What A Bunch Of Whiners!
Cops are out on the ‘Net complaining about the civilian reaction to the decision of the grand jury on Staten Island, and they are making up all kinds of excuses.
According to the medical examiner after an autopsy was conducted, the death was caused by the choke hold and the compression on the man’s chest which are not natural causes or accidental, so he ruled the death was a homicide. If the cops want to argue that the cause was obesity or asthma, they had better show their degrees in pathology, and indicate when they examined the body.
They are claiming that the normal procedures were followed and the police officer was cleared. Sorry, but normal grand juries do not get extended testimony from suspects, and they do not take months to hear evidence and decide.
Resisting arrest without violence is not a capital offense, and suspects should not die as a result. The officer at the center of the case violated stated NYPD policy when he used the choke hold. As soon as you arrest someone, you are responsible for their well-being.
16 comments
So, they recognized this person as being a high risk obese individual yet they chocked him to death anyway…
Time to end these star chamber pardons.
I fully agree with your last line: But the “you” is rather indefinite. I think all of us are responsible even though only the person engaging in the physical activity can be held accountable.
The people who can vote are responsible for failing to demand accountability from the system. Law enforcement is not an easy job, but it isn’t as dangerous as being a garbage hauler, a lumberjack, a fisherman, or an aircraft pilot according the the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Law enforcement isn’t among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the US, and most of the 18 cops/100,000 who die in a year are killed in motor vehicle accidents, not shooting it out with criminals.
If you want to bring someone down a kick to the back of the knee will do it. If you have a nightstick, jab the thigh muscle. Small dogs drop people all the time jumping up on the back of their leg. My Mother’s poodle was notorious for it.
The death was clearly avoidable, but the cops didn’t care about anything but their convenience.
Karlo at Swerve Left has pointed out that 28 police officers died due to criminal action last year. Twenty-eight. More people died from being struck by lightning last year. There were probably over 4,000 people killed by police officers last year, it’s hard to tell because there is no requirement to report these deaths to any authority except for a small subset of police forces that are under court order to report to the FBI. Police officers were tried before a jury of their peers for none (zero) of them.
There is a term for the kind of country where police officers have complete impunity from prosecution for any crime and can impose any punishment they wish without involvement of a judge, jury, or attorneys. That term is “police state”. The only things differentiating the US from typical police states at this point are the fact that our police departments are decentralized rather than being centrally controlled, and the fact that there has to be a pro-forma kangaroo court proceeding where most defendants are unable to wage a real defense (due to the woeful state of public defenders’ offices nationwide, nevermind those jurisdictions that simply appoint the most incompetent in the county to handle defense for the indigent) prior to defendants being sent to jail or prison or execution chamber. Those are rather tiny hooks to be hanging “we’re not a police state!” banners upon…
I had hoped I was going to be dead and buried before the end game played out, because I’ve seen this game before, whether it is 1789, 1918, or 1979, it all ends badly. I’m now no longer so certain I will get my wish.
– Badtux the Somber Penguin
Who is telling all these cops that it’s OK to do knee drops on someone’s ribcage?
I saw a researcher talking about the problem on some cable channel while I was eating dinner, and he pointed out that police training has been improving for decades on techniques for deescalating violence that are used very effectively all over the US, but police officers don’t even attempt to use them in poor and minority areas. In fact, the police officers seem to reverse the process and escalate the level of violence in poor areas, and with people of color. That is what we have been seeing – the police assume that there will be violence, so they overreact to the situation.
PJ, a knee drop is excessive use of force, and from a liability standpoint, it is potentially fatal and produces obvious bruising. It isn’t control, it is gratuitous pain.
Badtux, the two most dangerous calls are family disputes and traffic stops. More cops are injured on those two calls than all of the rest combined. The reality is that the ‘tough on crime’ crowd have convinced cops that they can do whatever they want without any consequences, so the cops have become another street gang. No one seems to want to keep the peace anymore, it’s all about teaching ‘criminals’ who’s the boss.
I am 66 years old. When I was a kid of maybe 10 or younger, my dad, a public school teacher and later counselor, knew a couple of cops through his work. Occasionally Dad would invite one of them to our home at the end of the cop’s shift, for a beer or a meal. I thought nothing of it; apart from the impressive uniform, they seemed perfectly ordinary people.
In my early 30s I went back to college to study music. One of my fellow students, a violinist in a couple of the ensemble classes, was a cop, attending at night, pursuing a degree in some area appropriate to law enforcement, mainly pursuing a raise in pay at HPD. Good violinist; good sense of humor; easy to work with in ensemble.
Today I know no cops personally (well, one retired one online 🙂 ) and I’m scared to engage one in conversation in a grocery store or post office. AFAIK I’m involved in no criminal activity (at least not yet, not until being politically liberal is criminalized). I don’t use any illegal substances. And yet I can’t imagine inviting an HPD officer to my home. Thanks to Mayor Parker and our strong-mayor form of government, HPD treated local Occupy folks with more respect than in just about any other major city. But as I look around at other cities’ PDs, I wonder when it will happen here.
I can’t tell you how much it saddens me. We all have an interest in the once-normal results of law enforcement; it’s a bummer to have legitimate cause to fear what that enforcement has become.
Steve, my dad’s shop was about five blocks from the main police station in the city where I grew up. A number of his customers were cops. By and large they were large boisterous Irishmen (sort of a stereotype, but there you go), and all were white. There were no black police officers in our city. Their interactions with white people were friendly, but their talking and joking around about what they did to black people when they went into “niggertown” and went “nigger-knocking” for fun, brutalizing any black person they came across “to teach the niggers their place”, was disturbing, to say the least.
In other words, I suspect that if your father had been black, the only interactions he would have had with police officers would have been at the end of a nightstick. And if you had been black, the only interactions you would have had with that police officer in ensemble would have been a cordial nod of the head as you passed in the hall, because he would not have given you the time of day. Things changed for a while because of lawsuits and civil rights laws and a general disquiet with blatant racist violence on the part of police officers, but they never really changed *that* much, and now they’re back to what they were for the previous 200 years of this nation’s existence. This nation has 300 years of history of police brutalizing people of color, and while the police culture may have changed somewhat for a while there, today it seems to have reverted back to form.
There is one important difference today, though. Police now feel free to brutalize white people, too. That is new. We will have to see where that ends up. I suspect that if there ends up being a backlash, it will be because the police beat up the wrong white person. We’ll see, I guess…
“There is one important difference today, though. Police now feel free to brutalize white people, too.” – BadTux
For many of us, the first inkling of that change was NYPD and LAPD cops beating bloody hell out of Occupy folk, who were quite possibly the most determinedly nonviolent protest group in American history. Of course, as I say that, I remember that the 1968 Democratic National Convention saw a fair amount of cop-on-white violence as well. The more things change…
You are probably right about how it could end up. The other possibility, though, is that the worst of policemen could join (have joined???) with the KKK in an active effort to eliminate all nonwhite people in America, and other Americans are either too scared or don’t care enough to stop them from finishing the job. Time will tell.
FWIW, in W.W. II, my father, gunnery officer on a landing ship, told me when I was old enough to understand that he used occasionally to drink beer with the steward’s mate (inevitably a position filled by a black man in those days), but he confessed to me that they got together secretly, for fear of what some of their white comrades would do to the steward’s mate.
I’m relieved that my dad did not live to see the course of racism in America today…
These whiners are not the cops I worked with. The police unions backed officers to the hilt, because that was their job, their raison d’être, but the individual cops didn’t want to work with people who caused trouble. The cops in Ferguson may have been supporting that cop publicly, but they had to know what a lightning rod he would be on the job. Based on his bogus testimony, I don’t see him as brave enough to want to work as a police officer in the atmosphere he created. We could have a summer of riots, like the 1960s, if the people with the power don’t stop this crap.
These police departments may find themselves under Federal court orders, as happened in the 1960s and 70s, and that was real hell for the departments hit.
I don’t trust the local cops in my jurisdiction to do anything correctly. They openly talk about abusing suspects at convenience stores to impress the locals, but there have been too many criminal indictments of the leadership in local law enforcement agencies, for regular people to feel secure. The badges in the US are tainted by misconduct, so cops are no longer safe on the streets and they are starting to feel the anger. Things are going to get really ugly before they are finally fixed.
Steve, one of the guys in my class at my first language school was from Pensacola and was black. When we left school we came home on leave, he to Pensacola and I to Cinco Bayou, as my parents had moved back here while I was in school. As we were landing in Atlanta to catch the next flight he said we should act like we don’t know each other, and not to call him while we were on leave or “There could be trouble.” That was hard to hear, that nothing much had changed in the decade since I left Florida.
Oh, Badtux, the correct charge should have been:
New York Penal Law § 125.15 Manslaughter in the second degree.
A person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when:
1. He recklessly causes the death of another person.
It is a class C felony with a maximum term of imprisonment of 15 years.
You know what i think.
They did indict someone though. The guy who filmed Eric Garner’s death/murder.
Ramsey Orta, Man Who Filmed Eric Garner Death, Was Indicted By A Grand Jury, But Pantaleo Was Not
And here’s someone I never thought I’d agree with!
George W. Bush: Garner decision ‘hard to understand’
So, let’s see if all those white neocon bobble-head pundits and politicians call GW out for disagreeing!
BTW, there were 5 pig’s there. So I can’t see that the murderer’s excuse of “the guy was so big I was afraid he’d hurt me!” was in any way true.
Thanks for the cite of the New York law, Bryan. Every state has a similar charge, but they all call it something different and I honestly wasn’t interested enough to look up what NY State called it. Clearly this cop was not guilty of murder, because there was no intent to kill. But his behavior was also clearly reckless given that he had been informed that department policy was not to use that hold because it was dangerous.
One thing I’ve noticed is that community groups really aren’t doing themselves a favor in these cases by pushing prosecutors to overcharge with murder charges where that’s not warranted by the evidence. The Zimmerman case was another case where prosecutors overcharged due to public pressure rather than going for the lesser charge that the evidence warranted.
Kryten, when you make the cops look bad they will look for a way to retaliate.
Garner wasn’t threatening or fighting, he was just not doing what he was being told to do. The officer made the decision to struggle with Garner, which is not good technique or generally effective. The cop would have been in trouble if Garner collapsed backwards onto the fool.
Yes, even the Shrubbery can figure out that the cop screwed up, which makes the people who refuse to accept it dumber than mushrooms and other fungi.
Badtux, all the DA had to do was give the grand jury a copy of the law, the medical examiner’s report, a copy of the NYPD prohibition against choke holds, and screen the video. Instant indictment to follow. That’s how these cases are normally dealt with by prosecutors.
There is a defense under Article 35 of the Penal Law for law enforcement, but a competent DA can easily neutralize it with the NYPD memo, and the reality that Garner would only have been charged with a misdemeanor and didn’t offer any violence to the officers. Even for law enforcement, there are severe restrictions on the use of ‘deadly physical force’ and the Garner arrest didn’t qualify.
Well, there *used* to be severe restrictions on the use of ‘deadly physical force’, but today? I’m not so sure, given how often cops are inflicting it with impunity.
If prosecutors won’t allow the cases to go to trial, the restrictions don’t come into play and the cops aren’t bound by them unless they are enforced.