The System Eventually Eats Its People: the Eric Garner Story

Matt Taibbi, I Can't Breathe: a Killing On Bay Street

On July 17, 2014, plainclothes NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a banned chokehold to a fat, middle-aged, diabetic street hustler named Eric Garner. Bystander Ramsey Orta’s cellphone video caught garner wheezing out “I can’t breathe!” eleven times before losing consciousness. These would be Garner’s last words. Garner’s unconscious body lay untended, possibly already dead, for eight minutes, while paramedics parked over a block away, and cameras kept rolling.

Garner’s death electrified the nation. While more police killed more African-American men and youths, often with flimsier pretexts, like Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, Garner’s death had the distinction of being caught on camera with sound, from beginning to end to badly bungled aftermath. This could’ve been the moment that changed American race relations forever… but nothing happened. The reasons why not matter as much as the death itself.

Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi previously wrote The Divide, an investigation into who, post-Financial Services Collapse, actually goes to jail, and for what. His conclusions were stark. He takes a similar approach here to exactly one case, Eric Garner’s controversial death. He describes a Staten Island so economically and racially divided that residents do anything, however unlawful, to get paid… and cops will do anything, however violent, to keep order.

As Taibbi shows early, Garner was no angel. He’d previously done time for crack distribution, then got into untaxed cigarettes because he became to aged and infirm for the cocaine business. He established a remarkably sophisticated network of buyers nabbing cigarettes by the trunkful in Virginia, with America’s lowest tobacco tax. NYC’s nicotine tax was so high, Gerner could charge a 100% markup and still clear a robust profit.

Matt Taibbi

New York had America’s highest cigarette tax, largely because mayor Michael Bloomberg made a campaign promise not to raise income taxes. But like all sales taxes, cigarette taxes hurt those most who can least afford the expense. Saying poor people should quit is unfair, not only because it implies poor people shouldn’t have nice things, but because nicotine, with its soothing anti-anxiety properties, makes life tolerable for workers living precariously.

So yes, Garner was a street-corner Escobar, breaking the law in broad daylight. But the NYPD targeted him disproportionate to the money he cost the city, or the disorder he actually caused. Garner got caught in a campaign to disproportionately target black and brown communities, assuming that darker-hued neighborhoods innately caused crime. This isn’t hypothetical, either; internal NYPD whistleblowers caught commanders, on tape, ordering racially targeted sweeps.

Taibbi goes into the history of Broken Windows policing, which arose from Sixties-era childrearing theories, before being adopted by Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. Even the theory’s originator admitted, before it became policy, that Broken Windows had the capacity for deep abuse. But he trusted elected officials to not break public trust and misuse their authority. In interviews with Taibbi, that originator now admits, he naïvely trusted bad people.

Police are hardly villains, though. Their harsh responses to penny-ante crime reflect top-down enforcement of technocratic rules. City managers demanded police keep crime down by making multiple arrests and completing laborious paperwork. Civilian complaints led to added layers of Big Data interference. Many cops get into law enforcement because they believe they’ll make neighborhoods safer for families and children. But, conscripted into punitive bureaucracy, youthful ideals dwindle in a hurry.

Taibbi’s first half focuses tightly on the friction between police, represented by Daniel Pantaleo, and communities, represented by Eric Garner. Following Garner’s death, Taibbi’s second half becomes more diffuse, reflecting the decentralized public response. This is further complicated by both local and national responses; and because Garner’s death coincided with Michael Brown’s in Ferguson, Missouri. Thanks to internet video, a local story became a national crisis.

Newly minted mayor Bill DeBlasio campaigned by promising to reverse Broken Windows policing. But he appointed its chief architect as police chief. Protesters considered DeBlasio too cozy with police, while police thought him too conciliatory with protesters. Massive, leaderless demonstrations gained national support, then lost it overnight when one march turned into an attack on police. Frictions only became worse, the adversarial relationship between police and city more ingrained.

Taibbi paints a heartbreaking picture. Though his sympathy, measured in column inches, clearly lies with community members, the police he interviews appear dedicated, misunderstood, and yoked to an administration that treats them badly. Protesters demanded change, but discovered that the system only exists to protect itself, as it always has. This isn’t easy reading. But in today’s divided society, it’s very much necessary.