Almost exactly one year ago to this day, on July 17, 2014, a New York Police Department officer choked Eric Garner to death on a Staten Island sidewalk. Filmed by a bystander, the video of his death, and of Garner telling officers over a dozen times that he couldn't breathe, was viewed by tens of millions of people on YouTube. In a sense, it felt like a public lynching of a non-violent man accused of selling single cigarettes on the street.
On Monday, it was revealed that Garner's family received a $5.9 million dollar wrongful death settlement from the taxpayers of New York City. His family deserved this settlement, but it still rings hollow.
If Garner's death was a $6 million mistake by the NYPD, why has no single person been held responsible? Officer Daniel Pantaleo applied illegal force to choke Garner that day and refused to let it go in spite of Garner's persistent pleas. Other officers refused to intervene and an entire cadre of officers refused Garner first aid for the crucial minutes when he was clearly near death. In what appears to be a coverup, the initial police report didn't even mention the chokehold:
In the hours after Mr. Garner died, an initial five-page internal report prepared for senior police commanders, known as a 49, did not refer to contact with his neck. The report, as well as the actions of supervisors involved, is part of the review by the New York Police Department, a spokesman said.
Instead, the report quotes by name a witness who described seeing how “the two officers each took Mr. Garner by the arms and put him on the ground.” That same witness, Taisha Allen, later said she told the grand jury on Staten Island that she saw a chokehold. She said the statement attributed to her in the report was not accurate.
The logic in this settlement, like the logic in countless similar police brutality settlements before it, makes zero sense. Either officers made mistakes and broke laws and should be fired or sent to jail—in which case a $6 million settlement makes sense—or officers didn't make mistakes or break laws, as the NYPD and the district attorney appears to have concluded, and this settlement makes no sense whatsoever.
It's illogical that Pantaleo, who applied the chokehold on Garner and has been sued for misconduct before, still has his job and never even faced a trial, but the city admits it was responsible for the wrongful death of this man.
In other words, New York City is perfectly willing to foot the bill for the brutality and murder committed by its police, but pretty much refuses to hold anyone accountable. So much so that New York City has paid over $1 billion in police misconduct settlements in the past 10 years alone, with another $1 billion from the previous 10 years.
Chicago isn't far behind. Struggling to pay its basic bills and shutting schools down across the city, Chicago has paid over $500 million in police misconduct settlements with almost no officers involved in those settlements held responsible in any serious fashion.
Ultimately, what we are witnessing is the cruel, unjust reality that dead black women and men are a permanent line item on the budget of big cities across America and little to no effort is exerted to change the conditions that put them there.