Thursday, December 4, 2014

J-Pod puts the Eric Garner case in perspective

Podhoretz calls the decision inexplicable, and I tend to agree with him. Policing strategies and tactics need to change with the landscape. This is a much different case than Ferguson. Excerpt:

What happened to Eric Garner was certainly not deliberate, but rather the result of a series of horrible choices. First, by Garner, to resist, and then by Officer Daniel Pantaleo to immobilize Garner by using a choke-hold, which New York City cops are trained not to use (but which is not in fact illegal). It strikes me as understandable that a grand jury would look at the events and not see something they would call a murder.

But a murder charge was not the only choice open to them, or so we are being told right now. There are gradations of illegality involving the unnecessary death of someone, and it seems likely that (as was the case with the 1994 choke-hold death of Anthony Baez) the federal government will secure some kind of charge now that it has involved itself in this matter.

The real question that is going to be asked, now, is just how aggressive law enforcement can and should be in an era of low crime, which is what we’re in now. If you defang cops, you are inviting a return to trouble. As I wrote last week, “if we send police officers the message that it is safer for their careers and reputations to stand down, stand down they will. We are the ones who will have to reckon with the results.” At the same time, no civilized society can view the tape showing Garner’s desperate pleading and not ask some very difficult questions of itself.

I can see why people would protest this case because Garner's death seems like a completely disproportionate result of his noncompliance. He wasn't trying to kill Pantaleo like Michael Brown was evidently attempting to kill Darren Wilson. And I don't feel bad for Pantaleo who is probably going to lose his job. He made a bad choice, whereas Wilson wasn't even given a choice.

Something I've been thinking of for the last few weeks with regard to the whole Ferguson fiasco, and especially after Michael Medved echoed my thoughts on his show about a week ago, saying something like "Why this case? Why Michael Brown? What is there about this case which has everybody so excited?" My theory is that the race-hustlers like Sharpton and Holder know that in order to achieve their desired level of chaos they need to have the maximum amount of divisiveness and polarization about an incident. A black man who is innocent being killed wouldn't work for the purposes of demonstrating systemic injustice because everybody would agree on the injustice of the event. Obviously disproportionate responses on the part of police would also get more of a unanimous condemnation, thus precluding any type of claims of enduring racism and injustice. My theory is that if you want to cause maximum chaos, pick an incident which divides people along racial, demographic or ideological lines. Then you can easily create the perception that the system is utterly unjust and biased in favor of the rich, the white or those nasty conservative people. One side says "Michael Brown was a criminal thug and Darren Wilson was forced to act in self-defense. Everything else is irrelevant." The other side says "Michael Brown was a young black man and a white cop, Darren Wilson, harassed him for no reason. Everything else is irrelevant." The lines are drawn, time to go to war.

This is only a theory, and doesn't sound particularly strong to me, but I'm not a psychopath like Al Sharpton so I can't mimic his thinking exactly. There is an interesting comment at the end of this piece along the lines of my thinking:

But it is interesting how the Ferguson situation has calloused people like me who would normally be dismayed by the Garner grand jury verdict. Ferguson is a tipping point.

We have to resist the urge to say "OK, you don't like the police, fine. We won't send them to your neighborhoods anymore." That would just punish the silent, innocent majority, and I think it would give CNN and the race-hustlers just what they want: more chaos. This is why I tell people I had to move out of the City of Cleveland. I felt like if I stayed, I might become a racist.

9 comments:

  1. The Michael Brown case fit the Trayvon Martin pattern (unarmed black teenager killed by a non-black acting in a role of authority). That's why that case was given traction.

    One of the sad things about the Garner case is that it will be used to give more credibility to the Michael Brown case, because it is part of a pattern.

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    1. I agree. The dumbest thing about the Trayvon Martin case was that the prosecutor went for the murder conviction and missed. Zimmerman was a complete idiot and the only reason Martin was killed was he was even a bigger idiot. Martin could have outrun GZ's fat ass with bricks tied to his feet.

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    2. You know, confession here, some of us used to call the cops on ourselves in our small town back in the eighties. We'd get this dude with a deep voice to call the station and say "There are some juveniles loitering outside my residence on Oak Street," then whenever the squad car drove by we'd take off through alleys and side streets. They'd run after us and it was like the biggest rush in the world.

      Was it wrong? yes.... Was it stupid? yes... Was it fun? yes.....

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    3. Zimmerman did nothing idiotic. He was loitering about on a walkway connecting two streets in a housing development in which he lived and waiting for the police. There is nothing idiotic about that. Martin appeared and attacked him.

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  2. If you're focus is on Ofc. Pantaleo, the question would be if his restraint of Garner met the standard elaborated in case law for 'recklessness' (2d degree manslaughter in New York) or 'criminal negligence' (criminally negligent homicide in New York). The former requires the disregard of a known risk and the latter the failure to perceive a risk that a reasonable person would. The thing is, would a reasonable person think that a 43 year old man vigorous enough to resist arrest would go into cardiac arrest if you tackled him?

    A question not much discussed is whether the conduct of the cops and paramedics afterward could meet a standard of 'criminal negligence'. He was not getting any first aid.

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    1. I think there's knowledge that a choke-hold *can* kill someone. It's happened in the past. So I think recklessness could stick. But I'm not a lawyer. Are you?

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    2. I don't practice in this area nor in personal injury. But if I can lend my 2c, a working definition of "reckless" means that the actor acted with indifference to the consequences of the action (shooting a gun into a passing train is the textbook example).

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    3. You can check the case law if you care to. The officers tackled him in an effort to put cuffs on him because he was resisting arrest. The manner in which one of them grabbed him may or may not have the characteristics of the chokeholds the NYPD does not use as a matter of policy (such holds not being prohibited by law). That's not been established. I tend to doubt it would meet a standard of 'recklessness', but you'd have to delve into the case law. T

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