I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  Concannon described what that kind of call would sound like to a precinct captain.

  “You want to keep that job, right? You don’t want me to embarrass you in front of the entire city, in front of all your peers at One Police Plaza? You want me to put your precinct on the map, with a picture of [Eric] Garner standing in front of a store, intimidating people, saying, ‘Hey, Precinct Commander, what are you doing about that?’ ”

  Concannon became furious as he watched the politicians’ response to the Garner case and then also to the Ferguson case. He believed that Bill de Blasio represented everything wrong with the political dynamic.

  “He campaigned against the police department. He bludgeoned them at every opportunity he had,” Concannon says. But after he got elected, Concannon says, “he knew he had a problem. He knew he needed to put a real cop in and not just one of his lackeys.”

  So publicly de Blasio was anti-police, but privately he wanted the toughest, most aggressive kind of policing. Oddly enough, in this at least Concannon was in agreement with a lot of the protesters. The only difference was what motivated them to go out on the streets. It all boiled over for Concannon after the bridge incident, when he first decided to hold his rallies. After the bridge incident, Concannon and most of the police union leadership targeted one person above all for their wrath: the mayor.

  In the history of New York there has probably never been a mayor as politically accident-prone as Bill de Blasio was in his early days in office. He was the Chevy Chase of elected officials. He walked over and over again into punji traps of his own creation.

  In early 2014, in a traditional Groundhog Day ceremony at the Staten Island Zoo, de Blasio dropped Chuck the groundhog, who later died. It wasn’t quite shooting Santa Claus, but it was close.

  Merely killing a groundhog on Groundhog Day would have been bad enough, but it later came out that the zoo also tried to cover up the death, insisting that the animal died of old age (sources told the New York Post the death was “consistent with a fall”). De Blasio was the only politician capable of turning even a Groundhog Day photo op into a murder and a cover-up.

  The Garner case posed a serious challenge to de Blasio as a new mayor, and he fumbled it nearly from the start with his disastrous roundtable, which The New York Times dubbed “the healing that wasn’t.” In that single episode, he lost both the police and Sharpton as allies and soon found himself taking water politically in the ensuing scandal over Rachel Noerdlinger.

  Now, as street demonstrations tore apart his city and set his police department against him, de Blasio froze. This was destined to be the defining moment of his administration, and he seemed to wander through each successive day with less and less of a plan, watching problems pile up without responses.

  In the wake of the Brooklyn Bridge fiasco, for instance, police spokespeople pounded him on an hourly basis. But he seemed too paralyzed to answer.

  One move de Blasio did make in the face of all this was to cancel a planned meeting with the Justice Leaguers, who responded by staging a protest at the mayor’s holiday party outside Gracie Mansion on December 15. Protesters chanted “I can’t breathe” and “Shut it down” while the mayor held a muted Christmas celebration inside.

  The rapper Immortal Technique, a Peruvian-born artist who grew up in Harlem and spent some time in jail for an assault he committed while also trying to finish college, delivered an oddly moving and pointed impromptu demonstration at this protest.

  Dressed in a Yankee hat and a plain black jacket, he told a story designed to refocus attention on the root of the problem. This wasn’t about hating cops, he said, but rather about fairness.

  “Don’t tell us these racist lies, how we don’t care when someone black or brown dies in our community, we only care when they’re the victim of a white police officer,” he said.

  He paused. “My friend recently died. He left a hole in my heart. All right, a hole that can never be filled. And I’m speaking from my soul here. We cared when he died. We care when everyone dies.

  “But you know what the difference is, bigots of the world? That when those people die, if someone catches the ‘gangbanger’ or the individual who’s responsible for their murder on camera, he’s going to jail ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time!”

  Applause broke out in the crowd.

  “And when we catch an officer of the law, who’s supposed to know the law, and in my opinion should be held to that law to the highest standards, ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time we hear excuses instead of hearing accountability.

  “And that’s all we’re saying. We want you to make it what you said it was on paper. Otherwise, it’s a lie.”

  He went on, spoke more, and turned to look at Gracie Mansion.

  “They think they can just close the door and have some kind of let-them-eat-cake Louis XVI party in there, while we starving out here,” he said, before quickly catching himself.

  “And when I say starving, I mean we got donuts. We starving for justice.”

  All of this was going on outside the home of a mayor who had been elected in large part thanks to his promises to reform the police. De Blasio had gone from being the savior of New York liberalism to being Marie Antoinette in less than a year.

  —

  A few days later, Carmen and the rest of the Justice League activists were hit with a surprise. Mayor de Blasio sent word that he would, in fact, have a meeting with them.

  “At one point it was supposed to be he was going to meet with everybody,” says Jules. “And then it was like, ‘We’ll meet with ten people.’ And then, ‘We’ll meet with eight people,’ and then, ‘We’ll meet with six.’ Then it was five.”

  At the meeting, when they brought up Broken Windows, de Blasio shrugged and said even discussing that was a nonstarter. He told them that Commissioner Bratton wouldn’t budge on that. Everyone would just have to find a way to make that work.

  The Justice Leaguers stared at one another in shock. Just like that, the central issue in the protests was officially off the table. What was de Blasio doing here?

  To say that the mayor was an enigma would be an understatement. In the hours after the grand jury announcement, de Blasio had given an extraordinary—some would say politically unprecedented—speech talking about how he’d had to warn his own biracial son, Dante, about the dangers of his own police department.

  He’d begun by referring to his conversation that night with Eric Garner’s stepfather, Ben Carr, whom de Blasio characteristically misnamed “Ben Garner” and misidentified as Garner’s father.

  “It’s a very hard thing to spend time trying to comfort someone you know is beyond the reach of comfort because of what he’s been through,” said de Blasio, adding, “I couldn’t help but immediately think what it would mean to me to lose Dante.”

  He then talked about how he and his wife, Chirlane, had had to instruct their son in how to behave around police. “Because of a history still that hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him as families have all over this city for decades in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers.”

  Nothing de Blasio said was untrue. He was right that teaching children how to behave around police—no sudden movements, keep your hands visible at all times, etc.—was a ritual virtually all black families in the city had learned to go through over the years. After the Giuliani and Bloomberg years—almost two decades of hard insensitivity on police matters—hearing the mayor speak this simple truth was a breath of fresh air.

  But to the police rank and file, de Blasio’s speech was pure treason. It was as though he was describing an occupying force of unaccountable racists, not an army of cops that, incidentally, he personally commanded.

  “He’s the head of the police department and he’s saying that!” roared the ex-captain Concannon. “Unbelievable.”

  A politician with keener instincts than de Blasio might have understood
that the protests raging across his city were about two problems, one far more fixable than the other. And this sharper sort of politician could have defused the situation by diverting attention away from the one and toward the other.

  —

  A large part of the tension between protesters and police lay in the explosive and impossibly complicated argument about race that had long divided the whole country.

  On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap.

  On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect toward authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair.

  This basic disagreement animated virtually every major political controversy in America, from immigration to health care to welfare reform. It gave no sign of being quickly and easily resolved.

  But the other controversy that caused de Blasio’s streets to be clogged with people that month involved highly specific sets of policies, including Broken Windows and the absence of a special prosecutor for police-abuse cases. These were immediately fixable issues.

  If de Blasio was so concerned for the safety of his son, he had it in his power to unilaterally end the practice of intrusive searches, mass arrests, and summonses over ticky-tack violations that vastly increased the statistical likelihood of deadly encounters.

  But he wouldn’t go there. Apparently, his relationship with Bill Bratton was too important to him. Faced with a fork in the road, with a choice between keeping the status quo and changing a racially charged enforcement policy, de Blasio took the fork.

  He alienated the rank and file by talking about how his own police officers were a threat to his son while simultaneously refusing to dial down the City Hall/CompStat–generated pressure to make numbers that was at least partly responsible for forcing cops into the role of street bullies.

  On a more mundane level, de Blasio alienated the cops by agreeing to meet with the protesters. Then he would alienate the protesters by blowing them off in the meeting. Every move the mayor made was a self-defeating blunder.

  —

  The Justice League activists were perplexed and disappointed that the mayor began the meeting by taking Broken Windows off the table, but they went on. As they spoke, de Blasio interrupted them and brought up the Brooklyn Bridge incident, asking for their take.

  The activists quickly referred to their “Kingian nonviolence” platform and noted that they were not even there when it happened (they left out the part about the margaritas).

  “It was like, a two-second conversation,” says Carmen.

  Soon after, the forty-five-minute meeting wrapped up. The group issued a statement.

  “We were like, ‘Great meeting, first step,’ ” Carmen explains.

  Except that de Blasio spoke with reporters right after the meeting and essentially tossed the group off a cliff, saying that Justice League was ready to help police find the remaining bridge assailants.

  “They will work with the police to identify anyone who seeks to harm the police,” he said. “So I thought there was real unity on that point.”

  De Blasio either didn’t know or didn’t care that by announcing to the world that the activists would work with the police to capture protesters, he’d just sabotaged the group with the entire protest community. Twitter exploded with taunting tweets from all corners, including protesters and rival activist organizations.

  One of the harshest denunciations came from Copwatch, a group dedicated to filming and observing police that was run by a young Puerto Rican from Sunset Park in Brooklyn named Dennis Flores.

  Flores in the early 2000s had been beaten in a bogus arrest that went sideways, an incident similar to the Staten Island case involving Ibrahim Annan. When he later successfully sued the NYPD in federal court, he used his settlement to found Copwatch, which would later claim Ramsey Orta as one of its spokespeople.

  Flores had heard the news coming from the mayor’s office that Justice League would be working with the police to locate troublesome protesters, and he was furious. In his mind the Justice League meetings with state officials were a dog-and-pony show anyway.

  “Harry Belafonte was a major backer of de Blasio’s campaign, so that’s how this happened,” he says, echoing the complaints of several rival protest groups. “We’ve all been at this for years and we never get close to a meeting with the mayor, and they show up and get it right away.”

  As soon as he heard the news about the meeting, Flores tweeted out:

  We have zero tolerance for people who collaborate with the police against people who want radical and/or social change. #stopsnitching

  Flores had called the Justice Leaguers “snitches,” a claim that was spun all over the Internet. The accusations of collaboration with police attracted enough press attention that Justice League was forced to put out a statement in response:

  CLARIFICATION: @NYjusticeleague is focused on transforming the systemic racism within NYPD. We have NO relationship w/ them whatsoever.

  It was an odd statement. “The group might have condemned violence while still maintaining an adversarial relationship with the police force,” wrote Jacob Siegel of the Daily Beast. “Instead, its representatives said they weren’t snitches and left it at that.”

  At the end of this trying day, the Justice Leaguers sat around in shock, devastated. The Chevy Chase of mayors had dropped a banana peel in front of someone else for a change.

  “The mayor played a hand that worked for him,” sighs Rameen.

  Except that he really hadn’t. Maybe the Justice Leaguers were always implausible as the would-be leaders of the protests wracking his city, but by blowing them up in public, de Blasio just ensured that he now had no one to talk to in the protest community.

  And if he thought that wiping out a ragtag group of protesters would buy him some love from the police unions, he was about to find out otherwise.

  —

  Late in the afternoon of the next day, a Saturday, two police officers named Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in a squad car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, at the intersection of Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues. Without warning, an itinerant loner named Ismaaiyl Brinsley walked up to the passenger-side window and pulled out a gun.

  Before Liu and Ramos could react, Brinsley opened fire and shot both in the head, killing them instantly. He then ran down the street, entered the Myrtle-Willoughby subway station, and waited on the platform. As police closed in, he shot himself in the head with a silver-colored semi-automatic handgun.

  Brinsley was twenty-eight and had been spiraling mentally for some time. Originally from Brooklyn, he’d bounced all over the Eastern Seaboard as a young person, growing up most of the time in Atlanta, living sometimes with his mother, sometimes in group homes, and sometimes on the streets.

  He ended up drifting from town to town and getting arrested for a series of increasingly bizarre crimes. In one of his busts, he stole a pair of scissors, some condoms, and a power inverter from a Rite Aid. Police found him in the laundry room of a nearby hotel minutes later, trying to cut off his braids. In another case, he was caught threatening a Waffle House employee and trying to punch her.

  He began the last day of his life in Baltimore. He went to the home of an ex-girlfriend in Baltimore who’d recently dumped him and put a gun to his own head. When she talked him out of killing himself, he shot her. She survived, but by then he was on
his way to New York, having posted an ominous message on Instagram:

  I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours……Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner #RIPMikeBrown.

  Baltimore cops got wind of Brinsley’s note and tried to alert the NYPD, but they only got the message just as Liu and Ramos were being killed.

  As de Blasio trudged to a news conference to address the killings that evening, a number of police officers in attendance turned their backs on him.

  Bizarrely, the decision by police to turn their backs on the mayor inspired the actor James Woods, of all people, to tweet out a hashtag, #TurnYourBack, that quickly circulated around the country. This would lead to hundreds of officers turning their back on the mayor during the funerals of the two slain officers.

  —

  Erica had been following the entire protest saga with great interest. At first, the sheer number of marchers protesting her father’s death had inspired her. But she needed to figure out what she would do with that inspiration.

  She felt the first inkling of a desire to start her own form of protest while sitting at the NAN press conference on December 3, listening to Al Sharpton give a speech about the nonindictment. Erica’s thoughts had drifted at that moment. She didn’t want to be just a prop at a press conference, the suffering victim. “I suddenly felt I had to do something that wasn’t just speeches,” she recalls. “I had to do something on my own.”

  As she watched the marchers flood the streets in the month that followed, she resolved to do more. “I figured, if they out there for my family, why shouldn’t I be?”

  And she began to have doubts that working within the system would get things done. The performance by the mayor was less than inspiring. At first, she’d been pleased by the speech that had so infuriated the cops, the one about how he worried about that son of his becoming a victim of police abuse.

  But then she saw de Blasio bending and vacillating when the pressure started to pile on during the protests. He began to push his rhetoric in a different direction, as though anxious to appease the police force and white voters. And finally, after the deaths of Ramos and Liu, when the police openly defied him and turned their backs on him, de Blasio did nothing.