“I Can’t Breathe” – A Dram of Justice for Eric Garner?
Daniel Pantaleo the veteran, now former, New York City police officer whose illegal choke-hold killed unarmed Michael Garner in 2014 when the latter was arrested in Staten Island for selling untaxed cigarettes has been cashiered.
Mr Pantaleo and the NYPD are now, rightly, severed.
The former officer made a series of specific and ultimately deadly choices:
.he chose arrest over issuing a summons with a man police knew was not a violent criminal and who was not behaving threateningly prior to his death;
.he did not wait for back-up;
. he behaved in a manner that violated his specific training and the regulations under which he worked.
Justice, however, remains unserved.
Justice will be served only when police departments and officers take the proper lessons here and behave in ways that convince communities that Justice is a goal of their work.
08/19/2019 @ 5:21 pm
Finally….
08/19/2019 @ 6:26 pm
Nah… no justice here. Without a conviction Pantaleo will simply go to another town and get hired in a heartbeat. Hell, he’ll probably get hired as a Lieutenant if he applies with the Ferguson PD.
08/19/2019 @ 6:26 pm
…and if I sound bitter about this it’s because I am!
08/20/2019 @ 8:49 am
It’s a step and I applaud it only because a complete lack of consequences was ridiculous, though this consequence is woefully inadequate. The case deserved an indictment and in this case malfeasance is not only on the part of Pantaleo but on the part of the Staten Island prosecutor who convened a Grand Jury for the express purpose of persuading them not to indict.
Why the Hell maintain a chokehold on a suspect who’s both down and cuffed? Seriously, what was the point? Was it necessary to control the suspect? In a department for a small city where training isn’t extensive it’s one thing but this is NYPD. Even beyond the fact that the offense was trivial with no allegations of violence whatsoever and that the chokehold was blatantly against NYPD policy, how could the officer possibly have viewed this as necessary? How easy did he think it would be for an overweight guy with his hands tied behind his back to get up at all? Try getting up off the floor without using your arms. An average fifteen year old could have kept him down with a quick shove whenever he came close to getting his legs under him. That’s assuming the suspect would have tried to get up at all, which couldn’t have been established because the choke hold wasn’t released once he was down. This was embarrassingly unnecessary.
And yes, someone would hire him, as Amy says. There are enough people out there who would be impressed by what department he came out of , who wouldn’t be bothered at all by his racism, and who would have sympathy for a cop not being given complete carte blanche.