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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Police action and disturbing conservative attitudes

Let me say at the outset that this post is not about Michael Brown and Ferguson. In fact, I consider it a complete coincidence that the grand jury deliberations concerning the death of Michael Brown happened to fall so near those on the death of Eric Garner. I have precisely zero sympathy for any violent so-called "protesters," and am furiously angry at destructive riots such as those in Ferguson, regardless of the cause or alleged cause. I also happen to think that the evidence favors Darren Wilson in the Brown case.

The Eric Garner case is far different and should be treated differently. (It's also just kind of odd that the protests concerning the Garner grand jury have been so much less destructive. I don't entirely know the reason for that. Or perhaps I've just been duped by the media into thinking the protests have been much better than the thuggish destruction in Ferguson.)

Leon Wolf has what seems to me to be a pretty sensible post on police treatment of suspects and prisoners.

I have noted a troubling trend in the course of some conservative commentary about cases such as these, which displays a complete misunderstanding of the nature of constitutional protections of civil rights. Whenever a story comes out about the use of excessive police force, a cottage industry of law enforcement officer apologists immediately begins pointing out that the suspect had a rap sheet or did something improper to bring the police to the situation and therefore whatever happened to them was their own fault. The first part of this equation is usually true – the vast majority of police interactions where force/violence becomes necessary involve people about whom the police have at least some reason to be there.

The second part shows a tendency towards acceptance of totalitarianism that I cannot either understand or abide. Just because the police suspect you (rightly or wrongly) of being involved in criminal activity does not give them carte blanche to use whatever level of force they feel like to bring the suspect into submission. Take the Eric Garner case, for instance. A number of commentators (none of whom I would trust to babysit my cat, if I had a cat) have suggested that Eric Garner was at fault for “resisting arrest.” This entirely glosses over the fact that not all instances of resisting arrest are created equal. Garner did not take any threatening or menacing actions towards the cops, he did not pull a knife or other weapon on them, and he was outnumbered by them by about 12 to 1. The sum total of “resisting arrest” in his case was to turn his back to an officer who was trying to cuff him. Would these same commentators have been comfortable if the police in question had responded to this affront to their authority by pulling their sidearm and shooting Garner in the back of the head?

Bingo. We have now all presumably seen the infamous Garner video. I have been quite simply appalled at the comments I have seen on Facebook from conservatives defending the police in what seems to me a kneejerk fashion. One of the repeated tropes is that he was "resisting arrest," which gives one an immediate picture of violent behavior. Which, of course, is not true to the facts. Garner pulled his arms (down at his sides) away from the police but did not try to tackle them. He told them not to touch him. And he was mouthy and argumentative. That's about it.

One of the most jaw-droppingly awful comments about "resisting arrest" that I have seen on this case was by a friend of a friend on Facebook who stated that Garner was "still resisting" when he was on the ground and therefore that the police actions at that point in subduing him were justified. As everyone now knows, those police actions included grinding his face into the pavement while he tried to say, "I can't breathe." I find the callousness and moral insanity of this excuse to be such as almost to render me speechless. His "resistance" on the ground was a struggle to free his face and chest so that he could breathe. Evidently he was insufficiently passive in his submission to being suffocated to death, and such a lack of passivity counts as resisting arrest, which, we are repeatedly and pompously told, "is a crime." So Garner's "crime" of "resisting" culminated in what one can only call Criminal Wriggling while being squashed into the pavement.

Well, I guess that settles it. People who commit Criminal Wriggling deserve what they get.

Wolf continues:

The problem we see is that there is a certain segment of the population (that seems to be over represented among District Attorneys) who seem to believe in the false choice that we must either permit police officers to use all the available force at their disposal under any circumstance or we must permit them to use no force at all. No one is suggesting that Panteleo should have just allowed Eric Garner to walk away, or that Shepherd was not allowed to use force to put a clearly belligerent Durden-Bosley in the car in the first place....In the case of Garner, the use of a carotid bar carried the obvious risk of serious injury or death, especially to an obviously morbidly obese middle aged man, and it constituted grossly inappropriate force to subdue a man who presented no obvious threat to the police at all.

Bingo again.

Based on some of Wolf's other comments in the post, I gather that he thinks this has immediate legal consequences. There I'm prepared to waffle a little. Maybe there is an argument for giving policemen a little more leeway to defend themselves against the charge of manslaughter given the nature of their job. And maybe "following protocol" (which we were assured was the case with Garner) should have legal ramifications for protecting police against subsequent charges if somebody dies. Maybe. I'm not wholly convinced even of that. But I'm willing to set aside the question in light of the far more important question as to whether, in fact, excessive force was used on Garner and whether protocols are wrong. In other words, what about the moral case? Are we so committed to a kind of narrow legalism that we don't care whether what the police did to Eric Garner was wrong? Do we care only whether they have some kind of "just following protocol" defense so that we law and order types can heave a sigh of relief and go home feeling justified? If so, that's wrong. Protocol can be wrong, even grossly immoral. To apply Leon Wolf's argument, what if protocol called for shooting anybody in the head who is resisting arrest, even if he is not violent or threatening? Would that be okay, then?

Wolf emphasizes the references that are made to the rap sheet of the suspect in this case. The rap sheet argument might be relevant if the policeman claimed that the suspect attacked him. In that case, we might use the rap sheet to help evaluate the prior probability for the policeman's story. But what about in a case like Garner's, where everyone knows he didn't violently attack the police, and no one is claiming that he did? What is the relevance of the rap sheet there? I submit that its relevance there is merely to remove sympathy for the person who dies and to cause us not to care whether he was the subject of excessive police force, because he's not One of Us (respectable, law-abiding citizens). And that's wrong.

Let me emphasize here that I am not making a point about race here. I'm making a point about criminality. But the fact that Garner was already a criminal doesn't mean that what the police did here was okay. Why should it?

Such a strategy of withdrawing sympathy is also deeply short-sighted. It places everybody who comes to the unfavorable attention of the police in a legal and moral grey zone where they can be treated in almost any way. And that's dangerous. That could be you, tomorrow, Mr. Respectable Citizen, or your beloved child, through something as simple as a mistake. Does anybody remember this story of the college girl who was police-swarmed in her car for buying water?

Or what about this home schooling mother and father, repeatedly tasered for non-violently asserting their fourth amendment rights? What if the father had died from the mishandling? That could be your or I tomorrow, home schooling parents, even though we are completely law-abiding. It doesn't take much these days to come to the unfavorable attention of the police!

The fact that the home schoolers were not entirely obedient to the officers (though not violently resisting) brings us to these wise words from Wolf:

Definitely it is true that following every order given to you by a policemen promptly and courteously will reduce your chances of being killed or injured by a cop who is using excessive force. That’s obviously a good lesson for parents to teach their kids. However, I don’t want to live in America where it’s generally accepted that failing to bow and scrape before police justifies police brutality and I find myself increasingly leery of those who are willing to suggest as much in public.

Bingo yet again.

Between kneeling down on the pavement with one's hands behind one's back and abjectly crying out, "I totally submit to you! I will go wherever you want! I will do whatever you want! I completely acknowledge your police authority! Please don't hurt me!" and repeatedly bum-rushing a policeman and making a creditable attempt to get his gun (as I believe Michael Brown did) there is a looot of space.

Does anybody remember this video? Should this fellow have been wrestled and flung to the ground by six cops with his face ground into the pavement for being uppity, for speaking up, for daring to show that he knew the law and the cop didn't? Why he even refused to show the officer his ID! He argued. He didn't do what he was told! I guess he deserved...whatever. Such a position, I submit, is profoundly at odds with the American spirit and with American constitutional legal principles.

We often hear that police have to make it a priority over everything else that the officer doesn't get hurt and that the suspect has no chance to get the officer's gun. These priorities, it is alleged, support the use of overwhelming force as in the case of Eric Garner. I say, rather, that such a position concerning priorities does proceed from a misguided idea that the life of a policeman is of enormously more value than the life of anyone who is so much as suspected of a crime. That principle is obviously false. It also creates a sort of schizophrenic conflict with the principles of the American founding. Not only did those principles hold that all human lives are of equal value, the founders also showed, through constitutional principles in the Bill of Rights, that they regarded it as more important that the innocent not be punished than that the guilty be punished. That priority has created some unfortunate and arguably unjust outcomes in which the guilty (even those guilty of heinous crimes) go free through jury stupidity or wrongly applied prosecutorial discretion. But I think they had good reasons for tilting the priorities that way. Think, then, how bizarre it is to hold that a person in the in-between zone of being accused of a crime or accosted by police, but not convicted of anything, is subject to being violently killed through the use of overwhelming police force. This in service of the principle that, whatever happens, we can't take any chance of having a policeman hurt! You are not being extremely submissive. You might be dangerous. We don't know that. But "better safe (for us, the police) than sorry (for us, the police)." In order to make sure that the cop "comes home to his family at night" (a phrase I have heard on the right in this context), we will justify overwhelming you with force sufficient to raise the serious risk of accidentally killing you, even though you have been found guilty of no crime whatsoever, and certainly not of any capital crime.

Something is very wrong with that reasoning. I would ask the relatives of police officers to stop and hear themselves when they say, "I want my beloved relative to come home at night, so I want him to follow protocols [that involve using overwhelming and possibly killing force against any suspect who isn't entirely and overtly submissive]." What you are saying is that it's us against them, police against, quite literally, everybody else in the country, and that you are on the side of police, whose individual lives matter much, much more to you than those of all the other people, including the innocent.

Those of us who are law and order hawks are understandably frustrated. We have a revolving door criminal justice system. We have judges who care nothing for the lives of the innocent and who order dangerous criminals released to avoid prison overcrowding. We have slap-on-the-wrist penalties. We have juries who refuse to convict based on unreasonable doubt rather than reasonable doubt. We hear infuriating stories of obviously relevant evidence forcibly excluded from criminal proceedings for frivolous reasons, resulting in failure to convict. All of this gets us riled up. I get that. We are tired of not feeling safe on our streets.

But what is happening, in reaction to all of that, is something very disturbing, which Wolf also notes: We are becoming simply brutal and cruel towards anyone whom we can classify as "the other guy" in the sense of being "the criminal." By the way, I trust that all of you have seen the follow-up video in which the police fail to offer assistance to Garner while he lies there, presumably dying, on the street after being subdued to the point of unconsciousness. The police do not roll Garner onto his back and check to see if his airway is clear. The EMT does nothing to render assistance. They simply stand around. The lack of concern is palpable.

It is that callousness amounting to cruelty that allowed someone to make the statement I highlighted earlier in this post--that Garner was "still resisting" when he was being ground into the pavement. What I see is that we are telling ourselves not to care. We are telling ourselves that, to keep up our creds as law-and-order citizens, we must make excuses even in this fairly egregious case of excessive force. We must not say that the police did wrong. We must treat Garner's death as his own fault. We must harden our hearts even if we feel disturbed by these videos.

That is a problem. It is not principally, in my opinion, a racial problem, but it is a very real problem. Perhaps it is a predictable consequence as a reaction to all the molly-coddling of criminals elsewhere in our criminal justice system. But as mature, intelligent individuals, not to mention Christians, we should resist any such mere reaction.

In these types of cases, it's especially important to be splitters rather than lumpers. If you sympathized with Darren Wilson and had no sympathy for Michael Brown, that is because of the facts of the matter. Every case is different. You are not thereby obligated to have no sympathy for Eric Garner.

As conservatives and upholders of American constitutional principles, let's take each case on its merits instead of just taking sides. Above all, guard your heart. For out of it, as Solomon says, are the issues of life.

Comments (60)

"Garner pulled his arms (down at his sides) away from the police but did not try to tackle them. He told them not to touch him. And he was mouthy and argumentative. That's about it."

If there could be a do-over, I think Garner would have preferred to say "Yes, Officer" and then do whatever it was that they requested instead of choosing to do his original actions.

I remember when a school district chucked a little girl's turkey sandwich over federal policy. Many conservatives I knew were foaming at the mouth in rage, and I asked them where their oh-so principled opposition was when zero tolerance policies were systematically implemented and kids got suspended for lawful uses of force in self-defense. There's a near perfect symmetry between the apathy in that case and the apathy toward Eric Garner's life. There's a lot of sure they shouldn't be treated that way but... *mumble**mumble**mumble* in the way many conservatives approach both.

If there could be a do-over, I think Garner would have preferred to say "Yes, Officer" and then do whatever it was that they requested instead of choosing to do his original actions.

So what? I just don't think anything follows from that. I mean, suppose you were getting shook down by a mugger, and you didn't pull out your wallet fast enough, and he shot you dead. I'm sure we'd say, "If there were a do-over, you'd hand over your wallet a lot faster." And the point of that is...pretty much nothing.

In other words, what we as mature citizens of a free republic have to think about is whether the police acted in a scandalously wrong fashion, not whether Garner, given a chance to do it differently, would have preferred to live or to die. You shouldn't die for a failure to, as Wolf puts it, bow and scrape to the police.

There's a lot of sure they shouldn't be treated that way but... *mumble**mumble**mumble* in the way many conservatives approach both.

At this point, Mike, I'd almost take the "sure he shouldn't have been treated that way but mumble mumble" over what I'm hearing. Which is more like, defensively, "Do what you're told! He was a criminal with a rap sheet of thirty-one counts and the police knew what they were dealing with and what do you want them to do just let him go and I want my cop husband to come home at night and what's the matter don't you appreciate all our police do for us and do what you're told do what you're told and he resisted arrest and that's a crime and..." All at something much louder, in electronic terms, than a mumble.

Well what I meant is most conservatives who want to defend the NYPD begin with something like "sure, Eric Garner didn't deserve to die." They are queasy at the thought of people rightfully noting that if you can defend this overreaction you are effectively giving the police a license to commit manslaughter.

Regarding the taser comment you made, tasers are an excellent example of how the police can frequently engage in excessive force and get away with it. You can find countless examples of the police tasering people to the point where it's becoming a form of torture to gain submission on Google. You can even find plenty of examples of the police just lazily whipping out the old taser and tasing people who turn out to be in diabetic shock, drunk but harmless, crotchety old folks, etc.

But you think these cases are bad, peruse the archives of Filming Cops. There are so many examples of wild-eyed overreactions, lost tempers, blatantly sociopathic behavior and more that would be so wildly illegal if done by a private citizen that it makes your skin crawl to think that a prosecutor can review the evidence and even contemplate not bashing the cop's head in with The Book.

That is a problem. It is not principally, in my opinion, a racial problem, but it is a very real problem.

This is a very good point. The police brutality isn't primarily directed toward "the other race", or we would have lots more black police doing it to white criminals, and we would have virtually none of the problem with black police doing it with black criminals. It is primarily directed by police toward "that guy I decide might be a criminal" or something like that. Which, I won't hesitate to admit, has a greater impact on blacks than on whites.

Being a policeman used to be a respected, dignified, honored profession. As I said here, there is a reason it was honored: because they voluntarily submit to putting themselves in danger for the good of the rest of us. What does it say of the profession if the standard protocols have backed away from putting themselves in danger, and instead uniformly take the stance "if it looks like a danger, beat the hell out of it"? It denies the very source of the honor of the profession. Which, not surprisingly, tends toward removing in people's minds the old willingness to give them honor. It is a vicious cycle of course - the less honor they get, the less compliance, and then the more "justification" for the brutality.

In my opinion we will find at the root source of the cycle the destruction of the justice and penal systems from being directed toward a real, morally driven justice, and reducing them to a positivist outcome, procedural rule-following, combined with a general repudiation of any principled notion of morality or justice - AND THEN refusing to follow the existing rules in wacky jurisprudence that would let off obvious criminals on technicalities and such like. Police watching criminals let back on the streets by such a system is likely to lead to dysfunctional reactions. This is one of them.

it makes your skin crawl to think that a prosecutor can review the evidence and even contemplate not bashing the cop's head in with The Book.

It makes my skin crawl to think that virtually ALL prosecutors have been turned out by law schools that wouldn't know a Christian concept of justice, morality, and law if it hit them in the face. They seem to be running the system based on a completely different notion of what stands at the heart of "the system" than anything I would recognize.

This is the best post I've seen on this topic. Excellent job.

Lydia,

Thanks for the great post and appreciate the kind words.

Lydia,

Mea culpa.

First of all, because I have ignored the shrill arguments of the left, I have missed something vital here. Not that I thought the arrest of Gardner was done professionally and without fault. But because I am a law and order hawk with as cousin on the Chicago police force, I'm naturally biased and defaulted to the position of "Gardner shouldn't have 'resisted' arrest" but didn't really think through what that resistance actually consisted of and what the proper police response should be. Plus, I viewed Gardner callously as just "another street punk causing trouble for the community". In other words, to speak to Mike T. and all the other libertarians who are always attacking the police, I think this part of your post informs my worldview to a great extent:

Those of us who are law and order hawks are understandably frustrated. We have a revolving door criminal justice system. We have judges who care nothing for the lives of the innocent and who order dangerous criminals released to avoid prison overcrowding. We have slap-on-the-wrist penalties. We have juries who refuse to convict based on unreasonable doubt rather than reasonable doubt. We hear infuriating stories of obviously relevant evidence forcibly excluded from criminal proceedings for frivolous reasons, resulting in failure to convict. All of this gets us riled up. I get that. We are tired of not feeling safe on our streets.

One point of difference -- I do feel safe on my streets -- because I live in a safe neighborhood in the city. But not every neighbor is safe and it is often the poor and working class who suffer the worst from criminal activity because they have no choice but to live where they in tough neighborhoods with street punks, gangs, drug dealers, etc., etc.

So I think you are right to shine a spotlight on the plank in the eye of law and order conservatives (my eye especially) -- we need to be concerned with the humanity of suspected wrong-doers, we need to be concerned with the professionalism of police forces around the country and we can never lose sight of the Constitutional order that protects all of our liberties even when it can be inconvenient to us in the short run.

I think the legal system has introduced many bad changes, but the political system is probably more to blame. The cultural changes in the police between my dad's generation and today's police is huge. Today's police forces were raised and realigned in an era of "War on X." The War on Drugs and War on Terror so completely altered the training, police powers and view of the public from then and now that it's no wonder the police are so messed up.

Consider the civil asset forfeiture scandal in DC involving the average seizure being down to around $151. They admit that most of the people they are "seizing" from are people off the street and they're grabbing the contents of their wallets. A few decades ago, "civil asset forfeiture" by police would be considered a violent felony. It's quickly gone from being used on drug cartels to DC cops shaking down people on the street.

The sort of man who can look himself in the mirror and justify that is simply not wired the same way as you or I Tony. Hell, he's probably not wired at all like cops a few decades older than him. It takes a man whose own conscience can say "this is not armed robbery, this is ok, because the law says I can just take this without proving a crime" to be able to do that. That's neither normal nor right, and it's just one of the many examples of how cops today are really not representative of the average person. Run civil asset forfeiture by the average person on the street and they're shocked that it's "constitutional."

"So what? I just don't think anything follows from that. I mean, suppose you were getting shook down by a mugger, and you didn't pull out your wallet fast enough, and he shot you dead. I'm sure we'd say, "If there were a do-over, you'd hand over your wallet a lot faster." And the point of that is...pretty much nothing."

Lydia, the analogy doesn't hold. The difference is that I complied. Garner didn't comply, and as you said, was mouthy and argumentative.

"In other words, what we as mature citizens of a free republic have to think about is whether the police acted in a scandalously wrong fashion, not whether Garner, given a chance to do it differently, would have preferred to live or to die. You shouldn't die for a failure to, as Wolf puts it, bow and scrape to the police."

Shrill extremes does not an argument make. Respectfully complying with officer demands should not characterized as doing a "bow and scrape to the police." Moreover, fwiw, a black female sergeant oversaw the arrest of Eric Garner. I do not believe that she is demanding that people "bow and scrape to the police." Nor do I believe that the grand jury expect folks to "bow and scrape to the police."

I think you are missing the point. Even if they were entirely legally correct, which has not been established (ex. NYC may not have been lawfully allowed to make that an arrestable offense under NY state law), it doesn't change the fact that the police were in control and let the man die.

On a related note, this interview with a NYPD veteran offers an interesting perspective on how Ray Kelly's changes to the department played a key role in this incident.

TUAD, I'm going to ask you this directly: Are you actually arguing that the force used against Garner was appropriate and proportionate? Are you actually arguing that what they did was justified and morally right?

Because if so, I could not disagree with you more.

And I could not care less about the presence of the higher officer, whether black, white, or green, whether male or female. I can watch the video for myself. Why should it make the slightest difference to my conclusion that excessive force was used that she wasn't bothered and didn't consider what they did wrong? Am I now just supposed to defer to the judgements of some person I don't know from Eve? Because why? Because she was a policewoman? Because she was their superior? This is about as blatant a use of the argument from authority in a fallacious manner as I know of. What it comes to is, "Who you gonna believe, your lying eyes, or a black female sergeant who had no problem with it?" Um...gee...that's a real tough call.

I've seen that argument as well, but it was _so_ weak and so obviously irrelevant that I didn't even bother mentioning it in the main post.

And I could not care less about the presence of the higher officer, whether black, white, or green, whether male or female.

Actually, her presence makes the situation worse for the police because she likely had command authority to alter the dynamics to ensure Garner's safety. The more senior the leadership present on the ground, the more cause there is for demanding a professional outcome.

Lydia,

My claim is that respectful compliance, instead of being mouthy and argumentative as you said Eric Garner was, would have probably been a better choice for Eric Garner.

Nothing more.

Regarding Garner's rap sheet, that justification cuts both ways. Although Garner had a checked past, Panteleo has a checkered past as well.

I've read that there were three pending lawsuits against him for civil rights violations even before the Garner affair.

It's a pretty banal point, TUAD. We might just as easily say that of Panteleo that restraint and discretion would have been a better choice. No grand jury, no glare of media intensity, no investigations -- and, oh yeah, no dead man.

These aggressive and brutish tactics on the part of police, culminating in an appalling callousness to distress, leaves much to be desired in terms of moral instruction and ethical discipline.

In the case Leon (OP link) addresses, from out of Seattle, the woman was obviously arrested for legit reasons. She was hammered and verbally abusive, possibly attempting an actual assault on an officer. Subduing force was unquestionably warranted. Probably serious charges as well.

But how does arresting or subduing force include a hard punch to a young lady's face while she's in cuffs? Riddle me that. The woman is not large, she was very drunk, and she was cuffed; her ability to bring actual harm to an alert and trained officer probably was nil.

Police don't get to carry out vengeance against personal slights while in the course of duty. It's a gross abuse of power, and the dishonor at its base must be particular offensive to men who cleave to a traditional view of the place of the sexes.

We expect better of our police officers in this country. That's why we honor them: fortitude, sacrifice, discipline, faithful service, prudence. On the whole, the NYPD is a very excellent police force, precisely because there are so many cops not callous to injury, not insouciant of lethal force, not ravenous to punish venality. We know of the honor because we remember, for instance, the NYPD officers to ran into, not away from, the burning buildings on the day of treachery 9/11. We know it because in living memory NYC was a squalid and dangerous place; but now is the crown of our commercial nation for ordered liberty. We know, more mundanely, that it is no easy thing to police a huge city, New York, LA, Atlanta, Dallas. From the patrolmen to the commanders this endeavor is a trying one.

But the honor of the trial is sullied by the evidence of cheating: the evidence of cruelty, despair, retribution, animus. If being a cop authorizes you to cold-cock besotted young ladies in the eye, something's gone wrong. If a shambolic old street hustler of gray market products deserves to be throttled and body-slammed and left to expire on the street, remedial moral instruction is in order.

"It's a pretty banal point, TUAD."

Banal or not, I do appreciate your acknowledgment of the point.

"We might just as easily say that of Panteleo that restraint and discretion would have been a better choice."

I fully agree with that. And I don't think that's a banal point, either.

TUAD, I cannot speak for Wolf, but my own endorsement of the "bowing and scraping" language arises not _only_ from the Garner case but from my knowledge of several other cases which supports that language. Others know of a lot more cases that support it. Consider, for example, the insane treatment of the Hagans, the home schooling couple mentioned in the main post. We have no evidence that they were mouthy or unpleasant. They were, moreover, legally in the right. But they were not violently resisting the officers' entry. They were simply stating that they did not give _permission_ for it, because there was no warrant. This is, in fact, the legally correct procedure under the circumstances. They were pepper sprayed, flung to the floor, etc. You can read about it at the link provided.

That is not an isolated case. There really is evidence that police consider themselves licensed to give all sorts of legally dubious orders which then place the innocent citizen in the wrong for "failing to obey an officer's orders" if he fails actively to obey, even if the order was unjustified in the first place and even if the citizen does not behave nastily or violently. Another case in point: In the Dearborn case in 2010 that I covered extensively, Negeen Mayel was an associate of some missionaries who were having a peaceful conversation with some Muslims about Jesus Christ. Her only job was to videotape the proceedings. She had done _nothing_ illegal whatsoever. Everything was taking place in public. She was merely videotaping. Because the police were getting ready to violate the civil rights of David and his associates by arresting them for no reason (because some Muslims were complaining about their having these peaceful conversations), the police wanted to stop Negeen from videotaping _first_, hoping thereby to avoid a video record of what occurred. (In fact, there was video, because more than one person was taping.) So an officer walked up to her out of the blue and told her to put down the camera. She asked why and tried to have a discussion with him. I have seen the video and, unlike with Garner, would _not_ call her mouthy. She told him not to touch her (but not in a threatening way) when he came and got physical and started taking the camera away forcibly. At that point the camera shuts off. Fortunately, Negeen wasn't flung down and smashed into the pavement, but she was arrested. For what crime? For not immediately obeying the _illegal_ order of the policeman to stop videotaping. (Numerous courts have supported the right of citizens to make video recordings on public streets.) In fact, she was convicted of this non-crime and now has it on her record.

So again, failure to bow and scrape. Yes, that really is deemed an offense in and of itself.

Lydia,

Three rather brief replies:

1) I used this qualifier intentionally: "My claim is that respectful compliance, instead of being mouthy and argumentative as you said Eric Garner was, would have probably been a better choice for Eric Garner." The qualifier is "probably."

2) I think Eric Garner knew that he was doing something that broke the law or violated some New York City ordinance. Negeen Mayel, although she was later convicted, did not think that she was violating the law when she was videotaping.

3) Gently suggesting that respectful compliance to a police officer would probably have been the better choice *should not* be mangled and twisted into saying that such a suggestion is an endorsement of police misconduct or a condoning of police brutality.

Many conservatives I knew were foaming at the mouth in rage, and I asked them where their oh-so principled opposition was when zero tolerance policies were systematically implemented and kids got suspended for lawful uses of force in self-defense.

The conservatives I know would have been foaming at the mouth with outrage at that too. (Most of them homeschool their children or send them to private schools so they don't have to deal with this kind of chickens***.)

If I wanted to mangle and twist your position, TUAD, I wouldn't have cut through the back and forth by asking you a direct question. I'm glad to hear that you don't endorse or defend the police actions toward Garner. A lot of people do, you know, and your one-sided initial comments made you sound like one of them.

It is worth mentioning that the fact that gov't has so often adopted a "see no evil" mentality toward the police has simultaneously cowed good cops and enabled bad ones. Good cops are routinely harshly punished for breaking the "blue line." There's also rarely any good for them, even if the good would be just seeing a bad cop get slapped with felony charges as the law demands. If a prosecutor and grand jury cannot look at the Seattle case and easily agree to indict and proceed with charges, it sends a chilling message to the public and good cops alike that bad cops are outside of the law.

It doesn't help that courts have often sided with the police and prosecutor, interpreting the requirements on intent and limits on immunity in such ways as to make actually nailing bad actors extremely difficult. As Radley Balko is fond of pointing out, the Supreme Court has upheld that prosecutors simply cannot be sued for what they do in a court room. Full stop. They have absolute immunity for what they say and do, even if it's actually a felony such as perjury; the SCOTUS has charitably refrained from preventing them from receiving criminal immunity, but probably out of a desire to not see the state lose any power to alter and abolish life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...

What many in the system and this cottage industry don't get is that they are starting to reduce the options for justice to vigilantism.

Cool. I can breathe now, thanks Lydia. ;-)

I think cases like this also highlight the extreme hypocrisy of much of the activist left. You have them simultaneously shrieking in rage about Michael Brown and the "violation of his rights" and yet many of the same activists are literally calling for a wholesale, formal mass reduction in civil rights for those accused of rape. Washington Post and others have had both in them. It's almost amusing since these are the same people will also cite the Scottsboro Boys as one of the landmark Civil Rights cases (the intersection of state brutality and people facing a wholesale disregard for their rights once accused of rape). But then, SJWs don't so much have positions as they have fits of rage targeted at something new every so often.

I have to wonder myself if even the left has been more upset about the Michael Brown case than about the Eric Garner case simply because...guns. That is, a gun was involved in Brown's death but not Garner's.

But perhaps I am wrong in my sense that there was more outrage about Brown than Garner (mistakenly, in my view, as I think the outrage-o-meter should have gone exactly the opposite way).

This case should serve as a reminder to people like Jeff why people like me have such a high level of hostility toward the police. The Baltimore PD was told by the US DoJ and multiple Maryland and local authorities that recording the police is legal. There is simply no legal basis for the cop to seize the recording device, let alone delete the contents. The police in that region still, on multiple occasions, have refused to follow guidance from authorities ranging from the various prosecutors' offices, to the US DoJ.

And is the officer facing indictment for various offenses, let alone an iron-clad termination that cannot be defeated by arbitration? Not that has been reported and likely ever will be.

If you wonder why cases like Eric Garner's happen, it's due in no small part to how most "law and order hawks" take a dismissive view of police misconduct so long as it's petty, annoying, disrespectful of authority or against "the right people." Then they wonder why many police forces have grown corrupt. Most "law and order hawks" do not have a Christian ethical view about law enforcement. They are precisely the sort of people referred to as the cottage industry of apologists who, short of a cop shooting a toddler in the back of the head for sassing them, never seem to face lasting and severe consequences for their conduct.

I find myself largely in agreement with the basic sentiment of the post. The over-militarization of the police force is to be resisted and the police shouldn't be thought to be more valuable than other citizens. Questioning the morality and legality of the police's use of force is fair game.

Nonetheless, I am skeptical that this is a good test case to raise awareness about police brutality and the use of excessive force, given what we know. Do we know that the chokehold caused the death, or would the general poor health of Garner combined with the police take-down have still led to his not breathing and apparent convulsions? I don't think we can be certain given his poor health.

Was the chokehold unnecessary for making the arrest? It seems like it (though one wonders if this sort of thing is used in part to avoid being bitten).

If you resist arrest--or if you like, are non-compliant and refuse to be handcuffed--it seems that the police have two options: they don't arrest you or they handcuff you by force. It seems to me prudent to let them handcuff you. I do not see why conservatives who have pointed out that Garner was partly responsible for his death can't also say that he didn't deserve to die.

Is it callous to point out that he was partly responsible for his death? Well, it depends on the circumstances. If told to his grieving mother, then, yes. But a lot of people (most?) on the internet are pointing this out, I think, because of the leftist reaction which paints the story completely as a case of racist, police brutality and homicide. But to outright deny that Garner was in any way responsible for his death--to focus solely on the actions of the police (not to mention ignoring the laws against petty crimes) is to feed a harmful narrative (not that I am saying you are doing this; I am just giving what I take to be one of the reasons for giving arguments which happen to also be on the side of the police).

"We must treat Garner's death as his own fault. We must harden our hearts even if we feel disturbed by these videos."

I can't speak for others so I'll just speak for myself: When I first saw the video it was disturbing. As I listened to the person recording it, it seemed that the police were arresting someone for breaking up a fight. Things changed when I learned that the police had had dealings with him before and they believed that he was breaking a law. As well, I became more skeptical about just how brutal the police were as I reflected on him saying, "I can't breath." I wrestle with my boys all the time and they say "I can't breath" even though they obviously can breath. Rather I'm restricting their breath (by, say, pinning them) or they are being claustrophic (of course when they say that I obviously let up!)

Did the officer let up and relax his hold when he said this (the officer is now denying that he put any force on the neck but it seems fairly obvious that he did in the video)? I can't tell. I certainly don't have enough evidence to tell him and his family that I think he killed Garner by choking him to death.

I feel bad for Garner and his family. But I'm hesitant not to resist the general leftist narrative which puts the focus squarely on the actions of the officers when the case is being discussed in the public square. Again, I think there are a LOT of better examples of police brutality.

I think we should resist being partisan. That he really couldn't breathe is clear from the fact that he, you know, died. That it was plausible that he was telling the truth when he said he couldn't breathe is true both because he was overweight and because they had him down on his chest on the pavement and were grinding his face into the pavement. That they didn't give a damn is also clear both from their actions at the time and from their failure to provide assistance after.

I'm not really interested in whether I'm helping a "leftist" narrative. I believe the police used excessive force, and I think I need to say this, above all, to my fellow conservatives, because my fellow conservatives are the ones so concerned about reacting to the left in a partisan manner that they are defending the police where their actions are indefensible.

The over-focus on the so-called choke hold is part of the problem, not part of the solution. _All_ the officers involved her were engaging in both excessive force and in failure to render assistance afterwards. (You forgot to mention that part, Tully.) If anything, the guy rubbing his face into the pavement bothers me more than the guy with his arm around his neck.

Yeah, he was a petty criminal. Yes, the police believed he had broken a law. Yes, they probably had grounds for arresting him. All of that is acknowledged in the main post. They then proceeded to use overwhelming force to carry out the arrest, which accidentally killed him. If anybody else did that, *regardless* of the legitimacy of the original intent to put the person under restraint, it would be a straightforward case of felony manslaughter. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of thing that charge was intended to cover.

"That he really couldn't breathe is clear from the fact that he, you know, died. That it was plausible that he was telling the truth when he said he couldn't breathe is true both because he was overweight and because they had him down on his chest on the pavement and were grinding his face into the pavement."

It is not at all clear to me that he was choked to death and died from a lack of oxygen to the brain. (I haven't read the autopsy or coroner report, however. I stand to be corrected. I'm just going off of the video and general news reports). He said WHILE BREATHING "I can't breath" multiple times. You can't speak while being strangled. The tackling could have set off an asthmatic attack in which case, he'd say "I can't breath." If there's not reasonable doubt that he was strangled to death, then the jury definitely got it wrong. I don't know that they got it wrong.

"_All_ the officers involved her were engaging in both excessive force and in failure to render assistance afterwards. (You forgot to mention that part, Tully.)"

I didn't forget to mention that Lydia. Their failure to render assistance is a separate issue from whether they killed him and whether it's wrong to point out that Garner was partly responsible for his death. I know CPR rarely works but somebody should have tried it when they realized he had no pulse. (At what point did they realize that? I don't know). Yes, the failure to do something after he's unconscious is disturbing. I don't disagree with that. But the focus has been on what led to that.

"If anything, the guy rubbing his face into the pavement bothers me more than the guy with his arm around his neck."

Isn't that the very same guy? The officer has him in the chokehold for about 15-18 seconds while taking him down and then removes his arm and holds his head down in place. In fact, Garner says "I can't breath" about 7 times AFTER being released from the chokehold while the other officers tell him to get his hands behind his back and try to get his hands behind his back.

"That it was plausible that he was telling the truth when he said he couldn't breathe is true both because he was overweight and because they had him down on his chest on the pavement and were grinding his face into the pavement."

Just to be clear, I think that it is true that he could not breathe in the sense that "I cannot breathe" is made true when someone (a) is being held in a position that restricts breathing OR (b) cannot catch their breath as a result of an asthmatic attack or other complication as a result of a struggle. And, again, I don't think we know he wouldn't have died if his face wasn't held down and he wasn't on his stomach. He starts saying I can't breathe before his head is down.

So what we might then say is that it WAS the chokehold that killed him. Or we could say that it might have been or it might have been the struggle.

And I have no dog in this fight. I'm just reporting about what I see as the evidence. I was once arrested by a police officer for something I didn't do (a misdemeanor). My brother and I testified in court that I didn't do what the officer said. He lied and the judge took his word for it and then read me the riot act.

I then helped campaign against the judge in her reelection. And in a huge upset, she lost.

It is not at all clear to me that he was choked to death and died from a lack of oxygen to the brain.

You don't seem to understand the point of what I said about the over-focus on the chokehold. You're still doing it. No, I'm not saying that he was choked to death. The compression of his neck and of his chest (partly, presumably, from being thrown to the ground and held down, given his weight) apparently occasioned a heart attack.


The tackling could have set off an asthmatic attack in which case, he'd say "I can't breath."

Yep, or a heart attack, but the coroner _also_ pointed to compression of the throat and chest as contributing causes. This isn't the same as "was strangled to death." What it does mean is *that they used seriously excessive force*. They were wrong. What they did was wrong. That's my point.

Their failure to render assistance is a separate issue from whether they killed him

I don't entirely agree with this--that it is a separate issue. I think that the protocols that license the excessive force used, which partly directly and partly indirectly killed him, are of a piece with a police culture that caused them not to render assistance. The whole idea is "He's the crook, we're the good guys, he doesn't matter." It all goes together very well.

I know CPR rarely works but somebody should have tried it when they realized he had no pulse.

Actually, they alleged (in the follow-up video) that he was breathing, so presumably he had a pulse. He died at the hospital.

However, they should have rolled him fully onto his back and cleared his airway. Neither they nor the EMT did this. I'm not saying that would have saved him. I'm saying it's basic first aid in the situation and that their not doing it speaks volumes.

Isn't that the very same guy?

By my recollection, no, it's a different guy. But I don't have time to look it back up right now. And they're more or less all on top of him squashing him down. vastly overpowering him, which is what I have a problem with. Again, the overfocus on the one guy's hold and on whether he was literally strangled to death is misguided.

I should also add that she gave me the maximum fine for no good reason and she was a Republican--tough on crime (too tough).

The thing is, one of my points in the main post is to challenge this whole idea that we should stop being appalled at the police force in the video when we cease to find Garner a generally sympathetic character. I see this on both sides. On the one hand, we have smarmy hagiography. I saw one Christian commentator saying that Garner's arguing with the police was understandable if, indeed, he had been "following the command to be a peacemaker" by breaking up a fight. Gag. Makes him sound like a hero. On the other side, we have the conservatives who say, "I was really appalled and disturbed by this video until I found out that the police knew about Garner, that he had probably been committing a crime, etc."

Now, that's just incorrect. It's not as though suddenly it becomes okay for the police to swarm the guy and smash him on the pavement because he was an unsympathetic petty criminal with a rap sheet.

That's sort of the whole point of American ideas like equality before the law. Even if you don't like the guy at all, and with reason, it doesn't become okay for the police to treat him in that way.

So in a sense I think this _is_ a particularly good test case for our being willing to condemn police excessive force, because it requires us to apply that evaluation even to people we find unsympathetic.

I think in a sense we're getting too much "TV cop" in people's minds--the edgy guy who goes around being mean and tough all the time, even torturing people and so forth, but the audience likes it because he's only being nasty to the "right" people, the people the audience already hates. That's not good, and it's certainly un-American.

One egregious example of callousness I've encountered on FB came from a police officer who said, "If he was able to say, 'I can't breathe,' then that means that HE COULD BREATHE." I gently reminded him that when an asthmatic says, "I can't breathe," what he actually means is, "I can't get enough air." This callous retreat into pedantry is typical of police wagon-circling that goes on whenever one of them gets caught going ballistic on some minor offender for Contempt of Cop.

"You don't seem to understand the point of what I said about the over-focus on the chokehold. You're still doing it. No, I'm not saying that he was choked to death."

I focused on the chokehold because of your response to my original post where I said:

"Do we know that the chokehold caused the death, or would the general poor health of Garner combined with the police take-down have still led to his not breathing and apparent convulsions?"

to which you chose to reply with the following snarky words (why you insist on taking this attitude with me, I don't know):
"That he really couldn't breathe is clear from the fact that he, you know, died."

But as I pointed out, we should think that he really could breathe, that is, unless you think he was killed by strangulation which is what that sentence of yours sure seems to imply. The only way it would be CLEAR that he was not breathing such that his not breathing caused his death is by strangulation or suffocation. And as you now say, he died of a heart attack. So it is not clear that he died as a result of not breathing (especially when, you know, he was breathing).

"Yep, or a heart attack, but the coroner _also_ pointed to compression of the throat and chest as contributing causes. This isn't the same as "was strangled to death." What it does mean is *that they used seriously excessive force*. They were wrong. What they did was wrong. That's my point."

I just do not agree. Excessive in retrospect knowing that he died, well, sure. But I just don't know what else you do in the circumstances and I haven't heard anyone explain how there would have been a gentler way that all reasonable cops would've done instead. He's 350 lbs! How do you get his hands behind his back to cuff him? You don't do it while he's standing up; no, you put him on the ground or on the hood of a car faced away from you--that is, if you don't want to get hurt by him. How do you get him on the ground? Well, having been in my share of fights in high school and the Army, I say taking him down by his head is not unreasonable. If he's 200 lbs you can wrap your arms around him, lift him off the ground and take him down once he's off his feet. But you can't even get your arms around Garner. He is twice the size of those cops---massive in comparison. The cop wraps his arms around the only thing he can and finally gets him off balance and takes him down. The other officers don't beat him or hit him (after all, they know they are on camera!), they get on top of him and try to grab his massive arms to handcuff him. And you can't do this without putting downward pressure on him, otherwise he'll just flip over. The officer that holds his head to the ground is not doing anything which appears to me brutal or crazy. Your body goes where your head goes, that's why it's so easy to be tempted to grab the facemask in football. When your head goes down the rest of you is down; it ain't easy getting up when your head is pinned down.

Of course none of this would've been necessary if Garner would have acted prudently and allowed the cops to cuff him.

"It's not as though suddenly it becomes okay for the police to swarm the guy and smash him on the pavement because he was an unsympathetic petty criminal with a rap sheet."

I agree.

I've said my piece. It's your website so I'll leave you the last word if you want to say more.

"One egregious example of callousness I've encountered on FB came from a police officer who said, "If he was able to say, 'I can't breathe,' then that means that HE COULD BREATHE." I gently reminded him that when an asthmatic says, "I can't breathe," what he actually means is, "I can't get enough air." This callous retreat into pedantry is typical of police wagon-circling that goes on whenever one of them gets caught going ballistic on some minor offender for Contempt of Cop."

But the chokehold is everybody's focus. The police officer who choked him killed him. The jury got it wrong. Homicide and all that. "I can't breathe" protests over the verdict.

To quote The Guardian this week:
"An analyst with the British South African bank Investec has described the regulatory strictures on Standard Chartered with the last words of Eric Garner, WHO CHOKED TO DEATH [my emphasis] during an attempted arrest by the New York City police."

But I and others want to say, let's be clear, HE COULD BREATHE. Let's not be ambiguous about the matter if you want to place blame on people. He could breathe because he was saying I can't breathe multiple times. He was not choked to death.

C'mon, Tully, you wonder why I'm getting snarky? It's because the "I can't breathe" was *not* just some kind of petty or misleading claim such as "everyone says" when getting arrested. It wasn't crying wolf. It was a sign that something was *seriously wrong*. This business of saying that he could breathe or he wouldn't have been talking is pedantry, just as Sage says, and it's all the stranger given that, since Garner died, he was clearly indicating that something was going very seriously wrong with him! We just watched a manslaughter in action. No, they didn't mean to kill him, but they arrested him in such a way that they _did_ kill him, and he was signaling to them that they were killing him by saying, "I can't breathe." One does *not* have to argue for death by strangulation to make that point.

I think it's funny that I keep saying, "Everybody is over-focused on the chokehold" and you respond, "The chokehold is everybody's focus." It isn't mine! I am saying we need to look at the violent arrest *as a whole*. You don't get to consider that you have answered _me_ by focusing exclusively on the chokehold, since that isn't *my* exclusive focus.

As far as how they could have arrested him, the fact is, they made very little attempt to do it in any way other than by taking him down. They decided almost from the outset to take him down. The moment he pulled his arms away, Pantaleo went for taking him down, and then everybody else piled on. How about three guys (say), coming around behind him and grabbing his arms?

By the way, it's possible I missed it, but I did not hear any of the officers say, clearly, before grabbing him, "Okay, that's it, you're under arrest for selling loose cigarettes. Place your arms behind your back, sir." What I see instead is a long scene where they are going back and forth, he's saying he didn't do anything, denying the charge, and then suddenly they sort of get tired of it and grab at him. That seems pretty unprofessional to begin with.

If the idea is to get his hands behind his back and cuff him, then tell him first _without_ grabbing to put his hands behind his back. Then if he refuses, several officers focus on _that_, rather than automatically taking him all the way down.

As far as the whole "body goes where the head goes," I don't know how anybody can watch that video and think that the face smashing, when he's _already_ down with people practically kneeling on him, is a necessary technique for getting him cuffed. That makes no sense. Rather, it's part of a general swarm-and-smoosh maneuver that they are carrying out jointly because he didn't submit tamely to the initial attempt to grab his arms.

You're sitting at home one evening when suddenly a member of the family or a guest starts gasping out, "I can't breathe!" repeatedly. Does any sane person say, "Well, obviously you can breathe, or you couldn't be saying that, so stop dramatizing yourself" and go on reading a book?

At the end of the day, the cops refused to even consider the old legal concept de minimis non curat praetor.

Meanwhile, a California officer was fired for refusing to use a taser on a suicidal college student. The logic? Even though the student was 150lb and four officers were subduing him (and 3 were using stun guns on him), the refusal of the fourth officer to use his stun gun "put officer safety at risk."

I'm all in favor of being able to stop people by forcible restraint if necessary from committing suicide. But obviously it's better to talk the person down, especially if he's not actually standing there gun in hand. It appears (and Mike's story is not my only evidence for this) that the police in these situations have little or no mental health training and think that the best way to deal with a suicidal or even potentially suicidal person is to create an extremely traumatic and dramatic scene in which the person is tackled and/or cuffed, which will hardly help someone who is depressed! It is almost as if, receiving a call such as they received from this student's father, they have no idea what to do to help the person and, by default, decide to get overwhelming and physical. Which is utterly stupid. Once the word gets out about that, how many people will want to seek help anymore for a troubled relative in another city or state? It would be like playing some kind of nasty prank on your already-depressed loved one--almost like SWAT-ing him--and will only make matters worse.

Precisely. The absurdity of these situations is that even if the guy is armed, the police can just talk to him. They can take the approach of telling him that no one wants to see him harmed and that they're there because someone cared enough to call. They're "not interested in arresting him" or "screwing with his life." They just want him to put the gun down and let them take him to the hospital. Why are they there? Surely not to arrest him, but for his own good because if he loses himself, they can prevent him from hurting himself better than an EMT. Unfortunately, that'd require humanity that many modern cops don't possess.

To make a few points to the whole "I can't breath" line of pedantry (or idiocy), which points may already have been made.

To say (or rather, wheeze or croak) a couple of words several times can take maybe one breath. Brief speech only requires the ability to exhale, so Garner could conceivably have used what air in his lungs that he inhaled before being put in the chokehold to say "I can't breath" when he realized he couldn't inhale, but rather, the force of his own weight and the weight of those piling on top of him only allowed him to exhale.

And even if he could inhale, what do the cops expect to hear? "Excuse me, could you get off of me? I'm having trouble inhaling, so I'm starting to panic, which will only make it harder to breath. Thank you ever so much"???? It's the same thing as when one has a piece of food partially blocking his larynx. He isn't going to gently notify a companion regarding his dilemma. He's going to start gasping for air, and alternating between coughing and saying "I can't breath"--or--"I'm choking!" Only a monumental ass would say, "Well, if you can cough and say that you're choking, you OBVIOUSLY aren't choking, so just carry on. I'm sure you'll be fine."

Another title: Police action and disturbing Liberal attitudes

for another story.

Tea Party Mom Wins $1.12M for False Prosecution

Excerpts:

"The Central Islip ​jury ​on Thursday sided with Nancy Genovese, 58, in a 2010 lawsuit she filed against Suffolk County​, its​ Sheriff’s Office and other parties, ​claiming she was ​only ​arrested during the July 2009 incident because she belonged to the Tea Party.

Genovese was arrested while taking pictures of a decorative helicopter in front of the Gabreski Airport Air National Guard base in Westhampton Beach for a “Support Our Troops” website. She was charged with criminal trespass and spent four days in jail before the charges were dropped.

Southhampton cops searched her and found a legally owned rifle that she was transporting from a nearby rifle range. She contends a deputy sheriff arrived on the scene later and said to her, “I bet you are one of those Tea Party people.” When Genovese said she’s gone to Tea Party rallies, he allegedly said, “You’re a real right-winger, aren’t you?” and “You are a ‘Teabagger’” and then added that she’d be arrested for terrorism to make an example of other “right wingers.”

“Ms. Genovese was subjected to a level of abuse because [authorities] did not share the same political views as she did and saw this as an excuse to deny her even the most basic civil rights,” her lawyer Frederick Brewington said.​​

Genovese said in a statement said she was “relieved” by the jury’s verdict. She added, “if this can happen to me, and officers can abuse their power like this, I can only imagine how other people who are not as fortunate as me have been treated.”

Do we know that the chokehold caused the death, or would the general poor health of Garner combined with the police take-down have still led to his not breathing and apparent convulsions?

are you bloody kidding me? No choke hold, no death.

It is amazing that we live in the 21st century and still have not risen above. I remember a time when I was taught, along with my peers, that you can go to the police for safety. Now I have conversations with my 3 teenage sons how far the police should go in a situation. It does make for some interesting debate, however I do not want impressionable people (of an age) to believe it is morally right to shoot or use violence because the "victim" may or may not have had a weapon, ill intent...
I have become disgusted with humanity as a whole. How can one justify the looting, burning, and pillaging of stores, businesses because of anger? These the same behaviors and tactics used by those in the past and present when annihilating villages, cities, races of people...

As a parent I find it hard to raise my sons at this time. We have a government that is divided by hate for the other side and cannot agree on anything. Extremists preach how Christian they are, but are the first to act completely opposite. There are so many problems we are facing as a community, country, world... People are basically greedy and arrogant. They do not care about their fellow neighbor, they do not care about the facts. They only care about themselves, how they feel wronged because of race, gender, sexuality, religion... Where are the people that want to make this world, the current world we are living in today a better place?

"are you bloody kidding me? No choke hold, no death."

Agreed. Raises two other questions:

#1. Why is it against the law in New York City to sell "loosies"? (I presume that's the law that Eric Garner was said to be violating.)

#2. Did Eric Garner know that it was against the law to sell "loosies" when he was arrested?

Yes, it was illegal, and I'm sure he knew; my impression is that he'd been arrested for it or at least warned about it before. In fact, he was probably lying when he said he hadn't been doing so. Even some of his friends seem to agree that he made his living by mildly illegal activity. And evidently the store owners thought, with some justice, that it was pulling down the neighborhood to have him hanging around outside and hustling cigarettes. The guy was no saint, but that doesn't excuse the excess.

"The guy was no saint, but that doesn't excuse the excess.

Quite so. But in the discussion of First Causes, the obvious should not be dismissed or overlooked: If no law broken, then no law enforcement.

Given this first cause, I should then like to understand the rationale of why there should be a law against the sale of "loosies" in the first place?

Oh, y'know, taxes, etc. At least, so I suppose. Besides which, there are no doubt all kinds of regulatory "things" about hawking anything whatsoever, including flip-flops, standing in front of the door to a place of business. Which is understandable. But one would think they could have just "moved him along," as one would have expected in the old days. "No loitering here, sir, move along," etc.

It's a funny thing, sympathy for the victim of a gross over-reaction.

When I was growing up, my (many) brothers and I, no strangers to physical invasions of personal space, evolved a kind of tacit standard: if you throw a punch at me out of the blue (just for fun, to get a reaction, to start a war, whatever), it is I and not you who gets to decide whether the return punch is "fair" or "excessive". You got your chance in deciding whether to hit first (and how hard). By doing so, you gave up the right to decide about the reaction. So, any sort of response like "hey, I didn't hit you nearly hard enough to merit that return hit..." was just so much bloviation.

But then, the recipient of the first punch didn't respond by gouging out his brother's eyes, break an arm, and then choke him to death, either. He kind of knew that if his return payment was truly different in kind and even remotely like grave, he was calling for the attention of a "higher power" who was going to punish both parties, not just the brother who started it. Escalation to _that_ degree was just not cricket.

I am not suggesting that this tacit standard we had was perfectly Christian - it certainly borrowed nothing from "turn the other cheek" - but I suggest that it held a modicum of common sense: there ARE natural limits to how you respond to a provocation. Just any old response you feel like is not made legitimate by the sheer fact of a provocation. Choking someone to death for selling un-taxed cigarettes is WRONG.

Yet perchance our sympathy for the victim of the over-reaction is somehow qualified. I call upon the example of the classic tragedies: they usually had horrific endings that seem all out of proportion to the degree of wrong in the tragic hero. I spoke harshly to my son's teacher, and WW III results with the destruction of America - not so good. The poets seem to suggest that even a minor offense against the gods warrants disaster. Moses strikes the rock twice instead of once, and he is forbidden to enter the Promised Land. But even in the Christian dispensation, we have something of the same pointing: merely lusting after a woman in your heart is a deathly act to the life of the spirit, which can end up putting you in hell.

To be an adult is, among other things, to recognize that the universe throws curve balls at us sometimes. It can be non-moral things: I pay no attention to that stupid bug bite, and then I have Lyme's disease leading to degenerative joint ailments, lots of pain, and much shortened life. But it can also be the results of acts that have moral weight, where a small immorality on my part opens the door to a much higher _possibility_ of a result seemingly all out of weight to my act. The smart choice is to not open those doors, stupid! Even in good times and with properly trained police, small crimes invite the attention of the police to begin with, and in and of itself that opens the door to a much higher probability that the police will mis-read the situation (even if it only changes the chance from 1 in a 10,000 to 1 in 100, that's a 100-fold increase.) E.G. If you are speeding and are pulled over by a state trooper at night, reaching into the glove compartment (to get the registration) can be mis-interpreted as reaching for a weapon - so turn on the dome light first, dummy!

I do not excuse or justify the police-caused death here. Not at all.

I follow the drift of your comments, Tony, and the comparison to Greek tragedies is very interesting.

Here's a sort of return serve, though: When "the gods" (i.e., the police) react in so disproportionate a way even to a _perceived_ slight to their dignity, it is quite easy to have situations where people who are _wholly_ innocent are treated very badly indeed. It's sort of a scaling matter. Scale it down, and you still have too much. If next-to-nothing in terms of a slight can call forth manslaughter, then _nothing_ (which is merely perceived as a slight or as law-breaking) may call forth, at least, getting roughed up and arrested or being terrified out of one's wits, through sheer mistake and misunderstanding. Cf. the terrified college girl surrounded by screaming, armed police for buying water which they thought was underage beer (or something like that--link in main story).

I agree. The one is making the other worse. Increased (reasonable) fear of instigating extraordinarily harsh responses from the police might lead to panic helping you to cause that response. Except the police themselves are responsible for their own behavior, not you. It is on them to bear the responsibility to act correctly - they are supposed to have the training for it, after all. If their reactions step outside rational norms, they are at fault and should be held accountable.

Which brings me to something I have said many times before, though maybe not here: If the ONLY punishment for a policeman is criminal trial for his behavior, that creates a problem. Yes, I think police ought to be held accountable for illegal actions. But actions that are slightly unreasonable, and not grossly unreasonable, should not be punished with criminal penalties but they should still be punished. If there are intermediate punishments for things that are dumb but not illegal, that would help: letters of reprimand, demotions, suspensions. Wait - there are already things like this. Why don't the police learn from these not to behave unreasonably? Is it because these punishments are unused or abused? Is it because police chiefs wink and nod at "boys will be boys"? Is it because departments close ranks around malefactor cops so those cops aren't charged with crimes? Is it because politicized departments use punishments for this for stupid "offenses" like not being gay friendly instead of for actual wrong behavior? Whatever the cause, cops are not learning from "the system" where to draw the line.

These situations can happen to anyone, as Lydia rightly observes. I am a living testament to the fact. July 17, 2010 was *my* day of infamy. Time was roughly 8:00pm, it was dusky-dark. I had just left my son's house when several police vehicles swarmed in behind me and threw on their lights. The streets were lined with cars so there was no place to "pull over." I drove on about 5-7 mph (so as not to alarm them that I may be "running"), turned onto another street and soon pulled over in a vacant driveway in front of a house. By this time several other police cars came swarming in all around me. I was ordered to turn the engine off, and throw the keys out. Which I immediately complied with. Then I was ordered to exit the vehicle. Which I did. I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, work boots and a ball cap. I exited with my arms stretched out to my sides, palms facing the police (here again, so as not to alarm them). There were 8-10 officers, and they all had their guns trained on my chest. I asked them to "put those guns down; I'm no threat to you guys." But to no avail. They began screaming orders out, and it quickly became very confusing; they ordered me to "get on the ground, now!" I flatly refused. The officer directly in front of me kept screaming "where's the baby?!, where's the baby!?" It took me a second to figure out what he was saying. When I did figure it out, I simply said "I don't know what you're talking about; I don't have a baby." I noticed during all this confusion that one (very young) officer, in front of and slightly to my left, was moving in toward me and he was shaking almost uncontrollably and his eyes were as big as saucers; he was scared out of his wits. I then said to him directly, "son, put that gun down before you shoot an innocent, unarmed man!" I was pretty angry and belligerent by this point. Within a matter of seconds the officers did holster their guns. I was arrested and booked on several charges, including "resisting arrest," "impeding a police investigation," "leaving the scene of a police investigation," "evading police" and an "open container" violation for a beer can that I'd picked up out of a driveway and thrown into the van several days earlier. The only one of these charges I went to court over was the "resisting arrest" charge (which I lost), and the "evading police" charge was dropped. In any event all the fines and bailing myself out of jail next morning, getting my vehicle out of impound and so forth, cost about $2000.00, give or take. Before this incident I never even had as much as a traffic violation. Indeed, I kept pointing this out to the officers, but they would have none of it. I never once "resisted arrest"; I never even had the thought to "evade police" (why would I?); when I drove away from my son's house neither he, nor I nor anyone else for that matter except the police had any clue that it was the "scene of a police investigation." There's quite a bit more to the story, but what I've shared should suffice to make the point, so I'll stop there.

Oh, what prompted the police to investigate the "scene" of my son's house that night, you may be asking? Well, someone called 911 about a child welfare check, and between the caller's exaggerating the extent to which the child had previously been burned when he touched a hot pan, and informing the dispatcher that my son "keeps a gun in the house," before it was all said and done, and several dispatches later, I was "abducting" the child in question, and police were in "Superman, come to save the day" mode.

True story! As I've said many times since, had a firecracker went off or car backfired during the really tense moments of this episiode, they'd have shot me dead right then and right there.

That's...quite a story and illustrates my point very well.

Lydia, this is hard for me to talk about, even to this day, without getting very passionate about what happened that night. I know how close I came to being shot, I could see it in the eyes of the young officer I mentioned. During the formal arrest when they were handcuffing me and all that, I said some things to the officers out of sheer anger that I'm not particularly proud of. For instance, I called the young officer mentioned above a "muscle-bound scared little rabbit," and, well, things like that. So I didn't do myself any favors as far as their jailing me and throwing the book at me goes. Oh well, lesson learned. Life goes on. But I retain a healthy skepticism about modern law enforcement officers that, prior to this incident, I did not possess. You probably understand why.

Also, I didn't just "let this go." I fought it tooth-and-nail from start to finish. I obtained a cd copy of the 911 call and the ensuing dispatch of officers to the scene, all the way through the arrest. I had to fight for it, but I got it. I had several interviews with various law enforcement functionaries in the days and weeks following, including the chief of police, the local sheriff's dept and a liason Hwy Patrolman. The OHP officer & I had a fierce exchange of words when I complained that the locals were "extorting" money from me based on frivolous charges all around. All he could see - all he wanted to see - was what was written on the police report, which was all "true" insofar as it went (like, for instance, that I'd "left the scene of a police investigation," but like I said, that it was a such was news to me and everyone else at the time I left), but at the end of the day the police report was a case study in how to "bear false witness against thy neighbor" and get away with it. Sure am glad now I didn't get shot, and/or, killed! But at the time I can honestly say that I'd have rather been shot, and/or, killed, than to simply cower to their unreasonable demands. Realizing this, one officer said to me during the arrest that "you're crazy!" I just smiled and replied "yep, if you say so then it must be true."

But anyway, glad it's all behind me now, and I'm able to talk about it without getting totally beside myself. 'twasn't that way until fairly recently.

Also, I should explain that prior to this (for me) eye-opening event, I was the typical "conservative" of whom you speak in the OP. I never would have dreamed in a million years that this type of thing could *really* happen to *me* of all people! After all, I lead a good, clean, honest, law-abiding life. What possible motive could law enforcement have for doing something like this to *me*?! The answer to the question is that they don't need a motive. All they need is to get all hyped-up, thinking they're going to swoop in and save the day, and bam!, if you happen to be in their crosshairs, this can happen to *you.* And you might not be so fortunate as I was to escape it with your life. Don't kid yourselves!

I can't find the quote, but one of the federal courts noted that police are frequently authorized to use tactics that would strike the general public as unsavory bordering on outright immoral if the public fully appreciated what they do. For example, it's perfectly legal for the police to just lie their asses off to you and fabricate evidence during an interrogation to scare you. This is where a "Christian society" has ended up in the name of expediency and effective law enforcement. Yet we wonder why police often end up get caught committing perjury when this is tolerated.

Mike T., yes, I agree that there is a correlation between public endorsement of questionable police tactics pursuant to extracting confessions in, say, murder cases on the one hand, and fabricating evidence on a police report to cover their *sses on the other. But if I could switch gears a bit here, I truly believe that instances of police overkill such as in my particular example would be far fewer in number, frequency of occurence and seriousness if the general public were more self-restraining and less prone to ... lie their own *sses off to get what they want!

In my case, the whole situation was initiated by a 911 call requesting an officer-accompanied child welfare check. When the dispatcher initially told the caller (more or less) that his concern, as he had expressed it, did not warrant a welfare check by police, he upped the ante a bit. When that didn't work either, he upped the ante again, and so on until she (the dispatcher) agreed to send an officer out. The caller stayed on the phone with her, meantime upping the ante even more as police were en route.

So, as I came out of our son's house and got into my vehicle to drive away, the caller (who was watching the house from his vehicle nearby) informed the dispatcher that I was leaving. Dispatch, in turn, informed the officer en route, and a sense of urgency that wasn't there before can be heard to take hold in their communications. Other officers were deployed to the "scene" as well in this instant. So it all got out of hand very quickly, and before officers even got within sight of our son's house. I had no idea, nor any reason to believe, they were en route, as I stated above. That being the case, when they did throw their lights on me, I didn't intially think it was anything serious enough to warrant my blocking the street by stopping in the middle of the street, so I proceeded slowly looking for a place to pull over. Literally, that is how this all went down. By the time I did find a place to pull over, police had worked themselves up into a pretty good frenzy (which can be heard on the recording), and the rest is history, as they say. Once police realized they had allowed their imaginations and their emotions to run wild, and to jump headlong into a classic example of overkill, they immediately started the process of fabricating evidence against me, beginning with the "subject left the scene of a police investigation" assertion (which really does sound kind of ominus) on the police report to establish "probable cause." And, as with our 911 caller, they continued to up the ante in their report until I was even unable to establish that I had in no way "resisted arrest" in court. (these terms are very broadly defined)

But at the end of the day, one reason I didn't go after police more aggressively in the wake of all this is because, having obtained and listened to the audio recording of the whole thing many times over, I realized that this was all initiated by a lying member of the general public and not by police. ...

Terry, you have a good point about the dishonesty of some callers. The recent shooting of John Crawford at Walmart was just such a story (caller claimed Crawford was pointing a weapon at people, later recanted and admit he made it up). So these things do happen and even cause real public scandals. That said...

Once the police got control of your situation, it was easy for them to just apologize, explain what happened and release you. In fact, had they done that you'd probably have continued on supporting them as you had before. The police could have, even should have, asked you to come down to the station and provide a detailed interview (with counsel present) explaining your side of the story as they were going to investigate the caller for calling in a fake crime.

Fact is, they had you outmanned and outgunned by a very healthy margin. They had total control of the situation and could have liquidated you the moment you posed any sort of armed threat like the caller seems to have implied. There was no call for them to react like there was such an imminent danger from you given how much control they had over you. But, as my father who is a retired local and federal law enforcement officer says about the cops of the gen-x and millennial generations: "damn cops these days act like they are afraid of their own shadows."

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