I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  But more important, it maintains the illusion of integration by allowing police officers to take the fall for policies driven by the white taxpayers on the other side of the blue wall.

  Follow almost any of these police brutality cases to their logical conclusion and you will eventually work your way back to a monstrous truth. Most of this country is invested in perpetuating the nervous cease-fire of de facto segregation, with its “garrison state” of occupied ghettos that are carefully kept out of sight and mind.

  Thanks to the ubiquity of cell technology and the instantaneous nature of modern media, those divisions became uglier and more visible after Eric Garner’s death.

  But the response to that increased visibility wasn’t shame, embarrassment, and a national conversation about how to better integrate a broken society. Things went another way entirely.

  —

  Before 2015, Donald Trump was a fringe media curiosity, a rich loudmouth with the world’s most elaborate comb-over who whored himself for ratings and Internet page views in the same waters as David Hasselhoff and Dramatic Chipmunk. Originally famous as a real estate magnate who obsessively pretended to be richer than he was and fumed over the media-created perception that he had short fingers, he was reduced in the late 2000s to trying his hand at reality TV, where weirdly enough America made him more famous than ever.

  The Apprentice spoke to Middle America’s most ghoulish masochistic fantasies about life in a world with no job security. In it, Trump played a vicious corporate tyrant firing unworthy losers over and over again in a revolting sadomasochistic ritual that millions for some reason found entertaining. Huge audiences got themselves worked up for the orgiastic “You’re fired” climaxes, clearly enjoying the spectacle of being humiliated by the despotic rich.

  But Trump wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. So he parlayed his Apprentice role into a new part in America’s longest-running TV show, the presidential election, reinventing himself as a ludicrous caricature of a racist strongman.

  It struck some people as odd that when America’s white supremacist movement finally spilled out into plain view, it would be led not by a gap-toothed southerner but by a rich New Yorker in a power tie. But really it made perfect sense. For ages now New York has been at the center of every innovation in institutional racism, from redlining to blockbusting to the “war on crack” to mass incarceration to Broken Windows.

  Somehow it always comes back to New York. And as a salesman for the first open revolution against the civil rights movement, Trump was perfect. He had money and education, but he spoke and wrote at a fourth-grade level. He shared a real bond with the Klansman in the Ozarks by having the same dumb reading habits.

  Here, at last, was a member of the financial elite with a real link to the common man! But the link was that both consumed Internet conspiracy theories about Mexicans carrying diseases over the border or nice white people from the suburbs being butchered by minorities.

  A terminal narcissist who flocked to crowds wherever they gathered, Trump unleashed a generation of suppressed hatreds simply by saying things he was too stupid to realize weren’t just harmless personal opinions but political dynamite.

  His boldest gambit was a proposal to build a wall separating Mexico and the United States, which he described as a protective measure necessary to keep America safe from the “rapists” across the border. He also pledged to ban all Muslims from entering the country until “we can figure out what’s going on,” a line that really resonated with people who loved the idea of a kind of racial cease-fire, a “temporary” stop to full integration.

  Trump said little about black/white relations, but most everyone got his message all the same. On November 21, 2015, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, a black man who chanted “Black lives matter” at a Trump rally was kicked and punched by Trump supporters, who shouted back at him, “All lives matter!” On the same day, Trump promised surveillance of mosques.

  The following day, Trump retweeted an Internet meme showing a dark-skinned man with a handgun and a set of data points, ostensibly about 2015:

  Blacks killed by whites—2%

  Blacks killed by police—1%

  Whites killed by police—3%

  Whites killed by whites—16%

  Whites killed by blacks—81%

  Blacks killed by blacks—97%

  Trump’s source was “Crime Statistics Bureau—San Francisco.” One Google search would have revealed this bureau didn’t exist. But Trump couldn’t be bothered to look up the real numbers from the FBI, which showed all of his numbers were way off.

  It didn’t matter anyway. The issue wasn’t that Trump had circulated the wrong numbers but that he’d circulated any numbers at all. The rhetoric about Mexican rapists and black crime rates resounded with Middle American audiences that wanted to hang on to long-forbidden beliefs about inherent racial differences.

  The ideas we supposedly learned in the sixties, that people are people and what differences we have must be cultural and political, not racial, never quite stuck. Not really. And the incompleteness of that civil rights movement finally surfaced in the form of a national counterrevolt that seized every form of power in this country.

  —

  Bay Street, late December 2015. The Plexiglas box commemorating Eric Garner’s difficult life and tragic death is now mostly unattended. It seems diminished, covered in scratches.

  A pair of black police officers has been stationed on the block for most of the year now, and things are quieter, at least in terms of quality-of-life arrests and confrontations. But the failure to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the election of Dan Donovan, and the rise now of Donald Trump has left people on the block dispirited.

  For James Knight, the death of his friend and the rise of Trump are linked. Just days after Trump’s Alabama rally, he reflects on what it all means. Instead of providing a wake-up call, Garner’s death might have just ended up driving hidden beliefs to the surface.

  “You can see now how America really is.” He sighs. “Most of the time, it was hidden, people didn’t say things like they’re saying now.”

  James sits on a stoop not far from where Garner had been killed, looks around, and shakes his head.

  “But now you can see with Trump, the support he has behind him, how it’s growing, you see what America is really feeling behind closed doors,” he says.

  “They’re letting us know what they think of us.”

  —

  Evening, December 4, 2015. Erica stands on the steps of the courthouse in Staten Island and addresses a small crowd of demonstrators. Her plan is to march through the St. George and Tompkinsville neighborhoods to commemorate a grim anniversary. It’s a year and a day since Dan Donovan’s grand jury elected not to indict her father’s killer.

  In the crowd stand representatives of a few rival protest organizations. Some of the Justice Leaguers, including Carmen and Rameen, are on hand. There are also demonstrators from groups like NYC Shut It Down, which have been holding weekly meetings and marches leading out of Grand Central station about this and other police incidents for some time.

  The Shut It Down folks were younger and a little more hard-core, allied as they were with Black Lives Matter. They saw themselves as being much more grassroots and street oriented than other groups, and there were grumblings from the very start of the march, when some of the Justice Leaguers arrived in Staten Island in a brand-new Lincoln Navigator.

  “Who the fuck comes to a street march in a Navigator?” groused one of the Shut It Downers.

  Erica wasn’t aware of the grumbling. She was instead trying to focus on keeping things together. Like Ramsey Orta, who went from being on the streets to trying to wear the activist hat virtually overnight, Erica had been thrust into the role of a political leader of sorts, without any training or guidance of any kind.

  Unlike Ramsey, who seemed uncomfortable in the role, Erica took to it. She has a strong speaking voice and can be heard from a great distance. And she
has a head for improvisation and a willingness to endure uncomfortable scenes and confrontations.

  She stood by herself on the steps, surrounded by cameras. The Justice Leaguers were making a film about their involvement in the Garner case. So they rolled cameras as Erica gave a brief speech about the politicians in both parties who by then had walked away from the case.

  She mentioned Governor Andrew Cuomo and his plan to create an independent prosecutor in police abuse cases, which would be in force for a year before it had to be renewed, by a Republican-dominated Assembly.

  “I’m calling out Andrew Cuomo,” she said. “He’s throwing us scraps! Because he promised the family he would renew the executive order if the legislature didn’t pass it. Why would corrupt Republicans pass it?”

  The crowd shrugged. Only a few knew what she was talking about. She went on to talk about Democrat Mike McMahon, who had just won the DA race.

  “I’m calling out Mike McMahon,” she said. “The new acting DA of Staten Island. He has the power to reconvene a second grand jury. But he won’t do it.”

  She mentioned again that McMahon had been endorsed by Pat Lynch. Then she paused and added, “I’m calling out Debi Rose, the only black elected official in Staten Island. She said to my face that my father’s life matters. But she endorsed McMahon. And he’s not gonna do anything.

  “You know what they are?”

  Liars! the crowd answered dutifully.

  She went on to say they were there that night to demand answers and justice, to make sure that the idea of prosecuting Daniel Pantaleo remained alive. Then she led chants, which she’d apparently learned somewhere in the last year of leading these sometimes-lonely protests:

  “No justice for the blacks! No justice for the browns! So what we gonna do?”

  Shut it down, shut it down!

  “When they say get back…”

  We say fight back!

  Then she began singing a poem her family had written. Most of the protesters knew it by heart:

  I can hear my father crying, “I can’t breathe”

  Calling out the violence of the racist police

  We ain’t gonna stop, till the people are free

  We ain’t gonna stop, till the people are free

  The crowd soon started walking through the St. George area, stopping periodically to lie down in front of traffic and block cars and buses. Erica was usually the first (and sometimes the only) person to lie down in traffic, and she would chant from time to time:

  “Who’s this for?”

  Eric Garner!

  “Say his name!”

  Eric Garner!

  She led the march through the projects, past Eric and Esaw’s old apartment. Young men popped out of doorways and leaned out of windows and said things like, “He lived here!”

  The marchers followed behind her, though conspicuously in different groups. There were whispers among some present that Erica was being goaded into lying down in front of traffic for the sake of the Justice League documentary. But Erica didn’t hear any of it and kept on.

  The police throughout the march had followed behind, seemingly not wanting to start a confrontation yet not wanting to let it go entirely either. At every major intersection there were bunches of police, who quietly let the group pass. There was a bit of eye rolling at the “die-ins” in front of traffic, but mostly the officers remained mute.

  Finally, the crowd made it back to Bay Street, where Erica briefly addressed the group, asking them to hold hands in a circle around the spot where her father had died. Rameen, dressed in his trademark Orioles cap, stood beside Erica during this serene moment.

  During this last address, in which she called for a moment of silence, word spread that police had massed around the corner, up the street at Victory Boulevard. And indeed, Victory was clogged with giant armored trucks belonging to Bill Bratton’s much-ballyhooed Strategic Response Group, or SRG.

  Surrounding the trucks were a bevy of specially trained riot police in Kevlar, some with machine guns. Given the small number of decidedly scraggly demonstrators, this giant battalion of muscle seemed comic and unnecessary.

  “Oh, shit. SRGs are here,” muttered James Woods, a cameraman filming the scene.

  Some people took off to look at the scene around the corner, but the bulk of the demonstrators had remained on the spot on Bay Street next to the Plexiglas memorial at the spot where Eric Garner had died.

  Tensions between the different groups of demonstrators finally boiled over and they were mostly all now standing there, split into two sides, pointing fingers and engaged in a ludicrous argument. The fighting-words moment had come when someone had accused someone else of being a fake, invoking the image of the Navigator car.

  In response, one of the Justice Leaguers shouted back that having money didn’t mean you weren’t real. After all, the young man said, “Harry Belafonte led a revolution from a mansion!”

  There was an outbreak of guffawing at this. A young woman shouted in response, “You did not just say that!”

  While all of this was going on, Erica quietly wandered around the corner to walk up Victory and have a look at the gathered police force. Word had filtered back to her that there was an argument going on between the two protest groups at the memorial spot, which she would later say both angered and saddened her. She felt that her father’s memory had been disrespected by the argument. It also left her with a not-insignificant logistical problem.

  There must have been a hundred heavily armed officers standing on the street in front of her. Storefronts on both sides were lit up, reflecting the blinking red-and-blue siren lights. The sidewalks were cleared. The huge armored vehicles lined the sidewalks far up the street, like a caravan of elephants.

  Erica rarely spoke of her father as a hero or a martyr. He was, she realized, “just a man,” a single flawed person ground up by the power of the state.

  Eric Garner was murdered by history. The motive was the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and determined to stay there. Now the long line of armor and weaponry arrayed against a single grieving woman appeared as symbols of our desire to separate. Hatred can be organized, but only individuals love.

  For a long moment Erica just stood in the middle of the street, staring at the preposterous show of force. The demonstrators were around the corner, still arguing. She was by herself.

  EPILOGUE

  On March 21, 2017, the site ThinkProgress published an exclusive: “The Disturbing History of the Officer Who Killed Eric Garner.” The site, it seemed, had been contacted by “an anonymous source who said they [sic] worked at the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB).”

  This source unilaterally broke the court impasse between Legal Aid and New York City, which had refused to turn over even a partial list of officer Daniel Pantaleo’s disciplinary records, by sending ThinkProgress a list of Pantaleo’s CCRB complaints: fourteen allegations, four of which were substantiated. The list showed that Pantaleo had an extensive enough history of complaints that his superiors probably should have intervened long before Eric Garner was killed.

  The journey just to get this list out to the public had been an arduous one. Legal Aid, remember, had already successfully fought this issue in court, winning a judge’s ruling that the city had to turn over a limited list of Pantaleo’s disciplinary records.

  But the city had appealed the judge’s decision in the summer of 2016, arguing that Section 50-a of the state’s civil rights code prohibited them from releasing any “personnel records used to evaluate performance.” The bizarre thing about this excuse was that the city had, in the years prior to this case, freely released similar records on multiple occasions. The excuse for not doing so in the Garner case therefore amounted to an admission that the state had previously violated the law as a routine matter, only realizing in 2016 that they were prohibited from releasing such records.

 
In any case, one of the four substantiated complaints against Pantaleo was a “vehicle stop” on December 23, 2011. This was the same date of videographer Charles Roberson’s fateful encounter with Pantaleo that led to a strip search in front of a laundromat. Roberson never knew it, but it appeared the department investigated his complaint, found it to be accurate, and even punished Pantaleo for it.

  But the punishment, as ThinkProgress wrote, was not terribly rigorous:

  The documents indicate that the CCRB pushed for the harshest penalties it has the authority to recommend for all four substantiated allegations…But the NYPD, which is not required to heed the CCRB’s recommendations, imposed the weakest disciplinary action for the vehicular incident: “instruction,” or additional training.

  ThinkProgress characterized Pantaleo’s record as a “chronic history” of abuse cases that would put him “among the worst on the force.” The stats backed up their analysis. Only about 5 percent of police received eight or more complaints. Pantaleo had fourteen. And only about 2 percent had as many as two substantiated complaints, while Pantaleo had four.

  Was this an accurate reflection of how bad Pantaleo was relative to other officers? I heard anecdotally that Pantaleo, though an “asshole,” was far from the worst officer working that part of Staten Island. But it was certainly clear now that between Pantaleo’s CCRB file and his multiple lawsuits for strip-searching and “flaking,” the NYPD had had ample evidence before the Garner incident that he was a problem cop.

  Naturally, the response of the police union to the Pantaleo story was outrage—at the leak. The always-in-character Pat Lynch had never stopped being furious about the Garner case and showed it when asked for comment by the Daily News about the leaked CCRB list.

  “The leak of such information is simply another demonstration of the CCRB’s inability to function in the fair and impartial manner prescribed by the City Charter,” Lynch said. “Their ineptness is well documented.”