Editorial/ The New York Times
The Staten Island grand jury must have seen
the same video everyone else did: the one showing a group of New York City
police officers swarming and killing an unarmed black man, Eric Garner.
Yet they have declined to bring charges
against the plainclothes officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who is seen on the video
girdling Mr. Garner’s neck in a chokehold, which the department bans, throwing
him to the ground and pushing his head into the pavement.
The imbalance between Mr. Garner’s fate, on
a Staten Island sidewalk in July, and his supposed infraction, selling loose
cigarettes, is grotesque and outrageous. Though Mr. Garner’s death was
officially ruled a homicide, it is not possible to pierce the secrecy of the
grand jury, and thus to know why the jurors did not believe that criminal
charges were appropriate.
What is clear is this was vicious policing
and an innocent man is dead. Another conclusion is also obvious. Officer
Pantaleo was stripped of his gun and badge; he needs to be stripped of his job.
He used forbidden tactics to brutalize a citizen who was not acting
belligerently, posed no risk of flight, brandished no weapon and was heavily
outnumbered.
Any police department that tolerates such
conduct, and whose officers are unable or unwilling to defuse such
confrontations without killing people, needs to be reformed. And though the
chance of a local criminal case is now foreclosed, the Justice Department is
right to swiftly investigate what certainly seem like violations of Mr.
Garner’s civil rights.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police
Commissioner William Bratton responded quickly to Wednesday’s development, as
they did in July, when anguish and anger flared. Mr. de Blasio went immediately
to Staten Island to meet with elected officials, clergy members and other
community leaders, and he issued a statement urging that New Yorkers outraged
by the grand jury’s failure express themselves in peaceful ways.
Protests in New York City on Wednesday unavoidably
echoed those in Ferguson, Mo., where an officer escaped indictment for fatally
shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. Protesters in both places
have every right to deplore both outcomes, as well as the appalling frequency
of fatal encounters between black men and the police.
New Yorkers, at least, have a mayor and
Police Department that have not fully squandered their credibility with the
public. Mr. de Blasio’s and Mr. Bratton’s vows to retrain the police force top
to bottom in defusing conflict, to reduce unwarranted arrests and restore
community trust, remain credible, if far from fulfilled.
Those who seek justice should remain
hopeful, if skeptical and wary. Indeed, if not for a bystander with a
cellphone, the police officers’ version of events would have been the
prevailing one: that Mr. Garner “resisted arrest” and had to be subdued.
Mr. Garner, who was 43, and left a wife and
six children, cannot speak for himself. But the video, at least, speaks for
him. It’s a heartbreaking, damning exhibit, showing Mr. Garner’s final moments
alive, and his final words: “I can’t breathe.”
