I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  He looked over the crowd of loyal Queens Republicans who’d paid their hundred bucks for dinner and nodded in appreciation. “I know most of youse can’t vote for me, but you can help,” he said, to cheers.

  He didn’t need to say much else. The crowd knew who he was and what he was about.

  The Donovan campaign brought the Garner story near its bizarre circular end. What began as a tragedy that momentarily forced even most white Americans to think about the dangers of overaggressive policing had flipped and become a cause for a significant percentage of white conservatives, who now cast themselves as victims in the story.

  They saw themselves as a besieged minority, surrounded by a coalition of ivory-tower liberals, work-averse ethnic groups, and immigrants looking for handouts. They were tired of being called racists and were beginning to wonder why it was that only blacks and Latinos and Muslims and whoever else were allowed to have identity politics. What about us? Who looks out for our interests? Who fights for us? They were determined to elevate and protect the men—and it was mostly men—who put themselves on the line to maintain the system they’d come to know and their place at the top of it. They honored the ones who’d fight—and kill, if necessary—for that order.

  —

  On May 5, Donovan was elected to Congress. To Erica, this was another blow and convinced her of the virtually undisguised racism of Republican voters.

  But, she noticed, it wasn’t just conservatives who’d sent Donovan to Washington. After spending millions on Domenic Recchia’s catastrophic bid to unseat Michael Grimm, national Democrats elected to pass on spending any money at all to defeat Donovan.

  She’d hoped that on principle, the Democrats would want to make at least a symbolic effort at opposing Donovan’s candidacy.

  No such luck. The Democrat opposing Donovan ended up being Vincent Gentile, a genial, diminutive politician who was more believable as a U.S. congressman than, say, Daily Show punchline Domenic Recchia (although the Daily News called Gentile “not the sharpest knife in the Democratic drawer”).

  But the party gave Gentile no money at all, leaving the race for New York’s Eleventh District one of the roughly 80 to 85 percent of congressional races in America that are essentially noncompetitive.

  Gentile ended up raising about $200,000, about a third of the average for a losing congressional race. Donovan raised well over a million from supporters all over the country and cruised to victory, winning almost 60 percent of the vote. At his victory party, Donovan grinned and glad-handed supporters in his virtually all-white crowd, calling his election a “victory for America.”

  “The hardworking men and women of the middle class spoke loud and clear. You sent a message to President Obama, to Nancy Pelosi—and yes, even to Bill de Blasio—that their policies are wrong for our nation!” he said, to cheers.

  During the campaign, he’d taunted the politicians and critics who pilloried the decision of his grand jury.

  “I do not begrudge citizens who saw one video, heard none of the other evidence or saw any of the evidence, and heard a medical examiner use the word ‘homicide,’ to be confused,” he said.

  This, again, sounded like it made sense, except for one thing: If Donovan didn’t believe there was a case, why had he presented one to a grand jury?

  It didn’t matter anymore. Donovan was off to Washington, and whatever questions anyone had for him would likely never be answered.

  For Erica, the fact that Dan Donovan had been showered with campaign donations from around the country and sent to Congress, largely because he’d failed to do his job and prosecute her father’s killer, was bad enough. Erica thought that the way people all over the country sent money to people like George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson, the policeman in Ferguson, was designed to send people like her a message. But more dispiriting was the lack of support from people she could have expected to be her friends.

  For instance, there was the matter of who would replace Donovan as district attorney. Legal experts had told her the next DA would have the ability to refile Pantaleo’s case to another grand jury, under certain circumstances. So the matter of who succeeded Donovan was of great importance to her.

  When former Democratic congressman Mike McMahon threw his hat in the ring as a candidate for the DA’s office, that at first seemed like good news to Erica.

  Then she found out that McMahon had received and accepted the endorsement of Pat Lynch, the hated police union chief who’d said her father had killed himself by resisting arrest.

  “I was like, he was endorsed by who?” she remembers. “I couldn’t believe it.”

  Moreover, it bothered her that city councilwoman Debi Rose, the first black elected official in Staten Island’s history, had thrown her support behind McMahon even after Lynch’s endorsement.

  Erica began to suspect that all of these officials, behind closed doors, had already agreed not to reopen the case. She didn’t know what to make of anything anymore.

  Everything that had taken place, from the grand jury investigation, to the court hearing to unseal the minutes of that grand jury, to her failed effort that spring to get at Pantaleo’s personnel file, convinced her that while some politicians might say they were for doing this or that thing on principle, in the end mostly what people in power wanted to do was nothing at all, unless there was an immediate benefit in it for them.

  Governor Cuomo, for instance, the son of a famous liberal, himself a Democrat of some renown, had met with her family and in early July 2015 approved a temporary plan to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate police-related killings. Cuomo got a nice headline out of it and a photo op with Erica’s grandmother, Gwen Carr. But Erica was worried all the time that the policy wouldn’t be made permanent.

  She began to feel alone, personally and politically.

  —

  In July 2015, Erica and several members of her family were stunned to pick up the Daily News and see a troubling headline: “Eric Garner’s Widow Rejects NYC’s $5M Offer to Settle Wrongful Death Suit: Source.”

  The paper reported that the family was holding out for more money, against the advice of counsel:

  A $5 million settlement won’t satisfy the heartbroken family of Eric Garner.

  A source familiar with ongoing negotiations between Controller Scott Stringer and the family of the Staten Island man killed by an NYPD cop say that his widow, Esaw Garner, turned down the hefty offer last week.

  The source said the Garner family’s attorney, Jonathan Moore, is urging the family to accept the $5 million and then seek more money through a separate lawsuit against EMTs from Richmond University Medical Center.

  The family was furious. There were only a few potential sources for the story. And no matter what the source, the motive seemed quite clearly to be to pressure the family into settling. The Garners were convinced that it had come from Moore’s firm. They held a family meeting, along with Moore and the Reverend Sharpton, and things got heated.

  Erica remembers being struck by the fact that Sharpton kicked Moore and his legal team out of the room at one point.

  “I need everyone out the room. I need to talk with the Garner family,” Sharpton said.

  There was some hesitation. In Erica’s account, Sharpton looked at the lawyers and said, “This is some shady mess going on. I don’t trust you guys. Y’all guys got to go.”

  In Erica’s telling, Moore hesitated, but Sharpton told him, “If you’re not family, you’ve got to go.”

  There are a number of ways to interpret this scene, but the family, anyway, came out of the leak episode more wary than ever. They were increasingly nervous about telling anyone anything. Moreover, they learned that the size of the settlement contained hidden perils, from a public relations standpoint and from a relationship standpoint. Once that much money is involved, it tends to divide families. And the Garners were due a big settlement.

  The next day, July 14, 2015, nearly a year to the day after Garner was killed, th
ere was an announcement in the media. The City of New York had negotiated up with Moore and reached a deal to deliver $5.9 million to the family.

  The size of the settlement, though actually modest compared with some other similar cases, drew outrage from the usual quarters.

  In an op-ed in the New York Post, Ed Mullins, president of the New York City Sergeants Benevolent Association, called the settlement “obscene.” He said the money was paid out to “placate outside political agendas.”

  Mullins implied that the taxpayers of New York had to pay for the fact that Eric Garner didn’t provide for his family. “Although Mr. Garner did not provide his family with an abundance of wealth, it was clear from the outset that the Mayor’s Office would,” he wrote.

  “Mr. Garner’s family should not be rewarded simply because he repeatedly chose to break the law and resist arrest.”

  Erica’s phone started ringing almost immediately from people offering congratulations. She was pleased, she guessed, at the money, but she also felt odd about the whole thing, like people were celebrating way too much. She wanted to stay focused on Daniel Pantaleo and keep every conceivable option open for bringing him to justice.

  On the day of the settlement, she implored the Obama administration to pick up the ball. “We are calling for the Department of Justice and [Attorney General] Loretta Lynch to deliver justice for my father,” she said.

  Al Sharpton, who appeared at a press conference on the day of the settlement, looked pleased as well. He pledged to launch another rally in search of a federal civil rights indictment.

  And those rallies happened, but not long after the settlement was done, Erica’s fears came true. A silence fell over her case. The family began to splinter and fight with itself; the world moved on. In the police brutality playbook, the conclusion of the settlement tends to be the last stage of the story arc. In the end, the only people left still paying attention tend to be the family members. And even they get exhausted after a while.

  —

  In May 1964, less than a year after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Lyndon Johnson announced a plan to build a “Great Society.” It was to be a plan of unity and integration, finally fixing the inequities of American society, where “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.”

  The ensuing series of legislative programs passed included Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Food Stamp Act, even the Public Broadcasting Act that created PBS.

  The Great Society was to domestic politics what the moon program was to the military-industrial complex, an audacious long shot. The very phrase “War on Poverty” conjured images of the unity and collective determination America had employed to defeat the Nazis.

  These programs were never meant to be an expensive Band-Aid used to maintain a perpetual uncomfortable détente between rich and poor, black and white. They were designed to wipe out divisions and inequities and leave one prosperous, integrated people standing at war’s end.

  But almost immediately, in the years after the project was announced, Johnson began to get cold feet. So-called race riots in big cities were growing in size and frequency. Watts nearly burned to the ground. In Detroit in 1967, Johnson had to send in army airborne forces after police raided an unlicensed bar that was holding a party for two black servicemen returned from Vietnam, igniting the so-called Twelfth Street Riot.

  In Newark that same year, a black cabdriver was arrested and roughed up for “tailgating,” triggering five days of violence that ended with the arrival of three thousand National Guardsmen. Soon after, much of Newark’s white population fled to the suburbs. To this day, those disturbances are called “the Newark riots” in white New Jersey and “the protests” in the city itself.

  Johnson after his election in 1964 pledged to end the problems of America’s cities. By the end of that term he was using federal troops to occupy them.

  During the Detroit riots in 1967, Johnson ordered the creation of the Kerner Commission, the study cited by Meyerson when he concluded that “everything changes and nothing changes.” LBJ installed one of his closest aides, David Ginsburg, as the executive director of the report on the causes of unrest in the cities. Johnson expected the commission to find that there was some kind of organized black power political conspiracy that had set out to cause all the mayhem.

  One of the commission’s stated goals was to discover the identity of “organizations or individuals dedicated to the incitement or encouragement of violence.”

  The commission included New York mayor John Lindsay, Massachusetts senator Ed Brooke, and NAACP director Roy Wilkins. It quickly came back to Johnson with some bad news. There was no conspiracy, just a lot of pissed-off black people.

  The report basically said that the cities were blowing up because black America was tired of living in a racist country where there were no jobs.

  Detailing extensive patterns of segregation, discrimination in the job and housing markets, and police brutality, the commission argued that the root of America’s problems had to do with the failure to integrate white and black communities.

  White people, the commission basically concluded, didn’t want to live with black people. They preferred a segregated society and used complex discriminatory practices to enforce the distance.

  Worse, the commission issued a warning. Unless we do something to encourage genuine integration, we’ll end up with two completely separate societies.

  “A rising proportion of Negroes may come to see in the deprivation and segregation they experience a justification for violent protest,” the commission concluded. “Large-scale and continuing violence could result, followed by white retaliation, and, ultimately, the separation of the two communities in a garrison state.”

  The commission continued, using language that today seems prophetic:

  To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.

  Johnson was furious when he received the report in February 1968. He couldn’t have been happy with the headline in The New York Times: “Johnson Unit Assails Whites in Negro Riots.”

  LBJ recoiled from his own commission and rejected its conclusions. He also refused to implement any of its recommendations. Johnson was done with kumbaya utopianism. From then on it was less sociology, more police. If we can’t fix it, let’s at least keep it out of sight.

  The Kerner predictions came true. By the mid-2010s, even after the election of a black man to the Oval Office, the country was almost completely segregated.

  Statistics bore this dirty little secret out. At the conclusion of every census the country would sometimes even take a brief note of it, usually in the form of news stories buried somewhere in the back pages. Then the embarrassing issue would quickly be forgotten again.

  From the proverbial thirty thousand feet, modern America has for some time now seemed integrated, especially the big cities. But if you take a closer look, walk from one block to the next, you’ll discover that traditionally white enclaves like Lincoln, Nebraska, are actually more diverse, at the neighborhood level, than places like Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Baltimore.

  On close inspection, these great cities, not coincidentally all sites of horrific police brutality controversies in recent times, are actually just collections of tense racial archipelagoes where people of different races don’t live near one another or socialize.

  America, in other words, is a lot like Staten Island: white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods often separated by a physical border like the Mason-Dixon Line.

  A half-century after Selma and Watts, three-quarters of white Americans don’t have a single nonwhite friend. The average black person, a minority living in a majority white world, has eight white friends. He or she is also very likely to live in an exclusively black, heavily polic
ed neighborhood.

  The civil rights movement, legislation, and milestone court decisions of the 1950s and ’60s produced remarkable changes and ended or ramped down centuries of explicit, statutory discrimination. But real integration was not one of the accomplishments.

  The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.

  Black America always saw the continuing schism. But white America has traditionally been free to ignore and be untroubled by it and to believe it had reached the “postracial” stage of its otherwise proud history. That was until cellphones and the Internet came along.

  When the murder of Eric Garner hit the headlines, it at first seemed to lift the veil on the ongoing violence of racism and discrimination. There was debate, controversy, furor, disgust, and a great deal of finger-pointing, even from the majority segment of white America, over what to do about the “unacceptable” problem.

  But after a period of days or weeks, national media audiences exiled these red-hot stories to remote chambers of their memories. From there they become provincial tales, “black” controversies, troublesome things that happened once in a corner of society that still doesn’t really concern most white Americans.

  Huge portions of the country then wash their hands of the matter and leave others to deal with the things that sometimes happen in the places they don’t think about. Baltimore. Ferguson. Staten Island.

  This forgetting process is what police are for.

  Aggressive policing maintains the reality of segregation in part by policing the borders separating poor black neighborhoods from affluent white ones.