For the second time in two weeks, a grand jury has declined to indict a police officer who killed an unarmed black man.
A failure to indict in a case involving a potential homicide is supposed to be a rare occurrence. Yet, that’s what happened last week in Ferguson, MO, and again today in New York, where a police officer had been videotaped choking Eric Garner to death, after jumping him from behind.
Garner’s crime? He was suspected of selling cigarettes illegally.
CNN reported that the cause of Garner’s death was “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” The New York City Police Department prohibits chokeholds. The death was ruled a homicide.
No wonder people think our justice system no longer works. It’s not as if we’re talking about convicting these police officers. An indictment simply brings the case to trial to see that justice is done.
I think it’s pretty clear the prosecutors are protecting the people they get their evidence from, and in many cases for DAs, the people who donate considerable funds to their campaign coffers.
Special prosecutors should be used in all instances in which cops are implicated in possible charges.
I can’t see any other way for this cop to have gotten off in NY from any charge at all other than a prosecutor actively undermining their own case.
they shouldn’t bring the case before a grand jury in the first place. In cases like these, there should have been special prosecutors, as rypower said. At the very least, the DA’s should have recused themselves, knowing they weren’t committed to going forward with their cases.
perfect smokescreen. The process is not adversarial. The proceedings are not public. The purpose of the grand jury is to find probable cause for an indictment, not to find the person innocent. This is a perversion of the grand jury system.
This just isn’t true:
That’s simply not true. If the purpose of the grand jury was “to find probable cause”, then it would be redundant. Without the grand jury system, we could simply leave it to police and prosecutors to prove probable cause at an ordinary preliminary hearing before a judge. The true purpose of a grand jury is to convene a panel of ordinary citizens to act as a real check against overzealous police and prosecutors. The true purpose is to determine whether or not the police and prosecutors have assembled enough evidence to convince a jury that there is at least enough probable cause to believe that the defendant may be guilty of the crimes charged.
All that said, this is undoubtedly true in this case and the Michael Brown case:
But that’s because, seemingly, the prosecutors didn’t do their jobs to present the best possible case for probable cause to the grand juries. Not because the grand jury system isn’t intended to primarily protect innocent defendants. Which it is.
What I mean to say is the first part of my sentence, “The purpose of the grand jury is to find probable cause for an indictment.” What I probably should have said was the grand jury was not supposed to try the case, which is essentially what the prosecutor did. He made an end run around an actual trial. With that said, the prosecutor, as I understand, doesn’t present both sides of the case, he presents the affirmative case for the prosecution. There is typically no defense presented to the grand jury. In Ferguson and in Staten Island, there are serious questions that these cases were treated typically.
What makes all this so suspicious is the “ham sandwich” doctrine: the fact that prosecutors don’t typically bring a case forward unless they have probable cause. The number of non-indictments returned from a grand jury is not just small, it’s infinitesimally small.
CBS This Morning (I’m a big Charlie Rose fan so it’s the only morning show worth watching at the gym) had a great segment with the victims wife and mother, and they mentioned how large, how multiracial, and how peaceful the protests were. Al Sharpton carried himself well in that segment as well. It is worth watching just to see the change in coverage starting to take place and the change in tone.
Apparently it was beneath the dignity of the Christmas lighting ceremony to even merit mentioning when Matt Lauer hosted that event last night, even though the protests were audible.
dependent on police investigators to further their cases, it’s impossible to imagine that they will aggressively go after one of their own. Go after one of them, and the rest of the blue brigade ceases to cooperate with you. They call it solidarity. In Ferguson, I’m sure the prosecutor had this in mind when he presented a case to the grand jury. Grand juries are slam dunks for prosecutors. If they want a decision, an indictment, they will get it. In Ferguson, he didn’t want an indictment, and presented a case guaranteed to achieve that end. In NYC, I believe the same dynamic was in play. The prosecutor went through the motions for the PR aspect of the case, knowing full well, that the outcome would be one he, and his symbiotic associates in the police dept, would be happy with. I don’t know what the solution is, but there are too many of these cases, and the outcomes are always unsatisfactory for the public.
There are good police officers and rogue officers. What I find most troubling is hearing nearly universal approval from law enforcement of the actions on the video tape that shocks the conscience of the American people.
I didn’t see any of the serve and protectors offer assistance or attempt to revive Eric Garner, to hold anyone accountable, or offers to make changes in policy and training to prevent further tragedies. Law enforcement spokespeople continue to state that people need to be educated as to the law to understand that Eric Garner’s death while tragic, was perfectly legal and appropriate.
Not sure when it became legal to use deadly force to subdue a non-violent suspect. If it is legal, we need to change the law.
Four EMTs were at the scene and did nothing to try to revive Garner. They were later suspended without pay; but you have to wonder if police at the scene suggested or ordered them not to help. It’s hard to imagine that someone, whose job it is to respond to medical emergencies, would just stand by at the scene of just such an emergency and do nothing unless they felt constrained by someone. That’s why I’m not satisfied with just hearing that these EMTs were suspended without pay.
Underrated and under asked question.
The powerful in government, often unelected, fear the citizenry. They arm their guardians with weapons of war and training by foreign powers in military tactics used against the populace. In Ferguson we saw the use of armored vehicles and loaded machine guns aimed at protestors. How long before the firing begins?
Their media outlets, with close ties to the government, seek to drive a wedge between the races as they report their news propaganda as a race problem. It is not. Police of color and white violently engage citizenry every day. All citizens are equal targets of police violence.
We must be one.
“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”
― J.K. Rowling
literally thousands and thousands of their 35,000 cops are fired — all the leadership and every single cop who’s had committed acts of brutality or racial profiling.
Thousands and thousands. There needs to be a serious, major house cleaning. That’s the only way to change the culture.
Ditto the prosecutors. The prosecutor who handled this case should be immediately fired and federal authorities should bring civil rights charges against him, yesterday.
How about a little due process for individual records? Let’s not assume that thousands of cops have been involved in police brutality and racial profiling. DeBlasio rightfully reversed the stop-and-frisk policy, but as long as it was policy, for example, all the cops adhering to the policy at the time should not be fired.
I suggest we need rather more “due process” for the millions of innocent black men killed, injured, and unfairly incarcerated by the thousands and thousands of cops “adhering to policy”. “Adhering to policy” has not been a viable defense for these kinds of human rights abuses since the Nuremburg trials.
When black fathers no longer have to have “The Conversation” with black sons about how to handle police “attention”, we can perhaps take another look at protecting the rights of cops.
First things first.
We’re not talking about anything remotely approaching the Holocaust. Due process on both sides is not mutually exclusive and if there are grounds for appealing several of those incarcerated (not by cops, btw – juries do that) then so be it.
The principle articulated in the Nuremberg trials is MUCH more broad than the Holocaust. The purpose of Godwin’s law is NOT to suppress conversation about the implications of Nuremberg or, for that matter, discussion of the Holocaust. In my view, a policeman — armed with a deadly weapon and authorized to use deadly force — takes on a proactive obligation to NOT “adhere to policy” when that policy results in the pervasive racism and discrimination that takes place across America today.
The fundamental premise that I refer to is the argument that “I was just following orders”. We correctly established, in the Nuremberg trials, that this argument is not a defense for crimes against humanity or human rights abuses. A cop who says “I was just adhering to policy” when he or she routinely arrests black men for actions that he or she ignores when done by whites is simply rationalizing thuggery.
Such protestations from you would provoke less reaction from me if they were balanced by an even occasional fervor to protect young black men from the pervasive discrimination they face in today’s America. It seems to me that you are far more eager to protect violent cops and corrupt politicians (with your arguments against jail for them) than to even acknowledge the reality of the crimes they perpetrate and the suffering that results from those crimes.
I used a much less aggressive policy as an example (If stop and frisk turned into a beat down you won’t get a defense from me.) and pushed back on what appeared to be Ryan’s call for a dragnet without considering whether individual cops were actually ever violent. When have I argued against jail for violent cops? That is most emphatically NOT my view!
[ eager to protect ] – [violent cops] – and – [corrupt politicians (with your arguments against jail for corrupt politicians].
The cops that Ryan is talking about ARE violent and brutal. “Stop and frisk” is not some benign policy decision involving a change in paperwork. It means terrifying confrontations between lethally armed thugs in uniform and teenagers who are doing NOTHING WRONG.
You argue against jail for corrupt politicians virtually every time the question comes up. You argued against jail for Michael McLaughlin, against jail for John O’Brien and his criminal co-conspirators, and (I think) against jail for Sal DiMasi.
Violent cops should be in jail, and your assessment of my attitude toward corrupt politicians is accurate, but they are two very different things. After all, part of my argument regarding corruption is that jail SHOULD be for the violent.
I don’t like stop and frisk and I seriously question its constitutionality (though I don’t know off hand if there has been a ruling in that regard), but it comes nowhere close to rising to the level of what the Nazis did and cops need to be disciplined case by case. Calling cops legally armed thugs betrays what I have often seen as a 60s mentality in you (ie you seem to think that all cops are inclined to act like those who broke up demonstrations in 1968 Chicago.) and I don’t think that’s appropriate. Is stop and frisk always more confrontational than I think? The image I have is like being pulled aside by airport security for an additional patdown either by random selection or when the metal detector goes off – inconvenient and maybe a bit embarrassing, but certainly not violent.
…I understand this is happening on the street to people minding their own business rather than at airports where there is applied consent, hence the constitutional concerns.
The Nuremburg principle that “following orders” is not a defense is and I suggest was intended to be broadly applied. If it were limited to “what the Nazis did”, it would not even have applied to Japan. In my view, the “Nuremburg” principle applies just as well to a police officer ordered to “keep the ni**ers off the street” (to pick an extreme hypothetical) as to the Nazis.
Our eagerness to reject the implications of the Nuremburg principle is an important component of why NOBODY was investigated or prosecuted for the pervasive war crimes committed by the previous administration.
Yes, I do have a “60s mentality”. That’s because I experienced those events first-hand. I see ZERO indication that today’s heavily-armed and eager-to-bust-heads riot police are ANY different from their counterparts in 1968. Perhaps you might worry less about my “mentality” and more about your own.
Again with the “always”! Why is it so difficult for you to appreciate that “always” and “never” are irrelevant to real problems with real people in real society?
For people of color living in New York city, stop and frisk was usually, perhaps even almost always, more confrontational than you describe. Have you not read the multitude of descriptions that abound on the net? Your image of “being pulled aside by airport security for an additional patdown” is incredibly naive.
I encourage you to watch at least a little bit of this, especially around 0:55. Or perhaps the longer version that appears to be the source of the first. The confrontations being described (and audio-taped) have more in common with the behavior of thugs than anything that happens in an airport.
Perhaps its time for you to update your “image” about what stop and frisk (and “white privilege”) means for adolescent blacks in, say, Harlem.
…discipline the cop in that encounter and the supervisor who flat out ordered the targeting of teenage black males. I am by no means defending either the stated policy or the implementation thereof, but I do still think we can discern degrees of acceptability to the concept of just following orders based on the obvious severity and immorality of such orders.
You wrote “The image I have is like being pulled aside by airport security for an additional patdown either by random selection or when the metal detector goes off – inconvenient and maybe a bit embarrassing, but certainly not violent.”
I offered my response to demonstrate that your IMAGE is woefully unrealistic. Even if this cop and this supervisor are disciplined, it won’t change the reality that this episode happens EVERY DAY to HUGE NUMBERS of young black men.
This episode is the reality. It won’t change while privileged white male liberals rationalize it away or hide behind comfortable and utterly false fantasies about what America is actually like in 2014.
Boston cops went on strike in 1919. All of the strikers were fired on the spot, never rehired. Clean slate. Presto.
It seems to me that a dilemma is highlighted by this incident. The police in this incident weren’t preventing violent crime or damage to property.
Garner was accused of selling individual smuggled cigarettes. NYC has long had extremely high taxes on cigarettes, which produces a very, very robust black market. It is very, very common, across economic classes (at least for kids just out of high school) to make a run to South Carolina, stop at “South of the Border,” and load up on cigarettes and fireworks, and then to sell them for a steep profit back in NYC. I knew more than a dozen people who did this at least once, after getting a drivers license, and I had a pretty sheltered existence in my youth.
There is always a risk of harm when police use force– even if they don’t use banned choke holds. On the one hand, you would prefer that this harm would only be risked to prevent violence to people or property. On the other hand, NYC has long had this, and other rather petty little regulations/tax revenue enhancements. And has long used NYPD to enforce those little tax revenue enhancements (ask someone who tries to operate a gypsy taxi cab).
So there is the dilemma, and I don’t think that the banned choke hold evades it. On the one hand, we only want the police to use force– which always carries the risk of harm, both to police, perpetrator, and innocent bystanders– in order to protect people and property from harm. On the other, we like to have the government make many rules, like the huge tax on tobacco, for people’s own good. But those rules must be enforced by the use of force by the police.
I hardly think we need tolerate as the price of taxing cigarettes, as the Times says, the lethal use of “forbidden tactics to brutalize a citizen who was not acting belligerently, posed no risk of flight, brandished no weapon and was heavily outnumbered” while six other NYPD cops look on and do nothing.
The issue here is not the charge. It’s the obscene deployment of lethal force, even after he kept saying he couldn’t breathe. Demanding that the arrest take place within the bounds of reason and decency does not require repealing the laws that make the underlying charge illegal.
The same thing could have happened if the guy stole someone’s car for a joyride and left it safe and sound parked on the street, or if he hacked some bank and stole a little old lady’s life savings. We wouldn’t be arguing about whether prohibitions on those activities are the real issue.
Once you have rules like this, it requires the police power to enforce it.
Police power is always going to be applied unfairly. People who pay the police get treated differently. People who the police like get away with things. People who the police don’t like will be treated more harshly.
I am well aware that this is the crux of the problem– it would be nice if police didn’t use greater or harsher force against an individual solely because that individual is not white. But I also recognize that human nature is what it is, and that this is an unattainable goal. It is similar to solving teen pregnancy through abstinence education– the program will ultimately fail because it depends on people being more perfect than people are in the real world, or economists “assuming a perfect market.”
So I think that it is an unalterable fact that there will be an underprivileged subset of the population that experiences exceptionally harsh or forceful interactions with the police.
I also think that every civilian interaction with police carries with it some degree of risk. The police might mistake you for someone else. They may think that you are armed, even though you are not. You might be armed, and resist, causing harm to innocent bystanders. They may react to you, rightfully or wrongfully, and injure innocent bystanders in the process. The police may be a nervous and trigger-happy rookie. He may be malicious. Etc. The essence of police is force, and you can’t really refine that much, except in a departure from reality.
I didn’t say that the NYC cigarette tax is “the real issue.” The “real issue” is how that guy didn’t get indicted, given that the whole thing was on tape, and what that says about the likely efficacy of the proposal to put cameras on police uniforms.
I am raising something that is an issue, even if isn’t the “real issue.” If the use of force by police is a matter of concern, then why is it such a great thing to find ever more things over which police are authorized to use force?
So yeah, the guy might not have died if the police had not used the banned choke hold.” But he also wouldn’t have died if NYPD wasn’t going to forcibly subdue him and haul him in for depriving the city of $15 in tax revenue.
If we sent a clear message that we won’t tolerate this kind of force, if we appoint a special prosecutor as a matter of course and some people actually do time, if we strip jobs and pensions for excessive force, it can change. I refuse to believe that appropriate and non-racist police behavior is “an unattainable goal.”
If the cops were so worried about NY’s cigarette tax laws, they could give people like Garner a ticket or something. I don’t understand why anything like arrest, to say nothing of force, comes into it at all. And while I understand (I think) your larger point about finding “ever more things over which police are authorized to use force,” I think it’s a red herring. The problem really isn’t the expanding reach of the regulatory state or something. The problem is that we seem to have a system in which the police can deploy lethal force pretty much at will without consequence.
I guess my position is that the correct amount of force in this instance would have been zero. And I was specifically avoiding zooming all the way out to the “regulatory state.” Because in local government, the enforcement mechanism for things like this is the police, which isn’t necessarily so in state and federal government.
The use of deadly force by police will usually wind up in a gray area. They aren’t wrong when they say that their job includes being shot at, and will always get some benefit of the doubt in that gray area. The shocking thing about NYC is that it wasn’t a usual case in the gray area– it was right there on video, in black-and white, so to speak, and STILL no indictment.
But, my larger point is that giving police more things over which to have confrontations with civilians, increases the number of confrontations with civilians, and some number of those, even if there is a roving special prosecutor, and cameras on every vest, and a healthy round of sensitivity training, will be harmful and fall into the gray area, and will be shocking to the conscience.
It is shocking to the conscience that this man was placed into a choke hold, and thereby killed, because he was selling contraband individual cigarettes. But to me, it would also be shocking to the conscience if he had been subdued using “approved” techniques, so that instead of being killed, he might have been bruised, because the crime of which he was accused is so thoroughly petty.
which I have never really bought into. That traditional argument has been that more rules and regulations result in lost efficiency and profits for business, and therefore higher prices; or else they reduce personal freedom, say to ride a motorcycle without a helmet or drive a car without a seatbelt.
Your argument, CMD, seems to be that more rules, no matter how relatively minor the possible infractions, will give the police more opportunities to kill you. Not quite sure of that logic. It’s a little like telling someone they shouldn’t go outside because they might get hit by a bus. There’s some truth to that, but, unless bus drivers suddenly start purposely trying to run down people on sidewalks, it should still be relatively safe to go outside.
While black. A white person would’ve been fined, and relaxing these regulations wouldn’t end stop and frisk or broken windows which target African American ‘nuisance crime’. Why was he selling cigs? For the same reason teens on the green line do it all the time-to make some extra cash since there are far fewer jobs available to black communities and black men in those communities.
Just as my nephew and I at age 12 could easily get away with shooting realistic cap guns at each other in Cedar Street park, my brother could get away with his mostly white crew underage drinking in the same park, but to a person all my black friends in the neighborhood were always harassed if they played basketball there after dark. And that’s in the peoples republic of Cambridge which has a diverse police force and had a black commissioner my entire childhood.
I got pulled over once for walking down the street at night with a hoodie on, the police had me face them they literally said “nope he’s white” and moved on. Granted, the suspect they said they were looking was black-but had I been a black person I might’ve had to go through rounds and rounds of extra questions I didn’t have to as a white man and the reaction from the cops wouldn’t have been as non-chalant or ended with an apology.
It’s a systemic problem that can only be solved by systemic reform and ensuring abusive cops get sent to prison. Just like most priests are good people, most cops are too-but the publics trust is compromised when no cop
or no bishop ever gets indicted or punished-and when the folks in uniform or vestment instinctively defend their own while dismissing the victims.
agreed
should not lead to death. We don’t do that with traffic citations or, at least in Massachusetts, with possession of small amounts of marijuana.
There are people that can’t control themselves, emotionally-disturbed people (EDPs, in NYPD logo). They can get upset and end up being “disorderly” and then “resisting arrest” until the police believe there is a “reasonable” possibility that their lives are in danger. And then… death. There is no education in how to deal with police so they don’t kill you. It’s up to the police in these cases. And given the number of the low number incidents we have in Massachusetts, you have to wonder what they’re doing wrong in other places.
that Massachusetts is better than anyone else, at all. Only that we have been lucky enough that excessive force hasn’t gotten anyone killed so far, or hasn’t made the news because it wasn’t caught on video.
that isn’t anecdotal and just my observations. The percentage of incidents may be the same, and I don’t know. But lethal force gets reported in the news.
Training matters. Policing philosophy matters. Attitudes toward policing matters. Politics matters.
Just the observations that incidents of lethal force, nationwide, are statistically rare, and so the lack of them here could as easily be random luck as the result of something special about our politics and policing philosophy.
WRT the phrase “statistically rare,” what statistics are you using?
As far as I can tell, there are no statistics on police killings.
The host of the linked site is attempting to compile a list of killings by police, but says he is actively hampered by every police agency he contacts, and passively hampered by poor reporting practices of the media. No news outlet reports killings by the police anywhere outside their coverage area, unless there is public outcry on the level of Ferguson. That you don’t read about the police killing someone in Philadelphia does not mean it didn’t happen; it means that your news sources aren’t reporting it.
This is a huge part of the problem. Police are deliberately obscuring the magnitude of their use of deadly force, by not keeping statistics, by not revealing the names of victims to the media, and by discouraging anyone who tries to find out the facts. By claiming that ” incidents of lethal force, nationwide, are statistically rare,” when there are no such statistics, you’re helping them do it.
Collecting and ensuring the ready availability of these statistics is, in my view, a clear responsibility for the Department of Justice.
This is not meant to be any more than anecdotal, but I was struck by Mark Wahlberg’s new pardon application. Per boston.com:
Wahlberg was hit with two contempt of court counts in addition to the assault charges because he violated an injunction from a prior incident in which he racially harassed black fourth-graders walking to a class picnic in Savin Hill with their teacher.
I share this not to vilify Mark Wahlberg, but because I’m struck by the parallels with the Michael Brown case. I wonder whether all the people who think Brown deserved what he got because “he robbed a store” and “he had smoked pot” — even though the cop didn’t know that and no call was made about a robbery — likewise think Mark Wahlberg should have been shot dead by the BPD on that night in 1988. His actions went far beyond anything what they’re pinning on Michael Brown.
It’s resonated with a lot if people-including people outside the “progressive” demographic. Let’s keep telling stories and comparisons-it’s the easiest way to get folks in the middle or folks that reflexively oppose Sharpton/black cops to get where the victims are coming from. I linked it to it elsewhere-but Charlie Rose interviewed Browns family on his PBS program, and his CBS morning team interviewed Garners family. Those are case studies in affirming the victimhood that Fox and too many media outlets try and take away focusing on “controversies”. They never seem to delegitimize white victims, and obviously invent many of them out of thin air (Joe the plumber, Clive Bundy).
And Indiana was an even shorter drive for them than South of the Border (a place I’ve heard a lot about from some Duke based friends). Hipsters in front of the Cobb Coffee shop helped put a few buddies through school.
on the Boston Common. Both by the passion and fervor of thousands demanding justice and by the restraint and respect of the police.
May this be the beginning to a long overdue reform of our entire criminal justice system from top to bottom.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
What do you mean they’re not?
But, I saw it on TV.
Oh, what’s that? Don’t judge them all by the actions of a few?
O.K., that makes sense.
But, all cops are still racist killers, right?