The Fight for Eric Garner Isn’t Over

On police misconduct, City Hall and the NYPD have gone back to business as usual.

The killing of Eric Garner happened ten years ago this month. The sad, infuriating truth is that it could happen all over again. It took a decade of extraordinary, patient pressure by activists to secure even a small measure of justice. Since then, City Hall and One Police Plaza have gone back to the usual business of dismissing, crippling, or slow-walking investigations of NYPD misconduct.

Garner’s death was the product of a botched NYPD operation, intended to restore order in Tompkinsville Park at the corner of Victory Boulevard and Bay Street in Staten Island. “There were people in the park who were abusing drugs, and it was a spot where we had asked for additional police coverage to try to make sure that the people in the park were safe,” Debi Rose, who represented the area in the City Council back then, told me recently. “It was supposed to be a crackdown on quality-of-life infractions.”

Such matters are the basic business of urban policing and almost never require the use of deadly force. But in July 2014, a crew of officers arrived and focused on Garner, who was known in the area as a peacemaker and had just finished breaking up a fight in the park. When Garner complained that cops had been hassling him, five officers swarmed the unarmed man, slamming him to the pavement to make an arrest. One of the officers, Daniel Pantaleo, leaped on Garner’s back and placed him in an illegal choke hold, never letting up, as a bystander’s video shows Garner gasping, 11 times in a row, “I can’t breathe.” The officers give no first aid to the dying, handcuffed man.

The city’s medical examiner ruled the killing a homicide, and protestors took to the streets demanding that Pantaleo be fired. Choke holds had been banned by the NYPD decades before Garner was killed, and the department’s Patrol Guide contained the unambiguous command: “Members of the Force SHALL NOT use a chokehold.” But the New York Times found that the rule was rarely enforced. The NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board received more than 1,000 complaints about the use of choke holds between 2009 and 2013 — but called for the punishment of only nine officers.

The Garner case would be different.

“This was exceptionally heinous, exceptionally egregious,” Reverend Kirsten John Foy, an aide to Reverend Al Sharpton at the time, recalls. “There were so many police officers who were involved, so many witnesses who were involved. Eric had begged for his life so many times.” Foy and other activists began holding rallies, marches, and vigils demanding justice as the NYPD and then-mayor Bill de Blasio sat on their hands, claiming they didn’t want to interfere with any state or federal criminal investigations of Pantaleo or other officers.

While City Hall dithered, a state grand jury declined to indict anyone for Garner’s death, and the federal Justice Department said it could find no constitutional violation that might be grounds to intervene. Months of delay turned into years. Garner’s 27-year-old daughter, Erica, died while waiting for justice. So did his stepfather. Pantaleo remained on the job. I and other journalists pressed de Blasio about what seemed like a politically convenient effort to avoid the ire of the police unions.

Things finally changed in July 2019, when Foy and several well-known city activists, including Tamika Mallory (another former Sharpton staffer) and Linda Sarsour, crashed a nationally televised presidential debate and shouted, “Fire Pantaleo!” while de Blasio, a candidate for president, was onstage. “We shouted out Eric Garner in the middle of the debate. We were escorted out,” Foy recalls. “But that precipitated a debate among some of the candidates, where Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey chimed in with a follow-up to the mayor: Why hasn’t the officer that killed Eric Garner been fired yet? Why hasn’t this family seen justice? Why hasn’t the city seen justice?”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, one of the other candidates, joined in. “He should be fired. He should be fired now,” she said of Pantaleo.

The following month, de Blasio’s police commissioner, Jimmy O’Neil, finally fired Pantaleo. “Five years is too long. It’s not fair to the family, it’s not fair to anybody involved,” O’Neil said. “It definitely makes me rethink, going forward, how would we proceed with administrative trials.” The Garner family got a $5.9 million settlement from the city.

And in 2020, when nationwide protests followed the horrific videotaped killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis as he begged for his life with the same haunting phrase — I can’t breathe — New York’s State Legislature and City Council outright criminalized the use of choke holds. The city’s largest union challenged the law, which was recently upheld by the state’s highest court. Aggravated strangulation is now a crime.

But New Yorkers should stay vigilant. The NYPD under Mayor Eric Adams has proved to be allergic to accountability, encrypting its radio communications, slow-walking controversial cases like the killing of Kawaski Trawick by stonewalling, and defunding the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The acting chair of the CCRB, Arva Rice, was pressured to resign after complaining about the department’s delays in the Trawick cases and finally quit last week; Chris Dunn, the legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called Rice’s departure “yet another troubling step in this administration’s campaign to undermine police accountability.”

And ProPublica, in a high-profile investigation featured in the New York Times, found that Adams’s handpicked NYPD commissioner, Edward Caban, routinely intervenes in disciplinary cases in a way that freezes them in a kind of bureaucratic limbo. “Since becoming commissioner last July, [Caban] has short-circuited cases involving officers accused of wantonly using chokeholds, deploying Tasers and beating protesters with batons,” the Times found. “A number of episodes were so serious that the police oversight agency, known as the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded the officers likely committed crimes.”

Foy says that he and other activists are ready to wage the Garner fight again if need be. “It seems as though this mayor has decided to take the leash of some of the old guard and allow them to espouse some of the same attitude and rhetoric that we’ve been fighting so hard for many years to eliminate from the mind-set and the culture of the NYPD,” Foy told me. “We’ve seen an uptick in the random stops where young Black and Latino men are once again being subjected to violations of their constitutional rights in the name of keeping the city safe. And so we do not have the luxury of falling back on our accomplishments of the last several years or the progress we’ve made.”