by Matt Taibbi
That clearly wasn’t the case here. There was a video of the victim being killed. So what happened?
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See if this story sounds familiar:
A black male is killed by a police officer on the streets of New York in front of many witnesses. The murder triggers furious protests in the African American community. A white district attorney somberly pledges to investigate and convenes a special grand jury to consider charges against the officer.
But the grand jury takes an unusually long time to do its job. Dozens of witnesses are called to give more than a thousand pages of testimony in multiple secret sessions, facts we know because the district attorney himself goes out of his way to show the public what a thorough investigation he’s conducted.
Still, there are whispers throughout that key prosecution witnesses and/or evidence is being excluded. And the city’s black citizens are infuriated, if not exactly surprised, when the grand jury finally comes to a decision months after the homicide: no indictment.
This was the story of fifteen-year-old James Powell, a black teenager who was shot to death in Harlem on the morning of July 16, 1964, fifty years before the death of Eric Garner.
Powell had been involved in a confrontation with a white building superintendent who had threatened to turn a hose on him and two of his friends (and may have said something to the effect of, “Dirty niggers, I’ll wash you clean”). When Powell chased after him, the superintendent fled, but an off-duty cop named Thomas Gilligan shot and killed Powell, claiming he saw him carrying a knife.
Two days after this incident, the city of New York exploded in protests. A three-day battle between police and protesters in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and other neighborhoods ensued, leaving one dead and hundreds injured.
After the Powell shooting in New York in that summer of 1964, New York County district attorney Frank Hogan convened a special grand jury to consider charges against the police officer. Thomas Gilligan had at least one other shooting of a black youth in his past.
Hogan took a long time to consider the charges. The public was later told that he called forty-five witnesses who collectively gave 1,600 pages of testimony at fifteen secret sessions.
Despite the seeming thoroughness of the panel’s investigation, he apparently excluded several key witnesses. Those included a visiting member of the Italian Ministry of Finance, an eyewitness who claimed Powell had been unarmed when shot.
On September 2, 1964, the grand jury returned its decision: no true bill. Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan would not be indicted for shooting James Powell.
The announcement sparked more protests. There were howls on the street of a cover-up. But over time, the story receded. And soon, nobody remembered what happened to that cop—what’s his name again?—who shot that boy in Harlem. In order for patterns to repeat themselves, people first need to forget.
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Staten Islanders had seen this same playbook before, too.
Two decades earlier, and thirty years after the death of James Powell, a man named Ernest Sayon, the son of Liberian immigrants, was asphyxiated by police. He died at the base of a tree on the 200 block of Park Hill Avenue in Staten Island.
This was in the middle of the rough-and-tumble projects that were home to many of Staten Island’s famed rap collective, the Wu-Tang Clan.
Known as Kase, Sayon was a strapping twenty-two-year-old who sold crack and coke and at the time of his death was out on bail on charges of firing twenty bullets into an apartment building. He was a very different character from Eric Garner. Garner was almost universally liked, thought to be harmless, and considered to be something like the neighborhood mascot even by business owners.
Sayon was a hard-core banger who scared some residents of Park Hill, who gave him a wide berth. He was standing on his usual corner on April 29, 1994, when police drove by. Someone threw a cherry bomb, which the cops mistook for a gunshot.
A former Park Hill resident turned police officer named Donald Brown was the first man out of the car. He subdued Sayon at the base of a tree, perhaps using a chokehold. In an eerie precursor to the Garner case, Sayon gasped for air while multiple other officers then joined in, swarming over the rest of his body.
“Everybody’s going, ‘Leave him alone, leave him alone,’ ” remembers Charles, a Park Hill resident who knew both Sayon and Eric Garner. “The more people said, ‘Leave him alone,’ the more they whupped his ass.”
Police eventually cuffed Sayon and threw him in the back of a van, where, according to local legend, other prisoners had to inform police that he was not breathing. Witnesses claimed it took police as long as seventeen minutes to take Sayon to a nearby hospital, where he died.
Though he might not have won any popularity contests, Sayon was one of Park Hill’s own. Protests broke out in the projects that night. A crowd of hundreds formed spontaneously and marched toward the 120th Precinct.
Doug Brinson, the check-cash man, was one of the marchers. “There was a picture of me in the paper with my fist raised, I remember that,” says Doug, who lived and worked in Park Hill for a time.
There was a long, tense standoff that night in Staten Island, but in the end, the police waited out the crowd. In the following days, city officials from Rudy Giuliani on down followed the brutality-scandal playbook to a T, promising a thorough inquiry and pleading for calm.
In yet another precursor of the Garner case, the medical examiner ruled Sayon’s death a homicide, by asphyxiation.
Just as his Manhattan counterpart Frank Hogan had thirty years earlier in the Powell case, and just as Dan Donovan would two decades later in the Garner matter, Staten Island’s then district attorney, William Murphy, convened a special grand jury to consider charges against the officers.
It eventually came out that Murphy called more than one hundred witnesses and took seven long months to present his case, at the end of which the twenty-three-member panel decided not to indict.
“We’re enjoying pizza tonight,” Officer Brown told The New York Times after being cleared by the grand jury on December 8, 1994. It was seven months after Sayon’s death.
There was yet another brief flurry of protests, but soon it was over, and the Sayon case was forgotten almost everywhere, making it possible for the pattern to be repeated later on. From Powell to Sayon to Garner, from Hogan to Murphy to Donovan, very little in these stories ever changed, except for the names.
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Apart from the Garner case, Staten Island that fall had been home to another bizarre controversy. The borough’s congressman, a clodhopping, jockish Republican named Michael Grimm, had been hit earlier in the year with a twenty-count indictment on federal corruption charges. He’d been busted for concealing about a million dollars in wages from the IRS from his restaurant, a doomed Upper East Side eatery called Healthalicious that specialized in soggy ten-dollar salads.
After his spring indictment, Grimm refused to resign from office and commenced his reelection campaign.
He handled press questioning about his scandal with aplomb, at one point threatening to throw a NY1 reporter “off this fucking balcony” for asking about the case. He added, on camera, that he would “break [him] in half…like a boy.”
Seeing a rare opportunity to gain a Republican seat, national Democrats poured $3.6 million of party money into the campaign of Grimm’s opponent, Domenic Recchia, a former city councilman from the Brooklyn section of the Eleventh District. Recchia raised a ton of money of his own as well, ending up with more than $5 million total.
Grimm, meanwhile, was abandoned by national Republicans and limped into the race with a little more than a third of the resources Recchia had.
But Recchia proved to be a disastrous candidate whose answers to policy questions were so embarrassingly bad (he had to take a time-out and confer with an aide when asked what the Trans-Pacific Partnership was) that he ended up becoming a punchline on a Daily Show segment.
Recchia was whipped that November by
thirteen points. Democrats in Staten Island couldn’t even beat a guy who’d threatened to throw a reporter over a balcony on TV and was scheduled to go to jail for a million years moments after Election Day.
But that December, Grimm’s incredible November triumph began to unwind.
Behind the scenes, Grimm folded in negotiations with the feds. On December 23, he pleaded guilty to a variety of misdeeds, including tax evasion, using undocumented labor, and lying under oath.
With characteristic goonishness, Grimm tried to hang on to his seat by his fingernails, pledging at first to remain in office even as a felon. But that plan, too, soon crumbled. On January 5, 2015, Grimm finally resigned, leaving a congressional seat open, along with room for a shocker plot twist to the Garner story.
Dan Donovan announced he would run for Grimm’s seat. Whatever happened in that grand jury room had certainly not hurt his political career.
When Erica heard that Donovan was running for Congress, she was mortified.
“He was using my dad’s body as a platform,” she says.
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Al Sharpton loudly opposed Donovan’s run, opposition that became another key part of Donovan’s platform.
“It would almost be seen as rewarding someone who has become the national symbol of what we are fighting,” Sharpton told the Daily News after the possibility of a Donovan run hit the news.
He added: “How are we gonna send someone to Washington whose only national reputation is the guy who couldn’t get a grand jury to indict on a video the whole world saw?”
Sometime later, the Donovan campaign would send out its first fundraising letter. Ostensibly written by his campaign chief, Ron Carara, the e-circular emphasized the name of Al Sharpton.
“Dear [Voter],” it began. Farther down, it read:
A recent news article revealed Al Sharpton’s National Action Network is working under the radar and doing their best to hurt Dan’s campaign. They were quoted saying they have to “tread delicately” because they know how divisively they are perceived on Staten Island and in Brooklyn…
We don’t need fringe agitators like Occupy Wall Street and Al Sharpton dictating what’s best for our nation or the 11th congressional district.
The invocation of Sharpton’s name was absurdly transparent. The letter referenced an article in which Kirsten John Foy, a spokesperson for Sharpton’s National Action Network, wondered aloud if it might not be better to lie low in the congressional race. She said that NAN had to “tread delicately” because, as she explained, “anything we could do to excite our base can incite his.”
Not only was this not an aggressive quote, it was virtually a kind of public surrender. But for Donovan’s purposes, it didn’t matter. The important thing was to make sure Staten Island voters knew that Al Sharpton was on the other side.
Sharpton, meanwhile, insisted before Donovan announced his run that even his potential candidacy “would energize those of us who have been dealing with the whole protest movement since day one.”
He made those remarks on December 30, 2014. He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t particularly prophetic, either. In response to the announcement by Donovan’s grand jury, the city had already come apart at the seams.
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* In one of those fifty-two, Al Sharpton was himself the plaintiff.
ELEVEN CARMEN
On December 3, 2014, a little after 2:00 P.M., an activist named Carmen Perez answered her cellphone in an office in Midtown Manhattan. The call came from Michael Skolnik, a producer and political organizer who works with Russell Simmons, the pioneering hip-hop mogul. Simmons had by then become a model for politically active cultural entrepreneurs and was very interested in this case.
TV news stations were reporting that a grand jury had refused to indict Daniel Pantaleo. Skolnik, Simmons’s liaison to the activist community, had an obvious question.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re gonna meet in my office,” answered Perez. “And then we’re gonna take the streets.”
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Within hours after Donovan’s announcement of a nonindictment of Pantaleo, tens of thousands of people spilled out onto the streets. More would follow with each passing day. If ever there was a time to force change through protest, it was now.
But there was a problem. The Garner case, and the Ferguson episode that followed it, had exposed a vacuum of political leadership within the black community.
In Ferguson, digital-age activists like Black Lives Matter had surprised everyone by repeatedly massing in huge numbers. They rallied by the thousands to take on police blockades from all directions on the strength of messages flowing through Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and other online applications.
These crowds formed without top-down advance direction of the sort practiced by the older generation of civil rights leaders, people like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Those two had been the faces of such protests for decades, but in a subplot to the Ferguson protests, both were heckled everywhere they went by younger, more strident activists. Many of these confrontations became widely circulated YouTube hits, with titles like “Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Booed Off Stage in Ferguson Missouri.”
Sharpton would later try to fight back, reportedly telling young members at an NAN gathering that new activist groups trying to drive a wedge between protesters and the old guard were “pimping” young people.
“It’s the disconnect that is the strategy to break the movement,” Sharpton said, according to Capital New York reporter Azi Paybarah, who obtained a recording of the meeting.
On tape, the reverend goes on: “They play on your ego. ‘Oh, you young and hip, you’re full of fire. You’re the new face.’ All the stuff that they know will titillate your ears. That’s what a pimp says to a ho.”
But it was no use. In a foreshadowing of the anti-establishment movements that would emerge in the Republican and Democratic Parties in the 2016 presidential race, younger protesters seemed convinced that old-guard warriors like Jackson and Sharpton were, in fact, the assimilated voices of the political establishment. They were accused of having grown fat off donations from celebrities and wealthy liberals and of doing little beyond pursuing financial settlements and/or directing votes to an ineffectual, untrustworthy Democratic Party. They were part of a structure that, for whatever reason, had clearly failed to change much on the brutality front over the course of many decades.
Carmen Perez and the activists in her group, Justice League NYC, stood somewhere in the middle of this dynamic. They were hardly lavishly funded. At the time of the Garner grand jury decision, the only person in the group pulling a salary was Perez, who got a little money from a union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
But even the small amount of patronage the group received, and the fact that it had an office, exposed it to criticism from other criminal justice reform groups. Critics took issue with the group’s relationship to celebrities (Justice League NYC was formed as a task force of the Gathering for Justice, an initiative of legendary singer Harry Belafonte); they even took issue with their clothes.
The Justice Leaguers were activists in their late twenties and thirties who, perhaps in an effort to connect with inner-city youth who were the targets of a lot of their programs, dressed in the sweatshirts-and-ball-caps look of people ten years younger. Over the phone lines of their union-funded office, college graduates spoke in slang.
“[Justice League] is like an old person’s idea of young people,” is how one rival protest-group member acidly described them.
But when nobody else emerged as the leaders of the enormous crowds pouring onto the streets of New York in early December 2014, Perez and her cohorts stepped forward into the middle of a once-in-a-generation odyssey. For two extraordinary weeks, the crowds grew across the city, to the point where something like revolutionary fervor began to vibrate through the winter air.
Then, in a single moment of terrible violence, it receded.
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Perez is a recognizable figure on the protest circuit. She has almond eyes and long black hair that she wears in a variety of styles or (often) under a black wool cap, which is never pulled down so far that you can’t see a trademark patch of shaved scalp over her left ear.
Originally from Oxnard, California, from what she says is a “gang-infested” neighborhood, Perez got into politics early, “after my sister got buried” (she died in a car accident). Carmen joined the Mexican American civil rights activist group Barrios Unidos following a stint at UC Santa Cruz.
She then moved east, where she ended up working as a canvasser and organizer for Purple Gold, a youth group funded by the SEIU.
Perez is the prototypical community organizer. She’s bright, assertive, committed, and articulate, though it’s a particular kind of locution. She speaks in the convoluted, difficult-to-master language of the modern activist left, which features an evolving lexicon of appropriate terms and a whole mysterious separate dictionary of movement phraseology.
She will talk about things like “silos” and “justice summits” or use phrases like “doing change at a holistic level versus just the back end” without always explaining what she means. And she talks with pride about helping to raise the consciousness of incarcerated young people, for instance, a young man who’d turned in a poem at a Justice League workshop.
“The first time he had read his poem, he said, ‘I want to get an Uzi, and I want to chill with my thot, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,’ ” she says. “And I’m like, ‘What’s a thot?’ ”
“Thot” turned out to stand for “that ho over there.” Perez hastened to expunge the term from the inmate’s vocabulary.
The minute Perez got the call from Skolnik on December 3, she dropped everything. Along with people like Julianne Hoffenberg, a film producer who serves as the Gathering’s director of operations, and Rameen Aminzadeh, another filmmaker who became heavily involved in directing and organizing street protests, Perez made plans to take a leading role in whatever was going on in the streets.