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<h1>The Ugly Idea That Killed Eric Garner</h1>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/12/the_big_idea_that_killed_eric_garner.html">http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/12/the_big_idea_that_killed_eric_garner.html</a></small></small></b><br>
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<p class="social"> by <strong><a
href="http://colorlines.com/archives/author/kai-wright">Kai
Wright</a></strong>, Thursday, December 4 2014, 7:00 AM EST
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<p>Jewell Miller is the mother of Eric Garner’s infant daughter.
Yesterday, she spoke with a New York Times reporter as she pushed
her 7-month-old girl around the scene of the two crimes—Garner’s
alleged* trespass of New York tax law, and the New York Police
Department’s crime against humanity. “Again the system has failed
us,” Miller told the reporter. “How? How? I don’t know how.” But
she did know how, and so she answered herself. “I think he has
done the job that he was trained to do,” she said of Officer
Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold ended Garner’s life, “and I think
he did a good job—to kill us.”</p>
<p>It’s unfair to say NYPD officers are trained to kill black
people. But Miller isn’t using hyperbole when she says Pantaleo
was doing his job and doing it well when he encountered Garner on
July 17. For nearly a generation, it has been NYPD’s explicit
policy to marshal a big response to small things, to treat the
illegal distribution of 75 cent loosies with the gravity of a
violent felony. This approach has been so widely recreated in
cities around the country that broken windows policing, as it’s
called, is now synonymous with effective policing. And it is this
noxious, conventional wisdom that a grand jury failed to indict
yesterday.</p>
<p>Officer Pantaleo may or may not ultimately be held accountable
for his crime—by the department, by the feds or by the heavens.
Whatever happens, justice does not lie in his fate. Justice will
be found in the degree to which Mayor Bill de Blasio lives into
the words he spoke following the grand jury announcement.</p>
<p>“There is a momentum for change that will be felt in every
neighborhood,” de Blasio insisted, ticking off reforms already
underway—a pilot program for body cams on cops, some
decriminalization of marijuana possession, new limits on
stop-and-frisk. But in considering reform, it’s instructive to
revisit the circumstances that led Pantaleo to grab Garner around
the neck and drag him to the ground.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/face-broken-windows/">WNYC’s
Robert Lewis reported</a> back in September, Pantaleo is a
poster boy for broken windows policing. He’s been on the force
since 2007, and in that time records show him as the arresting
officer in 259 criminal court cases. They are overwhelmingly for
minor crimes like pot possession; just 24 of them were for
felonies. “Two-thirds of Pantaleo’s cases that made it to court
ended with a dismissal or a guilty plea to a disorderly conduct
violation,” Lewis reported, “which is a little more serious than a
speeding ticket. He is one of the most active cops on Staten
Island.”</p>
<p>This is what broken windows cops are supposed to do. They beef up
their ranks in priority neighborhoods and get in folks’ faces over
anything and everything. I’ve lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant,
Brooklyn, for about a decade. Our neighborhood has for many years
been on NYPD’s list of target spots for broken windows—“impact
zones,” as they’re called. It’s unexceptional here to swap stories
of run-ins with bizarrely unreasonable cops—telling us stop
lingering by the subway entrance, to get out of the street, to
move along. Eric Garner’s frustrated response to that constant
harassment will appear routine to anyone who’s lived in
neighborhoods like ours. He’d just broken up a fight, and now here
was NYPD in his face, again. “Every time you see me you wanna
arrest me,” Garner snapped. “I’m tired of it. It stops today.”</p>
<p>NYPD brass had ordered the 120th precinct to make a priority out
of interrupting the sale of untaxed cigarettes, <a
href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/wife-man-filmed-chokehold-arrested-article-1.1893790">according
to a Daily News report</a> just after Garner’s death. It was a
recurring “quality-of-life” issue, a spokesperson told the paper.
Garner had been arrested for violating New Yorkers’ quality of
life in this way eight times. So Pantaleo and his colleagues were
doing their job and doing it well. And when Garner pushed back on
their outsized response to his petty alleged crime, they escalated
further. After all, that is the oxymoronic premise of broken
windows policing: the cops should escalate things in order to keep
things under control, and that will keep us all safe.</p>
<p>The contradictions within this idea beg unpleasant questions: Who
is us and what is danger? <a
href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/bratton-nypd-keep-aggressive-begging-down.html">Commissioner
Bill Bratton gave some indication</a> of the us and them of New
York City crime and safety not long after he took the department’s
helm. In a March speech at the Waldorf-Astoria, Bratton reassured
business leaders that he’d stand firm behind broken windows
policing.</p>
<p>“We will be focusing on ensuring that aggressive begging and
squeegee pests, all those activities that create fear and destroy
neighborhoods, graffiti, all those seemingly minor things that
were so much in evidence in the ’80s and early ’90s here, don’t
have the chance to come back.” He vowed a late-night tour of the
subway with criminologist George Kelling, one of the intellectual
fathers of broken windows. “George and I are going to go out, kind
of like old times for us, riding the rails and getting a sense.”
But don’t worry, he insisted, their Old West posse would treat New
York City’s terrifying “pests”—also known as poor
people—“respectfully” and “compassionately.”</p>
<p>Eleven times Eric Garner told the cops huddled around him that he
couldn’t breathe. His unanswered pleas for respect and compassion
echo in the canyon that separates the conceptual niceties of
broken windows from its ugly, grinding reality.</p>
<p>In the hours following the grand jury announcement, the idea of
body cams for cops morphed quickly from a hopeful reform to a
Twitter punchline. After all, the whole incident here was recorded
and the whole world has seen it. Still, maybe body cams will bring
some marginal reforms; the record’s mixed in jurisdictions where
they’ve been deployed. But the real killer here isn’t in the
margins. It’s not the tools cops use. It’s not their training.
It’s not the rigged game of grand juries. At least, these things
aren’t at root. The root problem is a consensus that we make
cities safe by harassing the residents of their black
neighborhoods. It is that idea that must be indicted and convicted
and put away for good.</p>
<p><em>*Post has been updated since publication to reflect that
Garner had not been convicted of selling loose cigarettes on the
day he was killed.</em></p>
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