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WTF: Eric Garner Said “I Can’t Breathe ” 11 Times As Cops Killed Him (Picture, Video)
The decision of a Staten Island grand jury on December 3 not to indict New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo for his part in the death of Eric Garner has thrust the city into the center of a rapidly intensifying national debate about policing and racial injustice. On Saturday, December 13, ten days of smaller, often spontaneous demonstrations reached a climax with a protest march of about 30,000 people from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue and then to NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza; there are signs the movement will continue. Despite a progressive, reform-minded mayor and a police commissioner who had already declared the “need for a fundamental shift in the culture of the department,” New York City appears to have a criminal justice system that, when it comes to the prosecution of violent police misconduct, is as unfair as that of St. Louis County in Missouri or anywhere else in America, for that matter.
Die In Protest
The video footage of Garner’s death, from Pantaleo’s arm going around Garner’s throat to his final unheeded words—“I can’t breathe”—repeated eleven times while he lay prone on the sidewalk under the weight of at least three policemen, was viewed with disbelief by millions of people around the world. Even political conservatives, who had defended the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, were openly disturbed by what they saw. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, said that he was “extremely troubled [by the video]. I would have loosened my grip [if I was the cop]. He did not deserve what happened to him.” Former President George W. Bush said that “the verdict was hard to understand.” Within hours of the grand jury decision, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would investigate whether the case can be prosecuted as a possible civil rights violation. Public outrage was almost universal. MOREHERE
