Rare News Desk
Over the past few days, Americans from all walks of life have expressed outrage over the New York City grand jury’s decision this week to not indict Police Officer Dan Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death.
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Once they watched and re-watched the video of Pantaleo snuffing the life out of Garner while arresting him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes – as well as one showing officers and emergency medical technicians standing over Garner for minutes doing nothing to help him stay alive – the outrage transforms into outright anger and indignation.
They should be outraged. We should all be. Because no American citizen, black or white, conservative or progressive, old or young, should ever be viciously, callously murdered by the very police officers we are supposed to trust to protect us from such violent criminality.
For blacks, the grand jury verdict is abominable because it once again reaffirms evidence that they – especially men – are more-likely to die because of the use of deadly force than any other racial or ethnic group. Blacks account for 31 percent of police killings of unarmed citizens despite making up 13 percent of the nation’s population.
It is bad enough that a grand jury in St. Louis made a questionable decision last week to not indict Darren Wilson for slaying 18-year-old Michael Brown. But the fact that Pantaleo will get away with killing the 43-year-old Garner – which video proves didn’t pose any threat to the officer’s life – is just plain wrong.
But for black people, the indignation over the grand jury verdict is more than just about the present. America has had a centuries-long history of government-sanctioned murder of African Americans – and letting the perpetrators off the hook.
This has included the lynching of 4,733 black men and women throughout the southern states between 1892 and 1959; the slaying of 23 blacks (as well as the loss of homes for 1,000 more) during the Chicago riot of 1919; the 1955 beating and drowning of 14-year-old Emmitt Till, and the murders of civil rights activists and others by Klu Klux Klansmen with the help of espionage from that state’s Sovereignty Commission.
Given that history, no one who is black can be blamed for thinking of Garner’s murder as another in the line of state-sanctioned killing of black men.
For everyone else, the history of racial violence in America may not be the underlying reason behind their outrage over the Garner grand jury’s verdict. But their outrage is equally justifiable.
For whites, the grand jury decision is morally repugnant because it essentially gives license to corrupt police officers that they can kill anyone with impunity. As it is, just one-in-three officers charged with a crime were convicted – two times lower than conviction rates for indicted suspects in the general population, according to data released in 2010 by the Police Misconduct Reporting Project.
Given the increasing militarization of police departments, whites can find themselves on the other end of police corruption, losing their own freedoms and lives almost as easily as blacks have for decades. Anyone who cares about preserving liberty should find that troubling.
For conservatives and progressives alike, Garner’s death is shocking because it is another stark reminder of what happens when you put too much power into the hands of governments at every level.
Even otherwise law and order-oriented conservatives such as Ross Douthat of the New York Times are realizing that state laws governing use of deadly force often allow officers far too much leeway in determining whether those they shoot are threats to their safety.
As for progressives, the fact that police unions such as New York City’s Patrolmen Benevolent Association work overtime to protect corrupt cops (and preserve institutionalized racism), challenges their thinking about the very existence of the very public-sector unions they defend.
This is even disturbing to many school reformers working to overhaul America’ woeful public schools. This is because the grand jury verdict is another reminder that public school districts play a pivotal role in fostering the very conditions that lead to police brutality – and to Garner’s murder.
Ultimately, for all of us, we are engaged that a police officer took the life of a father and grandfather for what should never have been a crime. Incensed that men in blue charged with saving lives left a fellow American on the ground to die without giving him any kind of life support. Disheartened that Officer Friendly won’t see a day of prison time for killing a fellow human being.
And just plain mad that this happened in America, a place where state-sanctioned murder shouldn’t happen at all.
