NYPD knew five years ago Pantaleo should be fired

NYPD, stop covering for Pantaleo.   The chokehold was illegal for a reason.  A man died because of it.  Being fired would be a lucky break.

Policing While Female and Black

My father, Eric Garner, was killed by New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo a year and a half ago, but last week marks the department’s first official charge of wrongdoing in his case. The charge was not made against Pantaleo, the officer who placed my father in a fatal—and illegal— chokehold, but against Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, one of two supervising officers at the scene.

We know Sgt. Adonis wasn’t even assigned on patrol during the incident. According to Ed Mullins, head of the sergeants’ union, she “responded at her own initiative.” She wasn’t the borough or zone commander. Yet Sgt. Adonis, stripped of her gun and badge, is now being charged on four counts of “failure to supervise.”

[...]

Adonis, who was promoted to sergeant two weeks before my dad’s death, wasn’t part of the team that piled on his back. In the video that captured the incident, we all see Adonis creep away. [...] She went to the ambulance stationed on the corner of Bay Street. According to witnesses at the scene, Adonis spoke to an EMT and made an additional call for assistance—I guess no one else planned on saving my father’s life that day.

[...]

The manager of Bay Beauty Supply heard Sgt. Adonis say to the other officers, “Let up, you got him already.”

[...]

If Sgt. Adonis can be charged with failure to supervise, then I expect the other sergeant at the scene to be charged as well.

  Erica Garner

Do not hold your breath.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This Should Help

A black, female officer has been punished in the choking death of Eric Garner in New York City.

A New York City police sergeant has been stripped of her gun and badge in connection with the July 2014 death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old black Staten Island man who died after police to administered a controversial choke hold.

[...]

Sgt. Kizzy Adonis has been subject to disciplinary charges, according to the NYPD. Officials said Friday that Adonis, who is black, was charged with failure to supervise, an internal charge.

[...]

Adonis was a supervising officer on the scene when police approached Garner on a Staten Island street under suspicion of selling untaxed, loose cigarettes.

[...]

In December 2014, a grand jury opted not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo [the white, male officer who choked Garner] in the death. The decision prompted marches and protests across the country.

  MSN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile In Cop Shootings

A white former Milwaukee police officer who fatally shot a black man in a downtown park in April won’t face criminal charges, the county’s top prosecutor said on Monday.

The Milwaukee County district attorney, John Chisholm, said in an emailed press release that Christopher Manney will not be charged because he shot Dontre Hamilton in self-defense.

[...]

Manney shot 31-year-old Hamilton on 30 April after responding to a call for a welfare check on a man sleeping in the park. Manney said Hamilton resisted when he tried to frisk him. The two exchanged punches before Hamilton got a hold of Manney’s baton and hit him on the neck with it, the former officer has said. Manney then opened fire, hitting Hamilton 14 times.

Hamilton’s family said he suffered from schizophrenia and had recently stopped taking his medication.

Police chief Edward Flynn fired Manney in October, saying Manney instigated the fight with an inappropriate pat-down. The chief said Manney correctly identified Hamilton as mentally ill but ignored his training and department policy, and treated him as a criminal.

[...]

Hamilton’s death preceded those of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, but the case hasn’t attracted as much attention despite frequent, mostly peaceful protests.

  The Guardian

That’s why it’s not getting any attention.

Manney has appealed against his firing and applied for disability, saying the shootings in Milwaukee and Ferguson have cost him sleep and made it difficult for him to think clearly.

Awwww.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Support in the NBA

LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and many Brooklyn players wore “I can't breathe” shirts while they warmed up for Monday night's game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Nets.

[...]

Inside the center, Cleveland Cavaliers' James and Kyrie Irving were among the players wearing T-shirts that said “I can't breathe” —Garner's last words, which have become a rallying cry for protesters since last week's grand jury decision.

“It was a message to the family. That I'm sorry for their loss, sorry to his wife. That's what it's about,” James said after the Cavaliers' 110-88 victory. “I think everybody else gets caught up in everything else besides who's really feeling it, and that's the family. That's what it's about.”

  alJazeera

Really, James? Take the shirt off. Put on one that says, "I'm sorry for your loss."

People Do Care

Opinion of an Ex-St.Louis (Black) Cop

Unfortunately, I don’t think better training alone will reduce police brutality. My fellow officers and I took plenty of classes on racial sensitivity and on limiting the use of force.

The problem is that cops aren’t held accountable for their actions, and they know it. These officers violate rights with impunity. They know there’s a different criminal justice system for civilians and police.

Even when officers get caught, they know they’ll be investigated by their friends, and put on paid leave. My colleagues would laughingly refer to this as a free vacation. It isn’t a punishment. And excessive force is almost always deemed acceptable in our courts and among our grand juries. Prosecutors are tight with law enforcement, and share the same values and ideas.

[...]

The number of people in uniform who will knowingly and maliciously violate your human rights is huge. At the Ferguson protests, people are chanting, “The whole damn system is guilty as hell.” I agree, and we have a lot of work to do.

  WaPo

And he gives examples from his own experience in the article.

I Wouldn't Have Expected That

But to be fair, it has seemed like most things are "hard to understand" for W.

CNN host Candy Crowley sat down with the former commander-in-chief in an interview that will air on Sunday, and the network released a short clip of Bush giving his thoughts about the case.

“The verdict was hard to understand,” Bush said. “I haven’t seen all the details, but it’s sad that race continues to play such an emotional, divisive part of life.”

On the topic of race relations, Bush believes the country has “definitely improved,” adding that he had dinner recently with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who told him that an increasing number of African-Americans do not trust law enforcement — “which is a shame,” Bush said, “because law enforcement’s job is to protect everybody.”

  Mediaite

So, he’s still seeing Condi is he?

Race relations have improved if you measure by the abolition of slavery and the decline in the number of lynchings, I guess.

The Death Penalty for Selling Loose Cigarettes

Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There's a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that's set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.

I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to the stories.

[...]

I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks.

[...]

I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch.

[...]

In Andrew [Brown]'s case, police thought the sight of two black men standing in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them. In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for "obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court demanded 50 bucks for his crime.

[...]

[T]he psychic impact of [Broken Windows police] policies on the massive pool of [the non-criminals] in the target neighborhoods is a rising sense of being seriously pissed off. They're tired of being manhandled and searched once a week or more for riding bikes the wrong way down the sidewalk (about 25,000 summonses a year here in New York), smoking in the wrong spot, selling loosies, or just "obstructing pedestrian traffic," a.k.a. walking while black.

This is exactly what you hear Eric Garner complaining about in the last moments of his life. "Every time you see me, you want to mess with me," he says. "It stops today!"

[...]

News commentators like the New York Post's Bob McManus ("Blame Only the Man Who Tragically Decided to Resist"), predictably in full-on blame-the-victim mode, are telling readers that the mistake made by Eric Garner was resisting the police in a single moment of obstinacy over what admittedly was not a major offense, but a crime nonetheless. McManus writes:

He was on the street July 17, selling untaxed cigarettes one at a time — which, as inconsequential as it seems, happens to be a crime.

The press and the people who don't live in these places want you to focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime! Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a fat guy with asthma besides!

[...]

A ferry ride away from Staten Island, on Wall Street, the pure unmolested freedom to fleece whoever you want is considered the sacred birthright of every rake with a briefcase.

[...]

[If] Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.

[...]

The counter-argument to all this is that the police are sent where there's the most crime. But that argument doesn't hold up for long in a city that not only has recently become the unpunished economic corruption capital of the Western world – it's also a place where white professionals on the Upper East and West Sides can have their coke and weed safely home-delivered with their Chinese food, while minorities in Bed-Stuy and Harlem are catching real charges and jail time for the same thing.

[...]

[Y]ou can't send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted.

  Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone

Of course, that indeed HAS been working for a very long time. A very long time.  It stopped for Eric Garner.

#I Can't Breathe

Grand Central Station 5:00 pm today

(hover over video and click speaker icon for audio;
click on video to stop action)

The Other Grand Jury - Part 2

You know Eric Garner - the man who was put in a choke hold for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally on a New York street, and choked to death while screaming that he couldn't breathe.

Without revealing exact numbers of how many officers will be put on the streets ahead of the announcement, [New York Police Commissioner Bill ] Bratton said that officers have been told to walk a fine line between allowing the protesters to express their anger while keeping public order.

"If they engage in criminal activity, such as vandalism -- actual crime -- they will be arrested, quite simply," he said. "But we have the ability to have a level of tolerance -- breathing room, if you will," Bratton said.

  ABC7

Wow. I wonder if he could have chosen any worse phrasing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Other Grand Jury

Surely they won't be making the same mistake.

New York officials are preparing for likely protests as a grand jury decides whether to charge police in the death of a black man subjected to a banned choke hold, although they are aiming to avoid the kind of violence that engulfed Ferguson, Missouri last month after the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case.

[...]

It is not clear when the grand jury will rule.

[...]

'We're just praying and hoping that things don't get out of hand,' said Bobby Digi, a Staten Island activist and businessman. 'We've been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to just try to get temperaments at bay.'

  alJazeera

I think this is going to take more than praying and hoping.

Hazel Dukes, president of the New York state chapter of the NAACP civil rights group, said she was 'very worried' about the possible response if no charges are brought by the Staten Island grand jury, which has been meeting in secret since August.

Yes, I imagine that would just about blow the roof. As well it should.

Garner suffered a heart attack after officers compressed his neck and chest as they restrained him for selling loose cigarettes, the medical examiner ruled, calling his death a homicide.

A 400-pound asthmatic Staten Island dad died Thursday after a cop put him in a chokehold and other officers appeared to slam his head against the sidewalk, video of the incident shows.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner, 43, repeatedly screamed after at least five NYPD officers took him down in front of a Tompkinsville beauty supply store when he balked at being handcuffed.

[...]

Police officials said Garner had a history of arrests for selling untaxed cigarettes. Cops said they observed him selling his wares Thursday on Bay St. and moved in for an arrest.

  NY Daily News

And went for the kill.

A law enforcement source said the incident was troubling.

“A guy is dead in our custody. That is always a potential problem,” the source said.

I sure hate it when the law is troubled with a potential problem.

And, perhaps they want to rethink this as well.

Investigators are considering whether to charge Michael Brown's stepfather with attempting to incite a riot for urging a crowd in Ferguson, Missouri, to "burn this bitch down" as part of a larger inquiry into violence after a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of the unarmed black teenager, authorities told NBC News on Tuesday.

  NBC News

Bob McCullough - the same prosecutor who called the Wilson Grand Jury - will decide whether to charge him.