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eric garner
Congress Can Lead the Charge on Divesting From Law Enforcement
The acknowledgment that Black Lives Matter demands bold and visionary leadership at the national level.
Jun 14, 2020
As a former Hill staffer, I know how the sausage gets made: the backroom deals, the pet projects, and the extreme partisanship. Our current moment requires far more than the ego, moderation, and compromise that is typically reflected in federal legislation. This country's recognition--finally--of the devastation and destruction that comes from the over-policing and over-criminalization of black bodies and communities warrants real, meaningful change. The acknowledgment that Black Lives Matter--finally--demands bold and visionary leadership at the national level.
Elected officials must dramatically reduce law enforcement budgets and put that savings into systems that could enfranchise black and brown people--housing, education, employment, and healthcare.
That audacious vision is divestment. We must stop investing in racist and brutal policing systems. Instead, we must start resourcing the black and brown communities that have been harmed by these "law and order" institutions. Elected officials must dramatically reduce law enforcement budgets and put that savings into systems that could enfranchise black and brown people--housing, education, employment, and healthcare. And providing full access to these segments of our society means removing police from them. School discipline, mental health crises, and homelessness should not be met with a police response.
Divesting from police must happen at all levels of government. At the federal level, divestment looks like an end to the Department of Defense's 1033 program, which gives law enforcement military weapons and equipment that are used against communities and protestors. It is an end to COPS grants that put police in schools and fuel the school to prison pipeline. Divestment is prohibiting Byrne JAG dollars from being used to continue low-level arrests, the failed drug war, and the destruction of black and brown communities. These dollars can and need to be better spent.
We know what policies and practices will not work because we have been here before. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. The list of names does not stop here. Their lives deserve more than hashtags and slogans. They deserve much more than what elected officials have done to date. Members of Congress cannot continue to throw taxpayer money at another commission or study to determine the failings of law enforcement. Federal dollars cannot support more training, more technical assistance, more "checking the box" in the name of reforming the police.
If federal lawmakers are truly up for taking on the country's entrenched, racist, and violent policing systems, born out of slave patrols, they have the vocal and organized backing of constituents to get this done.
The federal government must invest in state and local communities differently. It must get out of the business of funding arrests and incarceration. And in the limited instances in which there would be law enforcement and community encounters, there must be measures to protect against police violence and ensure accountability when there is misconduct. Congress must model a national use of force standard that makes deadly force a rare, last resort. This respect for the sanctity of life must also be reflected in federal laws that prohibit the use of chokeholds and carotid holds. And if these laws are violated, there must be transparent and certain policies with which to hold police responsible.
As we mourn and protest the black lives lost, 21st century policing should look dramatically different than the current status quo. If federal lawmakers are truly up for taking on the country's entrenched, racist, and violent policing systems, born out of slave patrols, they have the vocal and organized backing of constituents to get this done. Now is not the time to dust off old bills and offer them as the way forward. Now is the time for divestment.
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Statues, Statues, They All Fall Down
European monuments to historic slavers and colonizers are the latest victims of rising protests for justice.
Jun 13, 2020
When the brutal murder of George Floyd occurred on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, few people could have imagined that it would have such far-reaching repercussions. Following the equally egregious killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, some of us assumed that Floyd's name would join the miserable rollcall of names of black Americans such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, slain at the hands of racist police and their civilian counterparts.
But Floyd's murder has ignited a breadth of protests seldom seen in the United States, and the current tension-filled climate has aspects that are still unfolding, and implications that are not yet fully appreciated.
One of the most unexpected and remarkable aspects of the nationwide protests is how these demonstrations have spread to other parts of the world, including continental Europe and the United Kingdom. Protests are occurring
not just in British cities with sizable communities of black people--such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester--but also in cities north of the English border, like Glasgow and Edinburgh. The rallies that have taken place across the United Kingdom have reflected the outrage of people of many different ethnicities.
Like the United States, Britain has a protracted and shameful history of black deaths in police custody. A significant number of the placards held by British protesters have drawn attention to the abuse of black people in Britain, even as these signs also demanded an end to the transatlantic pandemic of racism--a pandemic which, like Covid-19, has claimed a grotesquely disproportionate number of black lives.
As could be expected, Black Lives Matter protests took place in Bristol, a city in the west of England with a long history of activism and protest emanating from its black communities. But few could have predicted that in the aftermath of the rally, activists would seek, in particularly dramatic fashion, to right a specific wrong and an injustice that had been well over a century in the making.
In Bristol's city center there has stood, from the late-nineteenth century onward, a statue of a merchant who shipped captured African men, women, and children, as part of what historians refer to as the Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Triangular Slave Trade. The merchant, Edward Colston, amassed considerable wealth from his trading activities and in doing so became an important philanthropist within the city, the benefits of his largesse still being enjoyed by modern-day Bristolians.
But just as there's a long history of activism in the United States around the removal of confederate monuments, people have spoken out against Colson's statue since it was erected in the late 19th century. In more recent years, those voices became more animated. Some sought a compromise by asking that a plaque be appended to the monument, drawing attention to how Colston amassed his fortune, and the price paid by hundreds of thousands of African people in this endeavor.
On June 7, matters came to a dramatic head when a number of Black Lives Matter protesters tore down the statue of Colston. For good measure, the damaged statue was rolled to the nearby docks in Bristol city center and dumped into the water of Bristol's harbor--the same harbor from which vessels set sail on their murderous voyages.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and senior government figures such as Home Secretary Priti Patel were quick to condemn what they declared to be acts of "thuggery," a racially loaded term if ever there was one.
Ironically, just as Johnson, Patel, and others have demanded the vigorous prosecution of those allegedly responsible for the toppling of the statue of Colston, politicians across the U.K. and throughout Europe began, at long last, to take preemptive action to remove statues of equally offensive figures.
These include a statue of the infamous King Leopold II of Belgium, who presided over unspeakable horrors inflicted on the people of the Congo. He was a monarch who ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited both the land and the people of a vast expanse of central Africa. One of his preferred methods to induce harder labor in the Congo, and punish those he believed to be slackers, was to amputate the hands, feet, and limbs of men, women, and children.
What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.
There are numerous statues of him across Belgium, and one of them, in a supposed gesture of retribution, had a hand severed some years ago; another was unceremoniously removed. But one Leopold II statue that's still standing bears a particularly deplorable inscription: "I have undertaken the work in the Congo in the interest of civilization and for the good of Belgium."
In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan, in response to the toppling of the Colson statue, announced a review of the many statues and street names with explicit links to Britain's involvement in the slave trade. A statue of the notorious slaveholder Robert Milligan was already being removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands. Milligan owned several sugar plantations and hundreds of enslaved people in the British colony of Jamaica--He was just one of the many slaveholders and imperialists that were honored in public spaces in Britain.
Parallels can--and should--be drawn between the belated removal of Confederate statues and monuments throughout the South, and the similarly belated removal of statues of brutes such as Colston and Milligan.
What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.
Names of some of those taken by police brutality in the United Kingdom (as seen on placard above): Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Sheki Bayoh, Leon Briggs, Christopher Aider, Joy Gardner, Cynthia Jarrett, Cherry Groce, Smiley Culture, Michael Powell, Ricky Bishop, Brian Douglas, Leon Patterson, Derek Bennett, Sarah Reed, Roger Sylvester, Azelle Rodney, Mzee Mohammed, Edson Da Costa, Rashan Charles, Kevin Clarke, Luigi Basile, Leroy Junior Medford, Shane Bryant, Oghene Abboh, Demetre Fraser.
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"Stay in the Streets. It's Working": Two Weeks Into Racial Justice Protests, New York State Classifies Use of Chokeholds as Felony
"Let's keep pushing, marching, organizing, and winning for our communities."
Jun 08, 2020
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday urged Americans to stay the course in the massive protests which have been held in cities and towns across the U.S. for the past two weeks, pointing to New York State lawmakers passing long-awaited legislation to classify chokeholds as a felony as evidence the pressure is working.
The Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act passed in the New York State Assembly with a vote of 140-3. The bill now heads to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is expected to sign it into law.
"Stay in the streets," tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. "It's working."
The bill was passed two weeks into a nationwide uprising over police brutality and racial injustice sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other black Americans.
The legislation is named after Eric Garner, whose killing in 2014 by former NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo also sparked widespread protests. At Black Lives Matter protests since Garner's killing, many participants have chanted and carried signs reading Garner's last words as he was placed in a chokehold: "I can't breathe." The phrase was also uttered by George Floyd on May 25 when he was killed by Minneapolis police officers, sparking the most recent protests.
The NYPD banned the use of chokeholds in 1993, but there is no law holding police officers accountable for using the maneuver. The Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act will classify its use as a Class C felony, carrying a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
The city received hundreds of complaints per year about the police chokeholds well after the practice was banned, and judges over the years weakened the definition of the term. Most reports of chokeholds happened in predominantly black New York City neighborhoods.
"We're going to make sure next time this happens in New York State, police officers will be going to jail," said Assembly Member Walter Mosely, who co-sponsored the bill. "They are here to enforce the law, not to be above it."
The New York City Council announced last week that it was also planning to vote on legislation to criminalize the use of chokeholds.
Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat running to represent New York's 16th congressional district, joined Ocasio-Cortez in crediting protests in New York with pressuring lawmakers to pass the legislation.
"Let's keep pushing, marching, organizing, and winning for our communities," Bowman wrote.
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The New 'Black Codes'
The elites are acutely aware that without police terror and the U.S. prison system, which holds 25% of the world’s prison population, there would be intense social unrest.
Dec 01, 2019
The police forces in impoverished urban communities, equipped with military-grade weapons and empowered to harass and kill largely at will, along with mass incarceration, are the principal tools for the social control of the poor. There is little pretense of justice and even less of protection and safety. The corporate state and our oligarchic rulers fear a backlash from those they abandoned in deindustrialized enclaves across the country, what Malcolm X called our "internal colonies." The daily brutality and terror keep the poor, especially poor people of color, in bondage. On average, more than 1,100 people, or one every eight hours, almost all unarmed, are killed every year by police in the United States. These killings are not accidents. They are not the results of a failed system. The system works exactly as it is designed to work. And until the system of corporate power is destroyed, nothing will change for the poor, or the rest of Americans.
Every police reform going back decades, including due process, Miranda rights and protocols for filing charges, has only resulted in increased police power and resources. Our national conversation on race and crime, which refuses to confront the economic, social and political systems of exploitation and white supremacy, has been a whitewash. The vast pools of the unemployed and underemployed, especially among people of color, are part of the design of predatory corporate capitalism. And so are the institutions, especially the police, the courts, the jails and the prisons, tasked with maintaining social control of those the system has cast aside.
The elites are acutely aware that without police terror and the U.S. prison system, which holds 25% of the world's prison population, there would be intense social unrest. Outrage over the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York City, Walter Scott in Charleston, S.C., Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Laquan McDonald in Chicago--fanned by video recordings or social media exposure--may have led to the rise of groups such as Black Lives Matter but it has done nothing, and will do nothing, to curb police abuse. More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minority members as police officers, a better probation service, equitable fines and special units to investigate police abuse are public relations gimmicks. No one in power has any intention of loosening the vise. Authorities are too afraid of what might happen.
The lack of work in the legitimate economy and the bottomless need for governmental revenue have turned policing into a sustained war on the underclass.
Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the loss of industrial, unionized jobs with sustainable incomes, and the collapse of public institutions have decimated city and county budgets. Police departments are used to make up lost revenue through the constant imposition of fines on the poor, often for manufactured crimes such as blocking pedestrian traffic (which means standing on a sidewalk), drinking from an open container or selling tax-free cigarettes. Arrests and consequent fines for such violations are called "quality of life" actions. Poverty has forced many, especially the young, to derive an income from the illegal economy. The lack of work in the legitimate economy and the bottomless need for governmental revenue have turned policing into a sustained war on the underclass. It was in this war that Garner, attempting to provide for his family by selling tax-free cigarettes, became a repeated target of police harassment and was eventually choked to death by police officers on July 17, 2014, in Staten Island.
Matt Taibbi's book "I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street" uses the killing of Garner to expose the architecture of state repression. None of this repression and abuse, as Taibbi illustrates, is accidental, and none of it will be fixed until the social, political and economic injustices perpetrated upon the poor by corporate power are reversed. [Click here to see Hedges interview Taibbi.]
"Eric Garner was murdered by history," Taibbi writes. "The motive was the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and determined to stay there."
The war on poor people of color has been a bipartisan project. No one was executed in the United States between 1968 and 1976, but drastic changes in laws occurred in the 1990s. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, Democrats and Republicans passed a series of "law and order" bills that saw the number of crimes punishable by death leap to 66 in 1994. In 1974, there had been only one such crime identified in federal law.
The two parties, in the words of Naomi Murakawa, engaged in "a death penalty bidding war." Then-Sen. Joe Biden was one of the leading proponents of expanding the death penalty. Biden boasted that he had "added back to the Federal statutes over 50 death penalties." The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, pushed through by Clinton and Biden, provided funding for tens of thousands of community police officers and drug courts. It banned some assault weapons. It mandated life sentences for anyone convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including for drug crimes. The mandated life sentences were known as three-strikes provisions.
The population in state and federal prisons during the Clinton administration rose by 673,000 inmates--235,000 more than during Ronald Reagan's presidency. The police became omnipotent on the streets of poor communities. The courts became a conveyor belt transporting the poor into the nation's jails and prisons.
Taibbi writes at the opening of his book of an unprovoked police assault in 2014 on Ibrahim Annan, the son of two immigrants from Africa, while he was seated in his car in Staten Island. Annan, in his late 30s, was beaten mercilessly on his face and head by police with what is believed to have been a telescoping metal baton. His left leg was broken in three places. A year later he would still be walking with a cane. As is typical in police abuse cases, a number of charges were filed against him: menacing; criminal possession of marijuana in the fifth degree; obstructing government administration; unlawful possession of marijuana; assault in the second degree, and assault in the third degree, among others. Taibbi writes:
The long list of charges slapped on Annan were part of an elaborate game police and prosecutors often play with people caught up in "problematic" arrests. A black man with a shattered leg has a virtually automatic argument for certain kinds of federal civil rights lawsuits. But those suits are harder to win when the arrest results in a conviction. So, when police beat someone badly enough, the city's first line of defense is often to go on the offense and file a long list of charges, hoping one will stick. Civil lawyers meanwhile will often try to wait until the criminal charges are beaten before they file suit.
It's a leverage game. If the beating is on the severe side, the victim has the power to take the city for a decent sum of money. But that's just money, and it comes out of the taxpayer's pocket. The state, meanwhile, has the power to make the losses in this particular poker game very personal. It can put the loser in jail and on the way there can take up years of his or her life in court appearances. As Annan would find out, time is the state's ultimate trump card.
Victims of such violence are uniformly vilified to a public that has a predisposition to fear people targeted by police. And so are those who bear witness, such as Ramsey Orta, who used his phone to video-record the killing of Garner.
"Try to imagine a world where there isn't a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness," Taibbi writes. "Instead, they're sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand."
Success in policing is not measured by combating or investigating crime but in generating arrests and handing out summonses, turning the work of police departments into what Taibbi calls an "industrial production scheme." At the same time, there is an imperative to suppress as many reports of felonies as possible to produce favorable crime statistics. This creates a situation where, as Taibbi notes, police are "discouraged from reporting real crime in the community, which [has] the effect of letting people know that police weren't interested in committing resources to their actual needs."
Police are empowered to stop anyone for a long list of reasons, including "inappropriate attire" and "suspicious bulge." This provides legal cover for the random stops and searches carried out by police, especially against boys and men of color. Garner was harassed in this way throughout much of his life.
"Garner was harmless, but he was also a massive, conspicuous, slovenly dressed black man standing on a city block during work hours," Taibbi writes. "People like him would become the focus of a law enforcement revolution that by the late 2000s had become intellectual chic across America with a powerfully evocative name: Broken Windows."
At its core, the broken-windows policy--the idea that arrests for minor violations prevent major violations--was warped by what Taibbi calls a "chilling syllogistic construct: New Yorkers who are afraid of crime are already victims. Many New Yorkers are scared of black people. Therefore, being black is a crime."
It is under this construct, as Taibbi writes, that "90 to 95 percent of all people imprisoned for drug offenses in New York in the nineties were black and Hispanic, despite studies showing that 72 percent of all illegal drug users in the city were white."
The random stopping and searching of poor people of color became known as stop and frisk, a bulwark of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York. The city government argued that it was not engaging in racial profiling. It stopped poor black and brown people, it said, because they were statistically more likely to be criminals. In 2011 and 2012, Taibbi writes, "blacks and Hispanics represented 87 percent of all the people stopped. The city of New York justified these stops by stating that 'approximately 83 percent of all known crime suspects and approximately 90 percent of all violent crime suspects were Black and Hispanic.' "
It is a startling admission by the city, but one that explains the war on the poor. There was, Taibbi writes, "a single, blanket justification that covered 'reasonable suspicion' for at least 80 percent of those searches: they were black or Hispanic residents of high-crime neighborhoods."
The police targeting of black people is part of a long continuum in American history.
The police targeting of black people is part of a long continuum in American history. It has its origins in the post-Civil War era's Black Codes, which prohibited blacks from owning weapons, restricted their property rights, forbade them to assemble in groups and imposed severe penalties on them for minor or meaningless crimes. "No matter what the time period, police from the Civil War through the later Jim Crow period always had a series of highly flexible laws ready if they felt the need to arrest any black person uncooperative enough not to have committed an actual crime," Taibbi writes.
Ghettos and crime-ridden neighborhoods, our "racial archipelagoes," he writes, were "artificially created by a series of criminal real estate scams." Real estate companies in the 1960s used scare campaigns to drive out white residents. They brought in "a new set of homeowners, often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles. They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for repairs, but repairs would never be done."
The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved for $17,000.
The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house worth $2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets, lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile, the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage corporation.
Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon. Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more time. Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into even greater disrepair.
This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent black and Hispanic in 1966.
Once poor people of color were quarantined in these ghettos it was almost impossible for them to get out.
Aggressive policing is the bulwark of a segregated America. The police patrol the borders between our urban wastelands and affluent white neighborhoods. This policing, Taibbi writes, "maintains the illusion of integration by allowing police officers to take the fall for policies driven by white taxpayers on the other side of the blue wall."
"Follow almost any of these police brutality cases to their logical conclusion and you will eventually work your way back to a monstrous truth," Taibbi writes. "Most of this country is invested in perpetuating the nervous cease-fire of de facto segregation, with its 'garrison state' of occupied ghettos that are carefully kept out of sight and mind."
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After Nationwide Calls for Justice and Family's Tireless Advocacy, NYPD Fires Officer Who Killed Eric Garner
"Eric Garner's family has never stopped fighting."
Aug 19, 2019
This story has been updated from its original.
Civil rights advocates on Monday applauded the family of Eric Garner for their tireless advocacy over the past five years, as the NYPD announced that Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Garner in 2014, had been fired.
A number of observers also made clear that Pantaleo's firing--after five years of sustained pressure and a number of failures by the justice system to hold the officer accountable--must mark the beginning of a new era of social justice reform.
Garner's daughter Emerald spoke shortly after the announement, expressing thanks for Pantaleo's long-awaited dismissal, but pledging, "the fight is not over."
"We will be going for congressional hearings, we will be trying to repoen the case, we weill be going after the rest of the officers incolved, because it's not over," Garner said. "I don't want another Eric Garner. I will do everything in my power to never see another Eric Garner."
The family is fighting for the passage of the Eric Garner Law, she added, which would ensure the NYPD never uses chokeholds and that officers are held accountable for civil rights violations.
Pantaleo's firing after remaining on the force for five years amounted to only a "modicum of justice" for Garner's family, the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement, calling on the NYPD to hold the other officers who were involved in Garner's arrest accountable.
"Harm--including grave harm--by police officers is not merely a matter of individual bad actors," said the group. "From a lack of transparency and accountability, to a culture of secrecy and ongoing biased policing, too many of the factors that led to Mr. Garner's death and the injustice that followed remain. For Mr. Garner, his family, and all New Yorkers, we need wholesale cultural change within the police department and to move forward with reforms."
Others echoed the call for full accountability and expressed anger that it had taken half a decade for Pantaleo to be removed from the force.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted that Pantaleo's firing is "not enough" and highlighted ways in which he would reform the criminal justice system--mandating criminal liabily for all civil rights violations resulting from police misconduct, directing the U.S. Justice Department to investigate all deaths caused by police officers, and ending practices like stop-and-frisk and "broken windows" policing.
Earlier:
Just over five years after Eric Garner was killed during an arrest by a New York City police officer, the officer who killed him was fired on Monday.
The decision came after years of unrelenting advocacy by his family and other supporters.
In a long-awaited statement, New York City Police Commissioner James O'Neill announced that the NYPD had determined Officer Daniel Pantaleo had violated department policy by placing Garner in a chokehold when arresting him in July 2014. The maneuver was banned by the NYPD two decades ago.
"It is clear that Daniel Pantaleo can no longer serve as a police officer," O'Neill told the press.
In addition to his termination, Pantaleo will not receive a pension.
Garner's family--including his daughter Erica, who died in 2017 at age 27--consistently demanded a thorough investigation of Garner's death and Pantaleo's conviction and firing.
A Staten Island grand jury's decision not to bring charges against Pantaleo resulted in an uproar in 2014, and Garner's family expressed outrage last month when the U.S. Justice Department announced it would not prosecute the officer.
But this month Deputy Commissioner Rosemarie Maldonado, a department judge, found that Pantaleo was guilty of "reckless" misconduct, renewing hope that the officer could be fired.
On social media, supporters on Monday gave credit to Garner's daughters, Erica and Emerald; his mother, Gwen Carr; and his widow, Esaw Snipes, for their tireless advocacy for justice.
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#FirePantaleo: Demands for Justice as NYPD Officer Who Used Fatal Chokehold on Eric Garner Gets Suspension
Department puts Daniel Pantaleo on suspension after administrative judge recommends firing
Aug 02, 2019
The New York Police Department announced Friday it was placing officer Daniel Pantaleo--who placed Eric Garner in a banned and fatal chokehold in 2014--on suspension following an administrative judge's recommendation earlier in the day that Pantaleo be fired.
The developments sparked the hashtag #FirePantaleo to light up Twitter and ignited renewed demands from Garner's family for justice and "true accountability."
As the New York Daily News reported:
In her recommendation, [NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemary] Maldonado found Pantaleo guilty of one of the two charges against him--recklessly using a chokehold banned by the NYPD. She cleared him of the second charge, intentionally restricting Garner's breathing. Pantaleo testified before the grand jury that he used a department-approved seatbelt takedown maneuver on Garner.
Maldonado's recommendation that Pantaleo be fired is going unheeded--at least at this point.
According to NBC News:
Now it is up to the city's police commissioner whether Pantaleo will keep his job, a decision the department said will come this month.
The NYPD announced that the officer has been suspended effective Friday in keeping with longstanding practice when there is a recommendation for firing.
Scott Hechinger, a public defender and director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, said that firing Pantaleo "is literally the very least NYPD could have done." Instead, said Hechinger, the department is sending "a chilling message to cops: 'Do anything. We got you.'"
As Hechinger referenced, Pantaleo's killing of the 43-year-old father was captured on video.
That video--which showed Garner repeating, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe" as he was pulled to the ground--went viral and became a rallying cry for justice for police brutality.
Online racial justice organization Color of Change said in a tweet Friday: "#EricGarner and his family deserve justice. It's been 5 years too long. Nothing will bring Eric back, but the NYPD Commissioner and @NYCMayor must follow this long overdue recommendation and #FirePantaleo to finally provide justice to Garner's family. #JusticeforEricGarner"
Eric Garner's mother, Gwen Carr, said Maldonado's recommendation brought her "some relief," but she reiterated her call for Pantaleo and "all of these officers who engaged in misconduct related to Eric's murder" to be fired.
Police reform campaign Change the NYPD shared Carr's statement:
"My family and I have been fighting for five long years for justice and accountability for Eric's murder--and Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD have put up roadblocks and delays every step of the way. It brings me some relief to learn that Judge Maldonado has recommended that Pantaleo be fired--but the recommendation is long overdue, I'm still not allowed to see Maldonado's report, and we still have a ways to go before there is true accountability for Eric's murder. It's past time for Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD to end their obstruction, stop spreading misleading talking points, and finally take action for my son.
"Pantaleo must immediately be put on unpaid suspension so that he doesn't continue to profit from the murder of my son, he should be stripped of his badge and weapons immediately, and he should be fired without a pension, benefits, or a 'good guy letter.'
"A disciplinary trial for Sgt. Kizzy Adonis must be scheduled immediately, and all officers responsible for my son's death and for engaging in misconduct to cover it up must be charged and fired--including Justin D'Amico and Lt. Christopher Bannon.
"My son deserves more than recommendations; he deserves justice. New Yorkers deserve to know that police who kill our children and those who try to cover it up will be fired from the NYPD so that they don't get paid with our taxpayer dollars to be a danger to us. I will continue to fight--and I'm asking everyone who supports me in NYC and around the country to continue to fight--until there is accountability for Eric and for all New Yorkers, and until Pantaleo and all of these officers who engaged in misconduct related to Eric's murder have been fired from the NYPD."
As the New York Times recently reported, "As a legal matter, [New York City Mayor] Mr. de Blasio cannot directly fire Officer Pantaleo; that role falls to the police commissioner, James P. O'Neill." Yet, the Times wrote, "the mayor certainly has influence over the police department."
Carr wasn't alone in urging de Blasio to use his influence to effect Pantaleo's ouster. De Blasio was interrupted by hecklers who shouted "Fire Pantaleo" on Wednesday during the Democratic presidential primary debate. And Justice League NYC, an initiative of criminal justice reform group Gathering for Justice, made a similar call Friday.
"Finally, after five long years," said Justice League NYC, "a judge has seen what we've always seen--#EricGarner was killed by an illegal chokehold and the moral obligation is to #FirePantaleo--and now it's time for @NYCMayor to act."
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NYPD Must #FirePantaleo Now, Eric Garner's Family Says After DOJ Announces It Will Not Prosecute Officer Accused of Using Chokehold
"The Justice Department's decision not to prosecute Daniel Pantaleo sends a dangerous message to law enforcement that they can kill with impunity."
Jul 16, 2019
Civil rights advocates decried the U.S. Justice Department's announcement on Tuesday that it would not prosecute a New York police officer in the death of Eric Garner as a "gross injustice," the victim's family demanded that the officer be fired.
Daniel Pantaleo is accused of triggering a fatal asthma attack five years ago when he put Garner in a "chokehold," a maneuver that's been banned by the NYPD for more than two decades. The five-year anniversary of Garner's death falls on Wednesday and marks the deadline by which charges would need to be filed against Pantaleo.
Garner's mother, Gwen Carr, and his daughter, Emerald Garner, spoke to the press after emerging from a meeting with prosecutors and Rev. Al Sharpton, where they learned of the DOJ's decision.
"The DOJ has failed us," Carr told reporters. "Five years ago my son said, 'I can't breathe' 11 times. And today we can't breathe because they have let us down...This is not an easy fight but we kept on pushing. And make no mistake about it, we're going to still push."
"We're asking the commissioner to make the right decision" regarding Pantaleo's dismissal, Carr added.
"Pantaleo needs to be fired!" Emerald said. "He needs to be fired. There is no waiting, there is no nothing....Five years later and there's still no justice. So no, there won't be no calm. No, there won't be no peace. No justice, no peace."
"They came in that room and gave their condolences," Emerald added in her statement to the press, noting that her sister Erica also died in 2017 while fighting for justice for their father. "Five years later, I don't want no condolences. I want my father and I want my sister."
"The tragic killing of Eric Garner was recorded and widely shared across the country and is a stark example of the dangers faced by African Americans at the hands of the very police who are sworn to protect them," said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in a statement. "The Justice Department's decision not to prosecute Daniel Pantaleo sends a dangerous message to law enforcement that they can kill with impunity."
Pantaleo has continued to serve in the NYPD since Garner's death, on desk duty. His pay rose to $120,000 per year in 2016 and he has continued to accrue pension benefits.
Police Commissioner James O'Neill has said he won't determine whether to fire Pantaleo until an administrative judge hands down her verdict in the officer's disciplinary hearing.
On social media, progressive groups, including Indivisible and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called the DOJ's decision an injustice and joined the Garner family's call for Pantaleo to be dismissed.
According to ABC News, Attorney General William Barr made the final decision not to prosecute Pantaleo.
Some critics denounced the Obama administration for failing to swiftly bring charges against the officer. Former Attorney General Eric Holder supported prosecuting Pantaleo at the time, but the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York warned that it would be difficult to prove that Garner's rights had been violated. Under Holder's successor, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the DOJ was working on the case when President Donald Trump was elected.
"The Obama administration broke the hearts of the family of Eric Garner when they let this case carry over to the Trump administration," journalist and civil rights advocate Shaun King tweeted.
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All Democratic 2020 Frontrunners But Biden Denounce DOJ for Failing to Hold Officer Accountable In Eric Garner's Death
Sen. Kamala Harris called the decision "a miscarriage of justice" while Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote that the Garner family "has suffered too much"
Jul 16, 2019
With the exception of Joe Biden, as of this writing on Tuesday all of the 2020 Democratic frontrunners had expressed support for Eric Garner's family and outrage over the Trump administration's decision not to prosecute the New York police officer accused of killing him in 2014.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who worked with Garner's daughter Erica on issues of social justice and police accountability before Garner's death in 2017, was the first major primary candidate to speak out about the Department of Justice's announcement.
The decision, reportedly finalized by Attorney General William Barr, was "not just," tweeted Sanders, "and we will not have real justice for black Americans until there is serious reform of our racist criminal justice system."
The senator was followed by his colleagues, Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in condemning the administration's decision not to charge Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who is accused of putting Garner in a fatal chokehold five years ago and who still serves in the NYPD.
Sen. Cory Booker, Gov. Jay Inslee, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand were among the candidates who issued their own statements decrying what they called "unjust" and "an outrage."
Joe Biden has been considered a frontrunner since before he announced his candidacy in April, and is currently polling between 21 and 32 percent, according to the most recent surveys.
The former vice president has faced criticism during the campaign regarding his record on racial justice, including his history of opposing school busing to integrate schools in the 1970s and 1980s, with Harris telling him she had been personally affected by school segregation as a child.
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Bill de Blasio Can't Run for President as a Progressive If He Doesn't Fire Daniel Pantaleo
This level of moral cowardice is disqualifying for a would-be president
May 17, 2019
Bill de Blasio cannot possibly run for president as a progressive. In 2014, after years of Republican mayors, de Blasio ran on a criminal justice platform, was elected, and promised to be a transformational, progressive mayor for America's largest and most diverse city. In my 25 years as a criminal justice reformer and organizer, I can tell you that he has not lived up to that promise.
When de Blasio started as mayor, there was hope that he would enact meaningful criminal justice reform in New York City. But de Blasio slowly but surely backpedalled on this promise over the years. Nothing is more representative of this than how de Blasio has handled the case of Officer Daniel Pantaleo.
Despite knowing we have a criminal justice system that refuses to punish white officers and having seen indisputable video evidence that Eric Garner was killed by a chokehold, the mayor has not yet fired Daniel Pantaleo, instead waiting on the CCRB to make that decision for him. Pantaleo is a City Employee and under the mayor's jurisdiction. He has and has always had the legal authority and moral obligation to fire Daniel Pantaleo.
When politicians like de Blasio refuse to use the authority granted to them by voters, they betray the very organizers that have worked with them to promote their agenda and elect them into office. Grassroots organizers at the Pantaleo hearings are the bedrock of the progressive base de Blasio claims to serve. I'm one of them.
At The Gathering for Justice, we have worked with our criminal justice task force, Justice League NYC, to live up to our moral obligation to address ongoing problems like police brutality and spur action. This builds on the legacy our organization started when we took our actions into the streets and the halls of congress when Officer Daniel Pantaleo was non-indicted - holding police, and politicians, accountable.
We have done our job. But politicians like de Blasio have yet to hold up their end of the bargain.
Ever since the NYPD's disgraceful work stoppage in 2014, de Blasio has been too scared of the power of the NYPD to make the difficult, principled decisions which his office demands of him. He is a man who campaigned on criminal justice reform and ending stop-and-frisk yet has done nothing for the formerly incarcerated, the currently incarcerated, or the millions of people of color in this city subject to discriminatory policing. And now he won't even fire a man the NYPD's own Internal Affairs Division recommended be terminated.
Bill de Blasio has made many unfulfilled promises to people of color in NYC. Instead, the mayor has chosen out of fear and convenience to prioritize his relationship with the NYPD. Where is the progressive leader our city voted for in 2013 and re-elected in 2017? What does de Blasio want his legacy as mayor to be? He can be a mayor who fulfills his promises to people of color, or he can be a mayor remembered for his lack of commitment on issues like NYCHA, gentrification, and solving police brutality, while using his platform as the mayor of New York to run for the nation's presidency.
Civil rights icon John Lewis famously asked "If not us, then who? If not now, then when?" For de Blasio, the answer is that it's not him and it's never time to act. No situation more clearly illustrates de Blasio's lack of moral courage than his foot-dragging over Officer Daniel Pantaleo.
This level of moral cowardice is disqualifying for a would-be president.
How can someone run for president who can't even handle the responsibilities which come with using the power of a mayor? If de Blasio wants to be the moral leader of the United States, he has to be capable of moral leadership in the five boroughs first.
We know that sometimes the use of executive power to protect minority rights and enact civil rights reform is necessary. In this case, de Blasio has a golden opportunity to prove himself to be not just a capable progressive democratic candidate, but a true leader who is willing to say that "the buck stops with me." I can't support de Blasio given his track record, but I do still believe that New York's mayor can make a return to the form that he showed in 2014.
If he wants to be president, de Blasio must do the right thing and fire Pantaleo.
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Calling Out 'Crisis of Leadership' Under Trump, Ex-Obama HUD Chief Julian Castro Enters 2020 Presidential Race
Former San Antonio mayor announces campaign while vowing to recommit US to the Paris agreement and championing Medicare for All
Jan 11, 2019
Julian Castro, former mayor of San Antonio and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary under President Barack Obama, formally declared on Saturday that he is seeking the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 contest--an announcement that's been expected since he launched an exploratory committee last month.
In a Saturday morning speech at San Antonio's Plaza Guadalupe, Castro denounced President Donald Trump's immigration policies--including his demand for billions of dollars in border wall funding that's produced the longest government shutdown in U.S. history--and his charaterization of refugees from Central and South America arriving at the Southern border as "a national security crisis."
"There is a crisis today. It's a crisis of leadership. Donald Trump has failed to uphold the values of our great nation," 44-year-old Castro told the crowd. "Yeah, we have to have border security, but there is a smart and a humane way to do it. And there is no way in hell that caging babies is a smart or a good or a right way to do it. We say no to building a wall and say yes to building community."
"As president, my first executive order will recommit the United States to the Paris climate accord."
--Julian Castro, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate
"There are serious issues that need to be addressed in our broken immigration system, but seeking asylum is a legal right. And the cruel policies of this administration are doing real harm and damage," added Castro, who is the grandson of a Mexican immigrant and would be the first Latino president.
Laying out other key components of his campaign platform, Castro noted his support for Medicare for All and his rejection of corporate political action committee (PAC) money as well as his dedication to taking action to address the global climate crisis.
"As president, my first executive order will recommit the United States to the Paris climate accord," Castro vowed, referencing the international deal that Trump ditched just months after taking office. Endorsing the Green New Deal, he added, "The biggest threat to our prosperity in this 21st century is climate change."
Castro also decried police violence toward African Americans, particularly compared with how authorities handled Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who murdered nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina three years ago.
While Castro pledged to campaign on several progressive issues, following his speech on Saturday, some critics pointed to an April 2016 Politico report on a petition launched by a coalition of progressive organizations when former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was considering Castro as a running mate in the 2016 race. The groups--including Presente.org, MoveOn, DailyKos, Rootstrikers and the Working Families Party--charged that Castro's record at HUD was disqualifying.
Citing the coalition's calculations, Politico reported that "HUD under Castro has sold 98 percent of the long-delinquent mortgages it acquired through a program aimed at preventing foreclosures to Wall Street banks under Castro's watch, without anywhere near the number of needed strings attached." Some group leaders also said that as agency chief, "Castro has done too much to help private equity firms like Blackstone, instead of black and Latino communities."
Castro is among the growing list of Democrats who have announced their plans to run for president--including Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), who said in a video circulated by CNN on Friday that she will make a formal announcement next week, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who launched an exploratory committee at the end of last year.
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