New York City SO Like Ferguson, Missouri!

The other shoe drops, again.

 

The second most prominent of about a half dozen recent murders of African-Americans that got wide public notice, that of Eric Garner, choked to death by New York City cop Daniel Pantaleo in the Borough of Staten Island on July 17, has closely followed the script of the Ferguson, Missouri execution of Michael Brown by Ferguson cop Darren Wilson.

The Staten Island prosecutor, a white reactionary like his Ferguson counterpart, dragged his feet for months, hoping the furor would die down. Like his Ferguson comrade, he used a grand jury to deflect responsibility from himself for the decision he made at the very start- no prosecution of the killer cop.

The medical examiner, a city official, ruled Garner's death a homicide. You'd think that would guarantee criminal charges. (If you're naive you'd think that, anyway.) 

If anonymous “law enforcement sources” can be believed, 9 of the grand jurors were “minorities.”

During these months of stalling, the police on Staten Island committed more felonies, namely witness tampering and obstruction of justice, by harassing, intimidating, and arresting the man who recorded the murder of Garner on his cellphone, and his girlfriend. This is standard procedure in such cases. Witnesses are threatened by police to change their stories. In this case, one tactic was shining searchlights into the apartment of the witness and his girlfriend in the middle of the night.

The most important pattern that repeats: the total refusal of the power structure to give an inch. Their police blatantly murder poor blacks with impunity, the system’s legal machinery churns its wheels, and the murderers are given a clean bill of health. Those who are outraged by the repetitive injustices get some chicken soup rhetoric poured on their heads by establishment figures, who also issue boilerplate rhetoric about the “right to peacefully protest” while in the shadows their goon squads brutalize and arrest protesters, and police infiltrators work to disrupt protesters, identify targets for “neutralization,” and everything is done to prevent an inchoate movement from crystallizing into effective organizations of resistance. [The details are readily available from numerous sources. Democracy Now is one good source.]

Pantaleo's lawyer or PR person wrote a statement for him offering condolences to Garner's family, which was duly delivered to the media. You can judge the sincerity of this by Pantaleo’s record of false arrests, humiliations, and sexual assaults on other black victims. (In one case he stripped black men and tapped their testicles.) [1]

Pantaleo sneaks up behind Eric Garner and cuts off his windpipe.

Pantaleo choking Garner on the ground.

Pantaleo grinds Eric Garner's head into the pavement.

The NYPD “banned” chokeholds in 1992- which doesn't stop the police from routinely using them anyway. Apparently that's another example of Potemkin village Official Reality, which has no relation of actual reality.

Funny thing though: both the current Mayor, the “liberal” Bill deBlasio, (who, like Obama, ran on a promise of change) and his handpicked police commissioner, the professional oppressor William Bratton, have both publicly insisted that police chokeholds NOT BE OUTLAWED. Gee, why not, boys? Do you want your cops to keep choking people? [2]

As in the Ferguson case, the killer-cop testified before the secret grand jury- a sure sign that the fix was in. No prosecutorial prey in their right mind would testify before a grand jury targeting them- unless they know they're safe. There are no defense lawyers allowed. The whole point of a grand jury is for prosecutors to present one-sided “evidence” to obtain an indictment. Except when the point is to “clear” a cop. [Grand Juries are also used to conduct political inquisitions, forcing activists to give up intelligence information about the political activities of themselves and others and targeted organizations. The information is then used for nefarious purposes, to destroy the organizations targeted, disrupt opposition activities, and bring trumped-up criminal charges.]

DeBlasio speciously claims that having cops wearing cameras will “provide more information” and improve relations between police and what's called “the community.”

Well, we had all the information we needed in this case from the cellphone video of Garner being jumped by a group of cops who dragged him to the ground like a gang of hyenas attacking a wildebeest and choked from behind. What would a cop-cam have changed? They still would have arrested Garner for the “crime” of selling loose cigarettes. The cop behind him would still have choked him- in fact coop-cams wouldn't have shown the choking as clearly (if at all) as the citizen recording the murder scene from a distance. 

The problem isn't a lack of information. The problem is the repressive structure of U.S. society. All the media jabber, politicians' blather, and even much “left” commentary obfuscates this basic fact.

By the way, if anyone cares, the police who committed witness intimidation and obstruction of justice could be prosecuted. But I guess the state has more important crimes to prosecute- like selling loose cigarettes. (Which Garner wasn’t even doing at the time- the police had arrested him previously and were using him to boost their arrest stats, serving their own careers.) Also local U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has been totally silent- even though he threatened the Governor of the state, Andrew Cuomo, with prosecution for obstruction of justice because Cuomo disbanded an “anti-corruption” commission that Cuomo himself had appointed. A real obstruction of justice case hasn’t gotten his attention. (Nor that of another U.S. Attorney with jurisdiction over parts of NYC, Loretta Lynch, whom Obama is now trying to elevate to Attorney General of the U.S. to replace the loathsome Eric “Due Process Is We Decide To Kill You” Holder.)

Another infamous choking murder by an NYPD officer occurred in 1994 in the borough of the Bronx in NYC, when a sadistic cop with a history of violent assaults on citizens named Francis X. Livoti choked to death a 29 year old security guard named Anthony Baez. Baez was playing football when the ball landed on the hood of Livoti's car. A police sergeant and other cops allowed Livoti to murder Baez right in front of them for this offense. (The police really are like a street gang.) The fix was in in this case also. Livoti was eventually indicted on the least serious possible charge for causing a death, “criminally negligent homicide.” He waived a jury trial so a political hack judge could acquit him in 1996. Finally public pressure forced the Federal government to defuse public anger by trying Livoti for violating Baez's civil rights, and he was convicted in 1998 and sentenced to seven and a half years (of a possible ten). He was freed a year early.

Usually a small number of police are sadists and thugs, and are easily identified by their records. Yet U.S. police departments continue to protect and employ them, apparently finding them useful tools of intimidation and repression. (For example, Livoti's superior actually wanted to remove him before the Baez murder, but NYPD Chief of Department Louis Anemone blocked the move. See “A Bit Of Justice,” Village Voice, October 13, 1998.

1] “Eric Garner choke-hold cop sued in prior misconduct cases,” Detroit Free Press, December 5, 2014.

For the horrible callousness of the dozens of cops, and the emergency medical technicians who treated Garner as if he was merely asleep after Pantaleo choked him unconscious, bursting blood vessels in his neck as an autopsy determined, see the video “Did the NYPD Let EricGarner Die? Video Shows Police Ignored Pleas to Help Him After Chokehold,” Democracy Now, 12/5/14, also on youtube.com. 

2] NYPD “banned” chokeholds are routine in New York. See for example '”I Was Choked by the NYPD': New York's Chokehold Problem Isn't Going Away,” Village Voice, September 23, 2014.

Bratton was also NYPD commissioner under quasi-fascist NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, until Giuliani, an egomaniac, couldn't tolerate Bratton's knack for media self-promotion and replaced him with another zealous oppressor, Raymond Kelly, who helped kill Vietnamese as a Marine. Bratton went on to head the Boston and Los Angeles police departments. In Los Angeles, his troops murdered a Hispanic journalist who had been a thorn in their sides.

As evidence for the unreformability of the system- because those in power like it just the way it is- see “Almost All Allegations of NYPD Brutality Go Nowhere,” Village Voice, July 25, 2014.

U.S. police have standard ways of killing people. Shooting them to death. Beating them to death. Choking them to death. Tasering them to death. Sometimes running over them with their police cars.

But while we are totally at the mercy of violent police and the system of power which they are the tools of, the apparatchiks of the system ruthlessly crush any who raise a finger against them. An activist named Diego Ibanez  tossed fake blood on the suit of NYPD police commissioner William Bratton on November 24^th. He was held on $20,000 bail and charged with sixteen crimes for this single act: two counts of second-degree assault, which are “violent felonies,” each count carrying a maximum prison term of seven years, and fourteen misdemeanors; two counts of second-degree aggravated harassment and six counts of obstructing governmental administration that all carry maximum one-year sentences each; and six counts of third-degree criminal mischief, good for another four years in the slammer apiece. 

That makes a total of 46 years in prison if the judge sentenced him to the maximum on each count and ordered the sentences to run consecutively, not concurrently. It would be perfectly legal for the judge to do this. Nor would there be viable grounds for appeal. While the U.S. Constitution “bans” “cruel and unusual punishment,” the courts here apply an 18^th century understanding of what constitutes “cruel and unusual,” which would rule out burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, or amputation of body parts. 

Thus it isn't cruel and unusual that thousands of minors in the U.S. are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. (Many were convicted of crimes other than murder, until the Supreme Court recently ruled that for such crimes, minors should have the possibility of parole. All heart.) As people in the U.S. have been sentenced to life without parole for such crimes as shoplifting socks, shoplifting a sweatshirt, and stealing a slice of pizza (all in “liberal” California), clearly there aren't many penalties that are considered excessive under U.S. law. And tens of thousands of prisoners have been kept in solitary confinement for years, and even decades- that's not “cruel and unusual” either in the U.S. In fact, it's quite common. I guess cruelty is perfectly legitimate as long as it isn't unusual. [“Bratton Blood Splatter Artist Posts Bail, Could Face Significant Jail Time,” Village Voice, December 2, 2014.]