by Matt Taibbi
“This is going to be a real test to see where policies are in the city now and whether the change that we feel occurred has occurred,” he said, looking pained.
This was just a year after famed Princeton University professor Cornel West had attacked Sharpton for being “the bona fide house Negro of the Obama plantation,” ostensibly for not being tougher in calling for federal civil rights charges for vigilante George Zimmerman, the man who killed a seventeen-year-old black boy named Trayvon Martin in Florida.
Sharpton surely felt the sting of critics accusing him of being too close to certain figures within the Democratic Party. A “let’s trust the process” approach with de Blasio in the face of the globally publicized Garner killing would box him in even further.
But within a few weeks, Sharpton turned things around in a classic demonstration of his skill as a political infighter, sacrificing the bumbling de Blasio to gain an advantage. As political chess moves go, it was stunning to watch.
De Blasio was also in a highly awkward political situation. As a candidate for mayor, he’d denounced Broken Windows policing tactics and called for an independent monitor, which the police department had long resisted. His embrace of police reform was perhaps the element of his campaign that most galvanized the city’s minority and liberal voters.
But then he won and invited Bratton back to run his police department, which immediately brought outcries from his liberal allies. In making the announcement about Bratton, de Blasio didn’t seem to know which notes to emphasize, criticizing the “overuse of stop-and-frisk,” a strategy that he said “too often alienated communities.” But he also said Bratton was a “proven crime fighter” whose accomplishments “just jumped off the page for me.”
The Garner case was therefore destined to define de Blasio’s administration. It would test all of his rhetoric about police reform. But it would also test his loyalty to Bratton. In response to this conundrum, de Blasio made a disastrous political miscalculation. He scheduled a roundtable on July 31, two weeks after Garner’s death, to discuss police brutality issues. The roundtable was to include religious and community leaders, who would sit down with Bratton and other police officials in what he clearly hoped would be a political love-in.
De Blasio was cooked before the meeting even started. For one thing, the mayor’s staff seated him flanked on one side by Sharpton and on the other side by Bratton, leaving many line officers in the NYPD with the impression that the hated Sharpton, who had railed against police for decades and had compared prosecutors to Nazis, had equal rank with Bratton. That single image essentially ruined de Blasio with police leadership forever.
Then the show started, and it was a blowout in both directions. Bratton had built a brilliant career out of impressing journalists and liberals alike with his ability to play the role of the thinking man’s cop, the tough guy with brains and a surprising sense of culture who could hang out at uptown dining holes like Elaine’s and be an entertaining eighth at a dinner party of liberal-minded celebrities. The act had never failed him before, and he tried it again now. He put on a smile and talked about how tragic incidents like the Garner case could be avoided with better attention to detail.
“Training is absolutely the essential catalyst for, out of this tragedy, finding opportunity,” said Bratton.
“Systematic retraining will have a huge impact,” de Blasio agreed. He went on to say, “It will help us to draw the police closer to the community, and the community closer to the police.”
The mayor and the commissioner both apparently expected Sharpton to strike the same “We Are Family” note. But it went another way.
Sharpton had sat seething through the entire meeting. In his telling of the story, he was ambushed. “I didn’t find out Bratton was going to be there until I was on the way to the meeting,” he says. He recalls being on the way to the event when he heard from Rachel Noerdlinger, a former Sharpton aide who was then chief of staff to de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray.
“She said, ‘Rev, I know I don’t work for you anymore, but Bratton is going to be there. I’m telling you even though I know you might turn around,’ ” he recalls. “But I thought, if I turn around, then I’m showing up Bishop [Victor] Brown and other black leaders who’ll look like sellouts. And I didn’t want to do that. So I went.”
In Sharpton’s mind, de Blasio had set him up. De Blasio, he thought, had invited him to this meeting so that he could be photographed sitting next to the police commissioner, endorsing some vague plan to do better and pledging friendship and cooperation—“a kumbaya moment,” as Sharpton put it, that would de-escalate political tensions in the city.
Sharpton decided to dispense with the kumbaya script. With Bratton one chair away, the reverend blasted Stop-and-Frisk and pointed out to de Blasio that his own biracial son, Dante—the one with the Afro—was statistically more likely to be a target of Bratton’s chosen brand of policing.
“If Dante wasn’t your son, he’d be a candidate for a chokehold,” Sharpton seethed.
As far as “training” went, Sharpton wasn’t having it. He told Bratton off to his face. “I also think, Commissioner, that the best way to make police stop using illegal chokeholds is to perp-walk one of them that did,” he said.
Part of what happened was bad calculus on de Blasio’s part. If de Blasio thought Sharpton needed an in with Gracie Mansion, he was overestimating his importance. “I was in with the White House now,” Sharpton recalls. “I was talking police reform with Obama.” Under the circumstances, Sharpton felt he had enough political capital to throw de Blasio overboard rather than participate in a sleazy photo op to save de Blasio’s relationship with Bratton.
Only a part of the disastrous meeting was seen by the press, but it was bad enough. The mayor not only lost his tie to Sharpton—“We went through a period of just not talking for a few weeks after that,” the reverend says—but he equally undermined himself with the police, who felt Bratton had been betrayed and set up to take a beating in the press.
A war in the media ensued. A week after the roundtable, Sharpton told The New York Times that he’d been totally unaware that Bratton was going to be at the meeting.
That wasn’t exactly true. Sharpton did know, only, he says, he found out too late to do anything about it. But the mayor’s office thought it could still use this discrepancy to bloody Sharpton. De Blasio’s office had emails back and forth from Sharpton and Noerdlinger proving that the reverend knew Bratton would be there. This came out a few weeks later, when sources tipped off the New York Post to a “scandal” involving Noerdlinger.
Noerdlinger’s presence on the city staff had always irritated the police rank and file, who didn’t want anyone associated with Sharpton inside the administration. Now Noerdlinger became caught in the crossfire after Bratton was shown up at the roundtable. The Post was tipped off that Noerdlinger was supposedly dating a convicted killer who repeatedly called cops “pigs” in online posts and had been involved in a road rage incident that the paper described as “nearly running a cop off the road.”
The paper also had details of email exchanges within the mayor’s office. The most damaging was an August 7, 2014, note from Noerdlinger in which she explained why she was against outing Sharpton for saying he was unaware of Bratton’s presence at the roundtable, when in fact he had been.
“I’m still not wanting to share any email with [Sharpton] to media because it will set us backwards with [Sharpton],” she wrote.
This made political sense, but when the news finally came out, it was spun as de Blasio bending over backward to “cover up” a rift with Sharpton. De Blasio had walked into two different media buzz saws almost simultaneously. Sharpton had blindsided him at the roundtable, and police “sources” now set him up for a beating in the Noerdlinger affair. Cops called for Noerdlinger’s resignation. “Rachel’s not going anywhere,” the mayor’s spokesperson responded.
None of this had anything to do with Garner’s family member
s or their desire to see Daniel Pantaleo brought to trial. To them, this noisy and irrelevant political infighting threatened to drown out what truly mattered. Immediately after Garner’s death, the public, including white voters, overwhelmingly saw him as an innocent victim and was, polls showed, outraged over what had happened. But Sharpton’s presence in the case now allowed the police to direct public attention to him, shifting the narrative of the story back to ancient and familiar patterns.
—
For decades now, Al Sharpton’s advocacy in police brutality cases, particularly New York brutality cases, has been a constant. Throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s, Sharpton advised families and victims in more than fifty different police brutality cases. Whenever cops shot, beat, or choked someone, which was often, mayors and police commissioners learned to expect newspaper photos of Sharpton addressing angry crowds with a bullhorn the next day. He was a consistent thorn in the side of politicians like Rudy Giuliani.
He also showed remarkable consistency in recommending legal representation to the families of victims. Legendary New York investigative journalist Wayne Barrett worked on a story on this very subject for the website City & State New York after Garner’s death, but he died before he could finish his research. What he did learn, however, was that in fifty-two different brutality cases between 1991 and 2014,* families that brought Sharpton into the fold ended up represented primarily by just four different lawyers.
The two main lawyers in Sharpton cases were famed litigators: New York–based Sanford Rubenstein and the late Johnnie Cochran. One or the other superstar attorney and Sharpton confidant sued the NYPD after such famed incidents as the Diallo case, the Sean Bell case (another unarmed black man, shot at more than fifty times by police at his bachelor party), and the Abner Louima case (sodomized with a plunger in a Brooklyn police precinct house).
The cases that didn’t go to Rubenstein or Cochran during that period inevitably went either to Benjamin Crump, a highly respected African American lawyer who represented the family of Trayvon Martin, or to Michael Hardy, now the general counsel of Sharpton’s National Action Network.
The Garner family was initially slated to be represented by Rubenstein, one of Sharpton’s top-two heavy hitters, and the main one left now that the legendary Cochran had passed. The two were so close that Sharpton wrote the preface to Rubenstein’s humorously self-admiring but light-selling autobiography, The Outrageous Rubenstein, which Rubenstein reportedly hands out like breath mints to office visitors.
Sharpton had a great many detractors in New York, especially among the white population. His reputation took a hit in the infamous Tawana Brawley case in the eighties, in which he’d accused white officials in a small upstate town of rape, accusations that later collapsed under scrutiny. He had also suffered the embarrassment of being outed as “Confidential Informant #7,” a man who’d worn a wire for the FBI against mobsters and boxing promoters, among others (court papers said he “was a very reliable informant”). It was hard to imagine Dr. King or Malcolm X—the men whose legacy Sharpton implicitly claimed—ever working with the FBI.
But whatever feelings Sharpton aroused, several things were indisputable. One was that for many of these families, there was nobody else knocking on their doors with offers of any kind of help. None of Sharpton’s many critics were offering to foot bills or line up legal aid for the families of brutality victims.
The other incontrovertible fact was that families represented by Sharpton’s favored lawyers almost always scored major financial settlements.
Cochran, for instance, won the family of Amadou Diallo $3 million after the unarmed man was shot at forty-one times by police. The family of Alberta Spruill, a fifty-seven-year-old Harlem woman who died of a heart attack when cops mistakenly burst into her home and tossed in a flash-bang grenade, won $1.6 million from the city, in part thanks to Cochran.
Rubenstein won more than $7 million in settlements for victims in the Bell case, while Rubenstein and Cochran together helped Louima win $8.7 million and another black man shot after a chase, Dantae Johnson, win $2.3 million.
The record of settlements was extremely good. But just as remarkable was another statistic. Out of those fifty-two cases, only one, Louima’s, resulted in a police officer actually going to jail. And the Louima case was rare because it involved a victim who survived.
Most of the rest of the cases resulted in acquittals, dismissals, or nonjail resolutions, or else charges were never even sought. In a few cases, investigations are still pending.
Whether this was by chance or design, the consistently huge settlements led to a debate within the legal community. Some lawyers wondered if Sharpton’s circle was essentially leveraging the demand for justice for more money. There was never any evidence of this, but it was something that was talked about in courthouses.
There was a flip side to the argument. What if the practical truth is that real justice in white America is a loser’s pursuit—and maybe money is the only consolation on offer for these families who’d lost their loved ones? If systemic change and true justice are nonstarters, is it wrong to focus on getting the families as much money as possible? Some civil rights lawyers reluctantly admit that these thoughts enter their minds.
“The only remedy the system really considers is money,” says one. “You want to do more, but in the back of your mind you know they’re just going to cut you a check in the end. That’s in the best case. The one thing you can say about Sharpton is that the check is a lot bigger once he’s involved.”
Sharpton understands the question and insists he’s always first looking for reform. “The goal is always institutional change,” he says. But in an exhausted voice he adds, “We have to be pragmatic, too. There are realities.”
He pauses and draws upon his celebrated facility for the memorable phrase. “The way I look at it is ‘If you can’t hit a home run, get on base.’ ”
Sharpton rose to prominence thanks in large part to his extraordinary skill in using the commercial media to get his message out. In the golden age of the New York City newspaper, nobody was better at getting the press out to cover an event, or at delivering quotes tailor-made for headlines.
But the twenty-first century’s fractured media landscape presented new pitfalls for Sharpton and other black leaders. With the rise of right-wing media outlets on radio and cable TV, images of black politicians were often used to tweak and terrify aging white audiences. Sharpton, one of conservative media’s favorite villains, often engaged and debated with right-wing show hosts, perhaps unwittingly reinforcing a WWE version of racial politics that by the end of the Obama administration increasingly dominated a divided media landscape, entrenching the most regressive voices.
For instance, the back-and-forth between Sharpton and figures like Rush Limbaugh (who denounced him as a “race hustler”) often ended up becoming a mutually reinforcing PR campaign. Sharpton’s appearances with the likes of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly (who was once a featured speaker at an NAN convention), Sean Hannity, and Mike Huckabee similarly raised eyebrows among media critics, who wondered at the symbiotic nature of these relationships. It was an odd bargain for Sharpton: he’d play the heel for conservative entertainers and politicians and get publicity and higher profile in return. But for those conservatives, the payoff was more tangible. In the political arena, any white, right-wing candidate singled out by Al Sharpton usually had his base sewn up automatically and often prospered. There was a long list of such politicians who used Sharpton’s name and face to secure votes, with Rudy Giuliani being one of his most successful foils.
Dan Donovan, the Staten Island district attorney, was about to add his name to that list.
—
Shortly after Donovan met with the Garner family members, a new controversy sent the police brutality issue into overdrive nationally.
A police killing in the heretofore-little-known St. Louis exurb of Ferguson, Missouri, where an eighteen-year-old African American named
Michael Brown was shot by a white officer, sent the country spiraling into furious protests. There were street demonstrations in dozens of cities large and small, from L.A. to Oakland to Denver to Chicago to New York to Boston. Many involved people blocking highways and intersections.
One of the largest was in New York, where both the FDR Drive and West Side Highway were jammed with people chanting, “Mike Brown! Mike Brown!” This was a preview of larger demonstrations that were to come in connection with the Garner case.
Ferguson was “controversial” in a way the Garner case was not. There was no video of the shooting in Ferguson, so the case devolved into a battle of spin.
Ferguson police quickly released footage of Brown captured by a security camera in a convenience store shortly before his death. The footage appeared to show him stealing cigars and pushing a store employee into a merchandise rack. The manner of the video’s release—in response to questions and protests about Brown’s shooting—left many media viewers with the impression that Brown had been shot and killed in the course of being arrested for the robbery.
But that wasn’t the case. Like Eric Garner and Jeff Thomas, Brown instead had almost certainly been stopped by the police officer who would kill him for yet another legally meaningless offense, in this case “blocking traffic.”
Though there would be conflicting stories later on, the contemporaneous account by Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson indicated that Officer Darren Wilson and his partner had decided to stop Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, simply because they were walking in the middle of the street.
During the course of the stop, Jackson said, Wilson “at some point” saw cigars in Brown’s hands, which led to the attempted arrest. Once again, a suspect in a routine stop was conveniently waving probable cause around in the direction of a police officer.