I would say that if he wasn't resisting the arrest he would still be alive. Was it a justifiable arrest? Well that is a whole different discussion all together. He was doing something deemed illegal and he knew the drill having been arrested some 30 previous times. That could be called harrasment but if a cop sees someone breaking the law they are obligated to intervene; fine, arrest, warn etc... It is all moot now and I understand that but there are very few people who have died that have cooperated with law enforcement.
How in Gods name do you avoid "resisting arrest" in this case? In this case, "arrest" began with a tackle and a chokehold! If you are trying to breathe, that becomes "resisting arrest"???? What the hell is that??? It appears, the only possible way to avoid "resisting arrest" in this case is to die quicker.
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I would say that if he wasn't resisting the arrest he would still be alive. Was it a justifiable arrest? Well that is a whole different discussion all together. He was doing something deemed illegal and he knew the drill having been arrested some 30 previous times. That could be called harrasment but if a cop sees someone breaking the law they are obligated to intervene; fine, arrest, warn etc... It is all moot now and I understand that but there are very few people who have died that have cooperated with law enforcement.
The way it's looking, if I was a black guy in the States I would probably just lay prostrate on the ground every time I saw a cop.
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I'm surprised no one has brought up the 12 year old that was shot in a park in Cleveland.
The guy who called 911 said multiple times the gun was probably a toy. In 2 seconds after arriving the kid was shot dead. The second link will show he was judged unfit to serve in 2012 .
"Police also claimed, according to the Associated Press, that the officer who opened fire on Rice asked the boy to put his hands up three times, suggesting that Rice was given ample warning before he was shot. The video footage doesn't disprove this, but it suggests the officer who shot Rice, Timothy Loehmann, would have given the commands fairly quickly — Loehmann shot Rice within two seconds of his squad car pulling up to the park pavilion."
A police officer who shot a 12-year-old dead in a Cleveland park late last month had been judged unfit for police service two years earlier by a small suburban force where he worked for six months, according to records released on Wednesday.
Officer Timothy Loehmann, who killed Tamir Rice on 22 November, was specifically faulted for breaking down emotionally while handling a live gun. During a training episode at a firing range, Loehmann was reported to be “distracted and weepy” and incommunicative. “His handgun performance was dismal,” deputy chief Jim Polak of the Independence, Ohio, police department wrote in an internal memo.
Great, succinct article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who has been chronicling how police-public relations have slowly become a war against certain groups:
"City police have tough, brutal, dangerous jobs. Even in the "hot spots," residents know this and will cut officers a little slack for being paranoid and quick to escalate.
Still, being quick to draw in a dark alley in a gang chase is one thing. But if some overzealous patrolman chokes a guy all the way to death, on video, in a six-on-one broad daylight situation, for selling a cigarette, forget about a conviction – someone at least has to go to trial."
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So in 1994, I joined the St. Louis Police Department. I quickly realized how naive I’d been. I was floored by the dysfunctional culture I encountered.
I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.
One example: A couple of officers ran a Web site called St. Louis Coptalk, where officers could post about their experience and opinions. At some point during my career, it became so full of racist rants that the site administrator temporarily shut it down. Cops routinely called anyone of color a “thug,” whether they were the victim or just a bystander.
This attitude corrodes the way policing is done.
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Once, I accompanied an officer on a call. At one home, a teenage boy answered the door. That officer accused him of harboring a robbery suspect, and demanded that he let her inside. When he refused, the officer yanked him onto the porch by his throat and began punching him.
Another officer met us and told the boy to stand. He replied that he couldn’t. So the officer slammed him against the house and cuffed him. When the boy again said he couldn’t walk, the officer grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him to the car. It turned out the boy had been on crutches when he answered the door, and couldn’t walk.
Back at the department, I complained to the sergeant. I wanted to report the misconduct. But my manager squashed the whole thing and told me to get back to work.
As President Barack Obama and other voices of authority try to reassure the nation that they can bring police abuse under control, a voice of true street-level power is speaking, too.
That voice belongs to Patrick Lynch, and it is frightening. Americans would do well to listen.
Lynch is the president of New York's police union, a man described by his own organization as the most powerful police union chief in the world.
As Newsweek has put it, Lynch represents not just cops, but "what it means to be a cop in America, where guns are legal and restraint is rare."
"If you're speaking, you can breathe," he told a press conference, praising the grand jury that last week refused to indict one of his members in Garner's death. (A coroner had ruled the death a homicide.)
Parse that statement, and the menace reveals itself.
In the view of New York's police union — and, no doubt, a significant percentage of street-level police officers in this country — if you can suck enough air into your lungs to gasp out that you cannot breathe, then you must be able to breathe, and therefore you're lying, and therefore there is no reason to release the chokehold.
Conversely, of course, if you actually cannot breathe, you wouldn't be able to speak at all, and therefore you'd be unable to communicate that to the policeman choking you, so how is that policeman supposed to realize he should stop?
Either way, by this piece of street-cop logic, it's not the policeman's fault. It's yours. And either way, you may very well wind up dead, which is also your fault.
Lynch made that clear, too.
"Mr. Garner made a choice that day to resist arrest," he told the cameras.
Had he just given in immediately, "he knew he'd go to the station house and … be out by the end of the day. But, unfortunately the choice was not a good choice and unfortunately we all live with the tragedy of that death."
'I can't breathe'
Well, not quite. Eric Garner doesn't get to live with anything anymore.
An awful lot of Americans, from the tens of thousands of protesters chanting "I CAN'T BREATHE" to officials and lawmakers, Democrat and Republican, have denounced the grand jury's refusal to indict, viewing it as tacit approval of extreme, unnecessary violence.
As U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand put it, no unarmed person should die on a New York street corner because he's suspected of some trifling offence. Garner was accosted by police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, which he vociferously denied having done.
But the beat cop view is that there's a larger issue here: refusal to submit.
Garner's real crime was to tell police he was sick of being rousted, that it had to stop and, when officers moved in, to get their hands off him.
Police tend to hold the view that citizens have no right to resist, no matter how unfairly they're being treated, and no matter how abusively police might be wielding their considerable powers.
Try to protect yourself from a police beating, and you'll only be beaten more severely, and likely charged with assaulting your assaulter.
Kafkaesque
I have no idea whether Patrick Lynch has spent much time reading Franz Kafka, but my guess is he would understand the treatment of Josef K., the central figure in The Trial, Kafka's masterpiece about arbitrary power and submission.
In the story, K. is arrested and tried without being told the nature of his offence. He denounces the process, or lack of it, at his trial.
But, by the end of the story, he is co-operating with his persecutors, right up to the point where his head is on a block, and two faceless agents of the state are trying to decide who should use the executioner's knife on him.
"K.," writes Kafka, "knew then exactly that it would have been his duty to take the knife … and thrust it into himself."
It's been 100 years since The Trial was written. In modern America, police are permitted to use lethal force essentially at their discretion. They also enjoy a level of legal immunity extended to no one else.
It is, of course, their job to deal with violent people, and they must err on the side of caution, especially if they perceive a threat. As beat cops are fond of saying, it's better to face 12 jurors than to need six pallbearers.
You can understand that point of view. The problem is that police can't all be trusted with the kind of power they possess, and police violence in America, especially by predominantly white officers against minorities, seems wildly out of control.
Here's an important and related article from Macdonald as well:
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The bitter truth, more obvious by the year, is that law enforcement in the U.S. is actually the enforcement of the class system itself.
If you are poor, you understand that. If you are wealthy, you probably understand it, too, but in another way altogether.
For a member of the American underclass, a minor brush with authorities can turn into the kind of Kafkaesque despair that most Americans associate with places like Egypt or Russia or Iran.
So the story of Kalief Browder, detailed earlier this month in the New Yorker — "Three years on Rikers without trial" — could only have been a shock to the readers of that magazine, who are generally members of America's elite, and therefore largely shielded from judicial abuse.
Long story short, Browder was arrested wrongly for robbery and assault. And for the sin of refusing to cop a plea he was imprisoned in New York's fearsome Riker's Island jail, mostly in solitary, for three years without trial, before prosecutors gave up and admitted they had no case.
Keeping him locked up didn't seem to bother anyone; Browder, a juvenile delinquent from the Bronx, belongs to the nuisance class, and that was enough.
Such treatment, it goes without saying, simply would not happen to a kid from the preppy confines of Sag Harbor or Montauk.
And Browder was by no means an exception. Half a country away, in Ferguson, Mo., some of the town's mostly white police force were wearing "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets (before Washington stepped in and told them to stop).
Others were hiding their name tags, which is illegal, as they tried to deal with the town's resentful, mostly black population.
Wilson is the policeman who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown last August, triggering what was basically a race riot that went on for weeks.
The message the bracelet-wearing, ID-tag-hiding police were sending couldn't have been clearer: We are the faceless wall of the establishment. Question our authority at your peril. For your purposes, the law is whatever we say it is.
I don't understand how anyone can look at all of this information--new cases every single week of excessive police force in the US--and then act as if those of us who are concerned about the current (and seemingly worsening) state of affairs are merely cop-haters.
This is a major problem that desperately needs attention, but until it affects someone with any kind of power, it'll go ignored.
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The great CP is in dire need of prunes!
"That's because the productive part of society is adverse to giving up all their wealth so you libs can conduct your social experiments. Experience tells us your a bunch of snake oil salesman...Sucks to be you." ~Calgaryborn 12/06/09 keeping it really stupid!
So in the US where there are millions and millions of guns on the streets, and in less urban areas, like say Monatana or Alaska, the police get a club a radio and a taser...
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So in the US where there are millions and millions of guns on the streets, and in less urban areas, like say Monatana or Alaska, the police get a club a radio and a taser...
I think the goal would be getting guns off the street as well...
