I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  The activists, in recounting the history of a remarkable two weeks during which the Garner story dominated the city and headlines around the world, clearly share a kind of esprit de combat and emphasize their friendship and closeness as part of their story. The “Justice League” tag actually was dreamed up with a superhero connotation in mind.

  “We all have these different powers, but when we come together, we’re really able to make change,” says Perez, whose abilities include being a basketball player and a dancer in rap videos once upon a time. “That’s why we’re called Justice League, because we’re superheroes, I feel.”

  “We come together like Voltron,” concurs Aminzadeh.

  A stout, bearded, Baltimore-born filmmaker, Aminzadeh says he has done everything from direct music videos to edit episodes of Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry? He had just come to New York from protesting in Ferguson when the Garner news broke.

  Like Aminzadeh, Julianne “Jules” Hoffenberg has an entertainment background, having worked on everything from HBO documentaries to celebrity panels involving the likes of Liev Schreiber, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Rachel Maddow.

  All three recall the pressure and excitement of December 3.

  “We stopped having ownership over our own lives,” Hoffenberg remembers.

  “We stopped sleeping or eating,” explains Perez.

  “Everything happened that day,” says Aminzadeh.

  They set up a “war room” in their offices above the SEIU chapter in Midtown Manhattan and then took turns going out on the streets with bullhorns and cellphones, hoping to lead marches, block city streets, and “shut things down.”

  The giant crowds that swallowed up the streets in those weeks reflected a strong impulse to do something about a very specific set of policies and problems, including Broken Windows policing and the lack of accountability for abusive police. Yet nobody quite knew what to do with all of that anger and determination.

  The only protest strategy most Americans are familiar with is the sixties model, which in grainy TV documentaries always seemed to involve big crowds of marchers headed toward a government building. Aspects of the old protest model have been romanticized over time, leading to the sometimes-embarrassing phenomenon of well-off college graduates bragging about getting arrested and confronting “the man,” usually a line cop who will work his whole life and still owe money on a starter house in some dreary suburb somewhere.

  A lot of modern protests will have the superficial characteristics of old civil disobedience battles: blocked streets, people being dragged off by police in riot gear, singing, candlelight vigils, etc. But the high-stakes nonviolent tactics of Gandhi and King had some teeth behind them, relying on economic strikes and nonparticipation campaigns to apply pressure on people in power. Nothing like that kind of highly organized battle for political leverage would take place in New York. Instead, protesters and pro-police advocates would take turns trying to seize momentum through the dissemination of images in the media.

  This was ironic because the Garner story began as a viral Internet video phenomenon, and the protests surrounding it would end in much the same way.

  —

  On the first night after Donovan’s announcement, demonstrations broke out all over the city. From the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to the West Side Highway to Columbus Circle to the Williamsburg Bridge to spots all over Harlem, the South Bronx, and Staten Island, major roads, highways, and commercial centers were closed off by furious protesters.

  Some of these crowds were spontaneous, and some weren’t. A dozen or more organizations, from Black Lives Matter to Copwatch to the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA), had sprung to action. Many of these groups actively disliked, even detested, one another and, behind the scenes, began vying with one another to seize a role as leaders.

  Mostly, though, people just went out onto the streets spontaneously, massing in places like Union Square and Times Square and using intel from social media to seek out confrontations with the roving squads of police that set up in places like Rockefeller Center, the Seventy-ninth Street off-ramp of the West Side Highway, and Mount Sinai Hospital up in Spanish Harlem.

  The Justice League crew involved themselves in all of these early demonstrations. Rameen, Jules, and Carmen even got arrested on the second day for blocking the West Side Highway. “There’s an image taken of me that made national news,” Carmen says.

  Then they were involved with what Carmen calls “economic shutdowns” (they blocked entrances to Macy’s and an Apple Store) and began planning other actions, like shutting down the George Washington Bridge and interrupting a visit of the British royal family.

  But it wasn’t until December 8 that the group assumed a central role in the ongoing demonstrations by leveraging its celebrity connections into a media coup.

  While protesters continued to fill the streets that first weekend, Carmen called her friend dream hampton (a writer and activist who eschews capital letters in her name). hampton is a longtime friend of Jay Z (she’s credited as collaborating with him on his autobiographical book, Decoded), and Carmen asked her if she would reach out to the music mogul for a favor.

  She did, and before long the group was planning a stunt, this one involving the Brooklyn Nets, the NBA team that at the time still listed Jay Z as a minority owner.

  Through Jay Z, the group reached out to then Nets guard Deron Williams, who agreed to wear a T-shirt reading “I CAN’T BREATHE” before a home game with the Cavaliers.

  Hurriedly they got Rameen to design and print up the shirts, and in a detail that sheds light on how threadbare the group’s organization was, they barely had the money to pay for the printing. “I don’t think we even had two hundred dollars in the bank for the shirts,” says Hoffenberg.

  But they got the cash together eventually and rushed by subway with the shirts to the arena in Brooklyn, where Jay Z had made arrangements to bypass security. This was necessary because then Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose had worn an I CAN’T BREATHE shirt on Saturday the sixth—two days before—a move that reportedly left the NBA less than pleased.

  “So Deron, with Jay Z, had to get a security guard that was his buddy to meet these guys so that they could get in,” Carmen explains. “We met Deron’s security guard in the back entrance and snuck them to him. He took them inside to the players.”

  The Justice League crew stayed outside of the arena. Inside, Jay Z ended up having a picture taken with four Nets players who wore the shirts: Williams, former league MVP Kevin Garnett, Alan Anderson, and Jarrett Jack. Jay Z sent the photo to hampton, who in turn relayed it by phone to Carmen.

  Almost immediately, the picture of the Nets players went viral, and the Justice League crew was announcing the feat to a crowd that had gathered outside the arena. The fact that Prince William and Kate Middleton were at the game, trailed by the usual ten million or so Fleet Street photogs, made it an international public relations coup.

  “You could see it on the big screens in the back in the Barclays Center,” remembers Rameen. “You could see them playing ball, and so as she’s announcing it, they’re warming up, and people are seeing it. It was just something that was extremely inspiring to the everyday folk,” he says. “There was a win here.”

  With these and other actions, Justice League made its way into the news stories in prominent enough fashion that they began to be described as the leaders of the mass demonstrations.

  By Tuesday, December 9, city and state leaders were, remarkably, agreeing to hold meetings with Justice League members.

  The planned meetings with Mayor de Blasio, Governor Cuomo, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and city council leaders were pitched to the media as the independent triumph of an autonomous youth-led movement that had protested its way into the corridors of power.

  Hoffenberg herself downplayed the group’s celebrity connections at the time.

  “We haven’t really used any of our Jus
tice League members or advisory board members to make outreach to anybody in the government,” she told reporters.

  The whole situation was curious. As remarkable as it was to see NBA players wearing the I CAN’T BREATHE shirt—and that moment meant a lot to Eric Garner’s family members—there was something odd about the ease with which senior state officials were willing to enter into something very like official negotiations with this tiny group of heretofore unknown activists.

  But it was happening. On December 10, a Wednesday, the Justice Leaguers met with Attorney General Schneiderman as well as members of the city council and afterward held a press conference at City Hall.

  This solidified their status (in the media, anyway) as the leaders of the ongoing demonstrations. At the meeting with Schneiderman, the group issued a list of ten demands:

  1. The immediate firing of Daniel Pantaleo.

  2. The creation of a special prosecutor to investigate police abuse cases.

  3. The city and state will draft legislation clarifying the rules of engagement on the street.

  4. The city will create a comprehensive NYPD training program.

  5. An end to Broken Windows policing.

  6. An end to the mass criminalization of kids in the New York City school system.

  7. The United States attorney general, Eric Holder, will expedite an investigation into the death of Eric Garner.

  8. Passage of the Right to Know Act, requiring officers to identify themselves.

  9. New York State and all localities to engage in complete transparency regarding profiling and police personnel issues.

  10. Meetings for the Justice League with the attorney general, mayor, and governor.

  The press conference at City Hall was attended by Russell Simmons, the rapper/actor Common, and several council members. Justice League member Cherrell Brown sounded like she believed it when she added, “I believe we will win.” It was starting to look like they just might.

  Then it all started to go sideways.

  —

  On Saturday, December 13, the protests continued on the Brooklyn Bridge. The Justice Leaguers were there for a while, leading chants on a nine-mile march that was supposed to end at One Police Plaza in Manhattan.

  It took ten long hours to complete the march, and when the JL people got over the bridge, they found the way to police headquarters blocked at Foley Square.

  So they knocked off for the day and headed to a Mexican restaurant called Gonzalez y Gonzalez, on Mercer Street between Houston and Bleecker. They drank margaritas, plotted their next move, and went home.

  They woke up the next morning to surprising headlines.

  “NYPD Cops Attacked During ‘Peaceful’ Protest,” read the New York Post.

  “Amid Assaults on Officers, New York Police Rethink Their Response to Protests,” was the predictably less-interesting construction of The New York Times.

  Rameen, Carmen, and Jules read in horror. The gist of the stories was that a rogue group of protesters, led apparently by a part-time English professor from Baruch College, had assaulted a group of police officers on the bridge.

  The professor, a twenty-nine-year-old named Eric Linsker, was caught brandishing a trash can while people were tossing “debris” on cops stationed on the lower level of the bridge. When a lieutenant named Philip Chan tried to arrest Linsker, he fled, effecting his escape as another man in a mask punched Chan in the face, breaking his nose.

  Linsker, not exactly a master criminal, seems to have dropped his backpack. Police looked through it and found a preposterous kit bag for an academic: three recently purchased hammers, a passport, a MetroCard, a mask, a debit card, and a pill bottle containing marijuana.

  With half the city seized with revolutionary fervor over a race killing, in an instant it began to unravel because of a white liberal-arts professor who tried to throw a trash can at police and carried to the scene of the crime ID leading straight to his home. Who brings a passport to a protest?

  In addition to Linsker and the man in the mask who punched Chan, six other people were involved in the attack, which also targeted another lieutenant named Patrick Sullivan.

  The five included two women and three men, all engaged in obvious assaults of the police, punching and kicking and throwing the cops to the ground. Police also insisted later on that the mob tried to steal the cops’ portable radios and tear away their jackets.

  Worse still, there was video of the incident, posted to YouTube, which blew the story into an instant media sensation. The video was the worst kind, salacious and violent, but also not quite clear enough to identify the aggressors.

  This turned the story into a thrilling media mystery on top of an outrage. Police issued wanted photos and began the manhunt for the John and Jane Doe trash-can assailants.

  “Male number two has a hat on and later on his hat falls off and he has a receding hair line. He’s seen kicking Lieutenant Sullivan,” said NYPD chief of Manhattan detectives William Aubry. “Male number three is the most disturbing as well as male number two. He pulls the officers down to the ground, and then he proceeds to run away.”

  When the Justice Leaguers began to see their names associated with the march in news stories, they were mortified.

  “The next day, everyone was like, ‘Justice League was inciting a riot with the police on the Brooklyn Bridge,’ ” recalls Hoffenberg. “We were like, ‘Wait. We were having margaritas.’ ”

  “Worse than that, someone stole our megaphones,” fumes Rameen, explaining that their bullhorns had disappeared at the Mexican restaurant.

  It wasn’t long before the cops arrested Linsker. Reporters dug up a poem called “Thwaites” he’d published in August that borrowed its only notable line from Ice Cube:

  Fuck the police

  To rise as you

  Disappear below current

  Interpretations of observations

  Fuck the police

  This news came out at the same time as another viral video, this one shot from the window of a home on Thirty-second Street that showed a group of protesters chanting, “What do we want? Dead cops.”

  The same dynamic that was igniting the national furor against police brutality, the omnipresence of cellphone videos, was now being flipped around to work against protesters. Now each side had its own outrage videos that could be referred to endlessly and amplified in their respective media echo chambers.

  It got worse from there. Mayor de Blasio tried to condemn the bridge attacks as an aberration from otherwise peaceful protests but screwed up even that simple mission.

  He called the bridge fracas, which again was entirely recorded on film, “an incident…in which a small group of protesters allegedly assaulted some members of the NYPD.”

  Police officials jumped all over the “allegedly.” Ed Mullins of the Sergeants Benevolent Association called de Blasio a “nincompoop,” while Michael Palladino of the detectives’ union fumed, “When cops are the accused, the word ‘alleged’ never enters into the discussion.”

  After the bridge incident, the former NYPD captain Joseph Concannon lost it. That was the tipping point for him. He’d been following the entire arc of the story since Garner’s death and had had enough. He decided to lead pro-police marches.

  A longtime dabbler in GOP politics, he asked the Queens Village Republican Club for an advance.

  “I said, ‘Will you guys front me a thousand dollars? I need money because I want to pull together an organization so that we can hold pro-cop rallies,’ ” he remembers. “ ‘These guys are getting beat up. They’re getting demoralized.’ ”

  There was an irony in this. Concannon had no love for street demonstrators. He had spent large portions of his career on the other side of marches led by Sharpton, who during the eighties became a symbol of everything law enforcement hated and resented about “community organizers.”

  In the old days most cops saw Sharpton as an overgrown hustler who looked like a hustler—he wore huge
gold medallions and velour track suits—and who played the game of leveraging the media to the cause of winning lawsuits against cops. The marches and anti-police demonstrations of the eighties, in Concannon’s mind, were just part of the hustle.

  Papers got sold, lawyers won lawsuits, victims got settlements, and the reverend got a higher profile. Everyone won except cops like Concannon, who were demonized in the papers and got more bottles and rocks thrown at them at demonstrations.

  Now, years later, a new generation of demonstrators was taking over the streets of New York, and Concannon decided he couldn’t stand on the sidelines any longer.

  Concannon would go on to become something like the street proxy for the growing feeling of alienation and betrayal within the police ranks that sometimes found expression in the comments of people like Pat Lynch. His protests would capture the widespread disgust toward politicians that emanated from the ranks of the police, who felt that they were being pilloried for doing exactly what politicians not so subtly had told them to do.

  To Concannon, the Garner story had to be viewed in the context of a long series of confrontations with police—and with the CompStat system that pressured cops to fix problems they had no real way of fixing. Concannon tells a story that he heard through police ranks, a version of which was also reported in The New York Times. To wit: a store owner first complained about “conditions,” i.e., sales of cigarettes and drugs, to the commander of the 120th Precinct.

  “And he basically threw up his hands and said, ‘I have arrested this guy. I’ve been jostling him, I’ve been doing everything that I can legally do in my legal responsibilities. I can’t do any more,’ ” says Concannon. “And they said, ‘Hmm, okay.’ ”

  In Concannon’s telling, the citizen complaints then went to the borough commander, who dropped some CompStat on the precinct chief.

  “They took it to the borough commander,” says Concannon. “And the borough commander said, ‘You like your precinct? Do you? You like being the CO of the One Two Oh?’ ”