence of police misconduct to grand juries out of the hands of local prosecutors. That authority could be handed to publicly accountable review boards staffed with civilian lawyers from within the jurisdiction, or to special prosecutors’ offices.

Along the same lines, Albert Burneko insists that it’s not our justice system that’s broken:

The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders. This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does.

America is a serial brutalizer of black and brown people. Brutalizing them is what it does. It does other things, too, yes, but brutalizing black and brown people is what it has done the most, and with the most zeal, and for the longest. The best argument you can make on behalf of the various systems and infrastructures the country uses against its black and brown citizens—the physical design of its cities, the methods it uses to allocate placement in elite institutions, the way it trains its police to treat citizens like enemy soldiers—might actually just be that they’re more restrained than those used against black and brown people abroad. America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that’s OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.

How Coates thinks about the struggle to change America:

I’m the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could have been born in 1820, if you were black, and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619, looked forward another 50 or 60 years and seen nothing but slaves. There was no reason to believe, at that time, that emancipation was 40 or 50 years off. And yet, folks resisted and folks fought on.

So, fatalism isn’t really an option. Even if you think you won’t necessarily win the fight today, in your lifetime, in your child’s lifetime, you still have to fight. It’s kind of selfish to say you will only fight for a victory that you will live to see. As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes. So, fatalism is not an option.

Vincent Warren believes that “affected communities – and youth of color in particular – must be at the center of the process of crafting reform solutions”:

The heart of the reform ordered after we won the stop-and-frisk case is a joint remedial process that brings community members and other stakeholders together to discuss and hammer out the actual law enforcement and accountability reforms.

A similar model was used in Cincinnati a decade ago, after the city was torn apart by scores of wrongful death lawsuits, a city-wide curfew, a boycott, a DOJ investigation and the most violent summer in the city’s recent history. Bringing those groups to the table yielded a decrease in the number of racially discriminatory stops and the number of civilian complaints, and an increase in black residents’ perception of fairness and professionalism by the Cincinnati police department.

The community-based reform processes in Cincinnati and just underway in New York are the models to follow. But we have to acknowledge that we need far more than a conversation, and right now, the protests in the street are bringing the pressure that will make real reform possible.

The protests are the road to reform.

The Right’s Response To Eric Garner

Yglesias observes that “early reactions suggest that anger over the decision not to prosecute [NYPD officer Daniel] Pantaleo spans the political spectrum.” Andy McCarthy, for one, freely admits that the Staten Island grand jury may have made a mistake:

I don’t think race had anything to do with what happened between Eric Garner and the police. I intend to keep an open mind until we learn all the evidence the grand jury relied on. And I continue to believe the NYPD is the best police force there is. But I also know, as good cops know, that there is a difference between resisting arrest by not cooperating, as Garner was doing in Staten Island, and resisting arrest by violent assaults and threats of harm, as Michael Brown did in Ferguson. Police deserve a very wide berth in responding to the latter, but less of one with the former. I thus cannot in good conscience say there was insufficient probable cause to indict Officer Pantaleo for involuntary manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.

Many more conservatives are outraged. Sean Davis is one of them:

There’s an America where people who kill for no legitimate reason are held to account, and there’s an America where homicide isn’t really a big deal as long as you play for the right team. Unfortunately Eric Garner was a victim in the second America, where some homicides are apparently less equal than others.

Dreher echoes:

Maybe, just maybe, a trial would have found these cops not guilty of negligent homicide in Garner’s death. But based on that video, how can there not even be a trial? This is messed up.

It strikes JPod “as understandable that a grand jury would look at the events and not see something they would call a murder.” But even he sees the need for change:

The real question that is going to be asked, now, is just how aggressive law enforcement can and should be in an era of low crime, which is what we’re in now. If you defang cops, you are inviting a return to trouble. As I wrote last week, “if we send police officers the message that it is safer for their careers and reputations to stand down, stand down they will. We are the ones who will have to reckon with the results.” At the same time, no civilized society can view the tape showing Garner’s desperate pleading and not ask some very difficult questions of itself.

Jonathan Last adds, “It would be helpful if the country could let go of Ferguson and focus our attention on Garner.” And Pete Wehner has a typically humane response:

I get that when citizens don’t obey orders from a police officer, they will sometimes need to be subdued. But there’s also such things as judgment and discretion. In this case, Mr. Garner committed the lowest-level transgression imaginable, he wasn’t armed, and he wasn’t really violent. He certainly wasn’t a man who deserved to die. Most people watching this video and hearing Mr. Garner scream “I can’t breathe!” before his body goes limp will, I think, be disturbed by it. Call it basic human sympathy.

I’m not in favor of rushing to judgment, and I’ll be happy to revise my own views based on evidence, if that’s warranted. But for now, based on the evidence we do have, my reaction is that a lethal mistake, an injustice, and a genuine human tragedy happened on the streets of New York on July 17.

Shortly after he was killed, a woman at Mr. Garner’s home, who identified herself as a cousin named Stephanie, said: “The family is very, very sad. We’re in shock. Why did they have to grab him like that?”

That’s a very good, and a very haunting, question.

I know that some will cavil at my relief that conservatives and liberals can agree on something, but we have to treasure these moments while we can. The exception to all this was Fox News last night. Megyn Kelly’s coverage proved that there is almost no incident in which a black man is killed by cops that Fox cannot excuse or even defend. She bent over backwards to impugn protesters, to change the subject to Ferguson, to elide the crucial fact that the choke-hold was against police procedure, and to imply that Garner was strongly resisting arrest. Readers know I had very mixed feelings about Ferguson. I’m not usually inclined to slam something as overtly racist. But there was no way to interpret Kelly’s coverage as anything but the baldest racism I’ve seen in a while on cable news. Her idea of balance was to interview two, white, bald, bull-necked men to defend the cops, explain away any concerns about police treatment and to minimize the entire thing. Truly, deeply disgusting.

A Question Of Human Dignity

Harry Siegel has a deeply moving piece about the second tape made of the killing of Eric Garner by the police. What he gets at seems to me extremely important. It’s about the way the cops treated Garner’s inert body on the sidewalk, ordering people to stay away, barely talking to the man whose head they just smashed into the sidewalk, still handcuffed. He gets no CPR and despite being quite obviously in serious distress, he is just left to lie there, occasionally prodded, his dignity stolen, for seven minutes:

A bit later, the cops and medics finally decide to get Garner into an ambulance.

COP: “We’re going to try to get him up on the stretcher. It’s going to take like six of us.”

They hoist him up and literally drop him onto a gurney. Or at least the left side of him. One cop catches his legs falling off. Another holds Garner’s shirt, apparently to keep the rest of him from rolling off the gurney. Garner’s belly is exposed. He appears to be unconscious.

VOICE: “Why nobody do no CPR?”

VOICE: “Nobody did nothing.”

COP (as he walks by): “Because he’s breathing.”

The camera turns to Pantaleo, about 20 feet away. He waves and steps out of the picture. The camera shifts back to Garner strapped to the gurney and being wheeled away …

As he lay dying, he was treated like a piece of meat. By Pantaleo. By the other cops on the scene. Even by the medical technicians. Had Garner been treated with basic human dignity after he was violently, and needlessly, taken down, he might not be dead.

I recall the way in which Michael Brown’s body was left on the street for four hours, as if he were beneath the dignity of an animal.

That Staten Island Grand Jury

The borough is far more supportive of police violence than anywhere else in the city:

In an average of Quinnipiac University polls taken in August and November, only 41 percent of Staten Island residents supported bringing charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo (the margin of error on these combined subsamples is 7 percentage points). In New York overall, 64 percent approved of criminal charges. Staten Island isn’t like the rest of the city.

Half of Staten Islanders thought it was “understandable that the police could have acted” the way they did in the Garner case, compared to 43 percent who said there was “no excuse.” Again, that’s far lower than in the rest of the city, where 66 percent of residents indicated to pollsters that there was “no excuse.” … Staten Island’s adult citizen population — the group from which the grand jury was drawn — is almost 70 percent non-Hispanic white; New York overall is majority non-white.

Faces Of The Day

Grand Jury Declines To Indict NYPD Officer In Eric Garner Death

Demonstrators lie down during a protest in Grand Central Terminal in New York City on December 3, 2014. Protests began after a Grand Jury decided to not indict officer Daniel Pantaleo. Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by Pantaleo on July 17, 2014. Pantaleo had suspected Garner of selling untaxed cigarettes. By Yana Paskova/Getty Images.

The Lawful Killing Of Eric Garner

A reader writes:

I am in fear.

My son is 15 years old but looks like he is 20. He just crossed six feet tall and is growing, he is an athlete, a swimmer and is muscular and imposing, but he is also a completely sensitive wimp. I am white, he looks more like his mother, who is black. He has already had a bizarre police encounter. When he was 13 years old, we hired a college student on summer break to take him to and from swim practice because we were at work; she is a family friend; young, white and blond. On his first week, they were pulled over by the police and no explanation was given. The police immediately came to the passenger side where my son was, told him to get out of the car, put him up against the car, patted him down and demanded identification. Being a 13 year old, he had no ID. The girl was asked to step out of the car and was questioned, only about my son.

After some time, they left, no explanation, no ticket – nothing. The girl’s parents were as upset as we were but understandably told us that no offense meant but they didn’t want to be putting their daughter in that situation and so we needed to find another ride. We spoke to the police and were told that since there was not ticket or arrest, there was no report, so there was no explanation. Nothing happened, but because I have no idea why the interaction happened in the first place, I have no idea what could have happened.

Therefore I ran through a hundred scenarios, a number of which where my son could be as dead as many others. My ex-wife and I are both lawyers, we have means and can protect our children better than most. They go to private school, they have every other benefit education family and money can provide. (By the way, they had airsoft guns – pink ones – and only used them right around the house but not after last week.) And certainly they have been told often not to argue with authority – teachers and law enforcement – but they are still kids and do stupid things. We live in a city, but not in a dangerous area. But I am terrified because I am white and although I knew these things happen, I have never walked in a black man’s shoes.

However, for me, myself as a father of a kid who fits a profile, black and imposing, the type who seems to lend to unnatural terror among police, this is a scenario I can’t account for or defend against. In this sliver of circumstance, I have some small realization of the plight of people who have to deal with this daily. I am frustrated that people like me, white and privileged, have no inkling how the parents of a black kid growing up a dangerous place must feel every freaking day and how blithely we can dismiss these events because they are never going to happen to us.

Another reader:

I just watched the video for the first time, and I’m pretty sure I’ll hear at work tomorrow (in my smaller southern town in NW Georgia) exactly what I heard a few days ago after the Michael Brown non-indictment: he got what he deserved, he was arguing with the police, he instigated the situation by (insert whatever the cops said he was doing here), what were they supposed to do anyway when he resisted arrest?

For the life of me, I cannot grasp the mindset among so many of my friends and co-workers that finds this sort of thing acceptable, that they can just shrug if off with a “Well, he brought it on himself.”  They have no concept of proportionality, of a punishment fitting a crime.  All the see is a person of color in conflict with authorities, and in those cases – ALWAYS in those cases – the person of color brings it upon him- or herself by not acquiescing to the demands of the police.  And they get what they deserve, because they were asking for it.

A week or so ago, you featured a letter from a gay reader who was thankful that he was gay because, for one thing, it allowed him to understand what it is to be the Other.  As a gay man myself, I join him in that sentiment.  I have so much in common with these friends and co-workers, but on things that matter, on issues of empathy and compassion and attempts at understanding others who are different but who live next to us and work beside us daily, we are worlds apart, and it seems with every passing incident a chasm ever more unbreachable.

There are two tragedies here: the loss of life, and the loss of humanity.  I am emotionally exhausted and distraught by both in equal measure.

You’re not alone.