I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

Had this news come out in December 2014, when protesters filled the streets, it might have rocked the city. But by March 2017, the world’s attention was focused elsewhere.

  Around that same time, on March 20, the House Intelligence Committee in Washington had held dramatic hearings in which former FBI director James Comey had announced the existence of an investigation into associates of Donald Trump’s campaign and their possible ties to Russia. Trump had fueled the media furor associated with the hearings by denouncing the Russia story as “fake news.”

  The Trump story captivated the world and dominated the Internet and social media, obliterating everything else. Nobody cared about the Eric Garner case by then. Though Trump was a new variable, the rapid fading from memory of public outrage is a key part of the pattern of these police misconduct incidents.

  When someone takes a beating or gets killed by police, city bureaucracies go into siege mode, reflexively stalling and delaying at every turn. The patience of complainants and their families is stretched to the limit. Embarrassing information, if it ever comes out, comes out years later, long after the streets have calmed down.

  The quest for changes and reform tends to get dulled over time, especially if there’s been a financial settlement in a case. That’s usually because there are so few people left who can stay angry enough to keep the fight going.

  Everyone just gets tired.

  For Erica Garner, the ThinkProgress story was just an additional insult piled atop many others. “It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know,” she said. “He shouldn’t have been out there on the streets.”

  The part that really bothered Erica was that Pantaleo even now was still on the police payroll. Even after his history came out, even after he’d killed someone—he was still police.

  Pantaleo was still stowed away somewhere quietly pulling a salary. Meanwhile, Ramsey Orta went away to jail for four years, and over time, a host of other characters from the Bay Street neighborhood where Garner had died were arrested in stings and raids. The police in Staten Island were not amused by the attention the story had won them, and made sure that the people in Tompkinsville Park knew it.

  Even outside of Staten Island, Garner’s friends and acquaintances had a hard time over the years.

  On February 20, 2016, John McCrae went to a little party in Edison, New Jersey. Just after midnight, he headed out of town, back toward Staten Island, driving a silver Dodge Durango. A white woman was in the passenger seat. Two Edison police officers named Joseph Palko and Daniel Hansson thought they saw a malfunctioning taillight and pulled McCrae over. They leaned in and started questioning McCrae, who was wearing a spiffy blue jacket.

  “Man, that’s some jacket,” one of the cops said. “How much you pay for a jacket like that?”

  McCrae, realizing right away he was being messed with, shrugged and said he didn’t know.

  “Well, that’s quite a jacket,” one of the two officers repeated. Then he shined a light at the girl in the passenger seat.

  “How much did you pay for her?” the officer asked.

  McCrae rolled his eyes.

  “How much did I pay…man, that’s a normal girl right there. We’re friends!”

  “Uh-huh,” he was told. “Get out of the car, please?”

  They asked him if they could search him. McCrae didn’t think he had a choice and just shrugged and said yes. Going through his pockets, they found three little baggies of weed, worth a total of about thirty bucks. They arrested him and took him to the station to be questioned.

  At the station house in Edison, they told him to take off his clothes so that he could be searched properly. He ended up stripped to his underwear, seated at a desk in the middle of the station for what seemed to him like a really long time.

  “I was in there in my damn underpants,” he later said. “And they started talking to me, like making jokes and shit. One of the guys there started asking me about cocktails, like what kinds of mixed drinks I liked. Like he was my friend or something. I’m like, ‘Man, can I put my pants on?’ ”

  Asked later if it was normal for police in Edison to interview arrestees in their underwear, the department released a statement:

  Officers Palko and Hansson transported McCrae, 52, of Staten Island, N.Y., to Edison Police Headquarters where—consistent with departmental arrest procedures—McCrae was thoroughly searched for other contraband that may have been concealed under his layers of winter clothing.

  They did not find any more “contraband” and McCrae was ultimately allowed to dress and leave. He was charged with possession of marijuana under fifty grams, and possession with intent to distribute. He was looking at six months in jail at first, but ultimately took an ACD and stayed free.

  “Ain’t going back to no motherfucking Edison,” he said, shaking his head.

  Doug Brinson was in Rahway, New Jersey, a few weeks later. He had a little stand out for his shirts and oils in a public square—unlicensed, he admits, but that wasn’t the problem. Doug had a big, new pickup truck, a silver GMC that he cared for like a newborn child. He got back to his truck to find a police officer writing him a ticket for trespassing.

  “For what?” Brinson asked.

  “Trespassing,” the officer said.

  He offered some kind of explanation about how Doug’s truck was obstructing a driveway by a few inches. Doug didn’t quite get it and asked him to explain again. The officer, annoyed, looked Doug up and down.

  “Say,” he said finally. “Whose truck is this, anyway? Where’d you get it?”

  Doug shook his head. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  The officer at this point threw his hands back up over his head. “All right, all right!” he said, as if Doug had overreacted and needed to settle down.

  At the sight of the cop’s hands over his head, Doug froze.

  “I thought maybe he thought I had a gun or something,” he recounts. “I damn near had a heart attack when he put his hands up like that. I was like, ‘Man, don’t do that, you’ll scare me to death.’ ”

  Doug got a ticket for “defiant trespassing” and ended up having to pay more than $300.

  Around the same time that Doug was getting ticketed, I found myself in the green room of a TV network, waiting to do a live interview. Ahead of me in line to go on the show was a prominent Democratic Party official. The official had a good reputation with progressives and was considered something of a strategic guru. He asked me what I was working on.

  When I mentioned that I was looking at the Garner case, he nodded. “Oh, right,” he said. “The thing about that case is—that’s the unequivocal one.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew what he meant, of course. The significance of Eric Garner to a lot of politicians and pundits was that he was a “truly innocent” victim—in other words, not a menacing-looking young man like Michael Brown, who may or may not have robbed a store before his death.

  This obsession with the individual guilt or innocence of victims among pundits and pols seemed to me to miss the entire point of the police brutality issue. The real villain in that story, I thought, was math and probability, and a community policing policy that was designed to massively amp up police confrontations in certain neighborhoods only. As was revealed in the Stop-and-Frisk lawsuit, the problem was that the policy pre-concluded that some people are more prone to crime than others. Simply looking a certain way became probable cause. That some of the people who ended up being searched and/or roughed up turned out to be criminals, and some didn’t, seemed totally random and irrelevant to me. The real issue was that we employed the strategy in some places and not in others.

  It was incredible to watch the reaction when a reporter named Dan Heyman was arrested in West Virginia in May 2017 for shouting a question at Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price. Heyman overnight became a martyr to the evil of Trump. The Twittersphere couldn’t contain its outrage that such a thing could happen. This is America! What abou
t free speech? The Constitution?

  But Heyman’s “crime”—“willful disruption of governmental processes”—is a charge that gets handed down in neighborhoods like the one where Eric Garner died virtually every day. It’s a legal wild card, a bailout tool for cops who need leverage to search or detain people not obviously guilty of doing anything illegal. You’d be hard-pressed to find a person in Tompkinsville Park who hasn’t received an “obstructing government administration” ticket at some point.

  But beyond all that, my green-room encounter with the Democratic official who knew Eric Garner only as the “unequivocal case” bothered me on another level. I knew enough about Garner by then to be depressed that he was destined to be remembered only as a political symbol. If there’s anything I hope I Can’t Breathe can accomplish, it’s to change that impression.

  I’d first become interested in the case in December 2014, just after a grand jury voted not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the killing of Eric Garner. When the decision came down, I drove over to Staten Island to ask a few questions about the case.

  I’d just finished writing a book called The Divide, which focused on law enforcement inequities. The book contrasted the negotiated, parlor-room approach to white-collar crime with the beatdown-based model of “community policing.”

  In the back of my mind, I thought maybe a magazine article about Garner would be a way to continue researching that world, given that Garner’s case seemed from the outside like a textbook example of what happens when initiatives such as Stop-and-Frisk go south.

  But when I got out to Bay Street and started asking about Garner, something odd happened. As I listened to stories about the man, all the policy issues faded from mind. More and more I found myself just asking about Garner the person. I liked him.

  Garner in life had been a physically huge man, but he also had a sizable personality, so much so that even six months after his death, you could still sense him out there on that block. After a while, it got so that I could almost see him leaning up against the beauty salon window, or arguing sports with the chess players in the park, or chatting up girls in the doorway of the check-cash store. I could even see him lumbering back to his SUV (I remember being told that his car would sink almost to the curb when he stepped inside it) to go home at dusk.

  I soon ignored the policy story completely and just started retracing Eric Garner’s last years on the street. It was like chasing a ghost. It wasn’t hard to get a measure of the man, because he was spoken of in much the same way by almost everyone who knew him.

  An outsider entering a neighborhood that had experienced a world-shaking event like that might expect to hear stories of a saint and a martyr. But Garner’s friends cared about him too much to slander him after death with false praise. Garner, I learned very early on, was a man who was loved by his friends and by his family members not in spite of his faults and not because of them, but because of the totality of who he was—the fullness of his imperfect humanity.

  On the one hand, he was a flawed character and hard-luck case that trouble seemed to find with unerring regularity. Cursed with impeccably bad timing, Garner could be counted on to pick the wrong one almost every time he was faced with more than one option and a coin-flip chance for success. He got ripped off more than once, and the Bay Street crowd ribbed him for his runny nose, sloppy dress, and fat feet. But they loved him. There were a lot of slow hours in that park, and Garner’s good nature and eccentricities kept everyone entertained.

  He argued for hours over meaningless things such as sports statistics that didn’t need to be argued at all, he was amazingly messy, and he ate in amounts that made jaws drop—the descriptions I heard of Garner folding a whole pizza in half and eating it like a taco were incredible. In short, he was the kind of character people would have been telling stories about on park benches and alleyways well into the future, even if this terrible thing had never happened to him.

  I soon learned that beyond his caricature street persona there was another Garner. This was a more serious and thoughtful person, clever in his own way despite his clumsiness. This more serious man struggled to find a place for himself in a world full of confounding obstacles. The private Garner was flawed, too, but in a different way.

  He wanted to be there for his family, but let them down early and often, repeatedly leaving them to go to jail—mostly for selling drugs, but once for a serious crime of violence, a beating of a neighbor that left Garner’s family home looking like a murder scene.

  Crime nearly cost him the love of his daughters, who eventually froze him out for leaving them to go to prison. He suffered terribly behind bars, and when he reemerged, Garner behaved like a man who finally understood where his priorities lay.

  He organized his life around his love for his children. Though he sometimes pretended otherwise, acting like a mini-kingpin of Tompkinsville Park and boasting about how much money he made, really everything he did on the street was for his kids. Almost every dollar he made went to them. Even as his health failed, his weight ballooned, and the clothes on his back began to split into rags, Garner still marched to the corner every day to bank as much as he could.

  An ex-athlete whose body had taken a beating through years of prison, untreated disease, and standing in rain and snow for hours on end to hustle quarters and dollar bills, Garner by his early forties had begun to fall apart physically.

  Like so many middle-aged people, he had learned to truly appreciate what was important in life at the exact moment when his strength began to leave him. On one level, his was a profound and universal story, about how people—in ways that are simultaneously tragic and beautiful—inevitably fight with all their might to hold on to things they know deep inside can never last forever.

  At heart, he was “just a man,” as his daughter Erica said, trying like most of us to hold on to a little piece of something. This is a story anyone can understand, making the brutal ending that much more painful.

  Of course, another part of Garner’s story is not universal. His troubles with the police were of a character almost exclusively familiar to black and Hispanic men. As a white man I was poorly equipped to even guess what he might have thought or felt about any of this, and I knew that any story I tried to tell about Garner would therefore be lacking in important ways. All I could do was try to describe the incredible breadth of the institutional response to his life and death.

  The lengths we went to as a society to crush someone of such modest ambitions—Garner’s big dream was to someday sit down at work—were awesome to contemplate. What happened to Garner spoke to the increasing desperation of white America to avoid having to even see, much less speak to or live alongside, people like him.

  Half a century after the civil rights movement, white Americans do not want to know this man. They don’t want him walking in their neighborhoods. They want him moved off the corner. Even white liberals seem to, deep down inside, if the policies they advocate and the individual choices they make are any indication.

  The police are blamed for these deaths, and often rightly so, but the highly confrontational, physically threatening strategies cops such as Daniel Pantaleo employ draw their power from the tacit approval of upscale white voters. Whether they admit it or not, many voters would rather that Eric Garner be dead and removed from view somewhere than living and eating Cheetos on the stoop next door.

  Garner kept running headfirst into invisible walls. Each time he collided with law enforcement, this unspoken bureaucratic imperative to make him disappear threw him back into an ever-smaller pen. Even allowing him a few feet of sidewalk space was ultimately too much. His world got smaller and smaller until finally even his last breath of air was taken away from him. He was finally deemed greedy for wanting even that much.

  Garner’s real crime was being a conspicuous black man of slovenly appearance who just happened to spend his days standing on the street across from a string of new high-end condominium complexes. No white people I tal
ked to would say it out loud, but Garner was just too visible for everyone’s tastes. His raw presence threatened property values. Plus he was an easy bust, and so became a regular target of police mandated to make busts like clockwork.

  Garner himself for a long time happily went along with this absurd charade. He accepted his “community policing” arrests as a business cost and trudged to court and to jail on command for years. He didn’t begin to get truly wound up about his treatment by police until he felt the cops were breaking the unwritten rules of the game, busting him after hours as he did his laundry, vouchering his money over and over, and so on.

  Then, on a day when he didn’t even commit a crime, as he was still huffing and puffing and leaning up against a wall after breaking up a neighborhood fight, Garner made the critical mistake of refusing for once to be dragged out of sight. In a way that was somewhat out of character, he decided suddenly that he’d had enough. He stood up for himself, not with violence but merely in the most literal sense, standing up straight and refusing to bend.

  This tiny act of defiance triggered not just a preposterous display of force but the mother of all disproportionate bureaucratic responses. The latter encompassed an apparent thrown case by the district attorney’s office, months of grand jury sessions, multiple judges in multiple courts holding the line against inquiries, years of obstinate refusal by city officials to turn over records, a sweeping effort by police to target individuals on the block deemed responsible for the controversy, and countless other actions.

  Garner’s death launched the political career of the prosecutor who failed to indict the policeman who killed him. It even contributed to a national backlash political movement that eventually coalesced around a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, whose “Make America Great Again” platform drew from an old well of white resentment.

  Once elected, Trump named as attorney general a man, Jeff Sessions, who made one of his first acts a decision to “pull back” on the federal civil rights investigations of corrupt local police departments. The gutting of federal authority to conduct civil rights cases rolled back decades of work by people such as James Meyerson, who sought to find a way to police the police. It also cut off what would have been one of the last possible avenues for justice in the Garner case.