Reasons to fire Daniel Pantaleo

Police Commissioner James O’Neill should follow the wellconsidered recommendation of his deputy commissioner for disciplinary trials, Rosemarie Maldonado, and fire Officer Daniel Pantaleo for applying a chokehold to Eric Garner. It would be the final chapter in this tragic story and will have a profound and necessary impact on the workplace norms of the men and women working for the NYPD.

Though Pantaleo wasn’t the only officer at the scene, he played the biggest role in the killing of Eric Garner. He used a chokehold, which NYPD policy explicitly forbids, to take Garner to the ground.

Three other officers then converged to roll him onto his belly, put his hands behind his back, and handcuff him. They all created the conditions in which his stomach pressed hard on his chest, lungs and heart, preventing normal breathing and precipitating a heart attack. Soon Sgt. Kizzy Adonis arrived and, she says, told the others to ease off.

They called an ambulance but did not indicate urgency. Garner was on the ground, in handcuffs, barely breathing, and medics did not realize the severity of the situation. (Adonis’s disciplinary hearing

will begin soon.)

To say that Garner’s asthma and obesity contributed to his death is not to blame the victim and it is not to exonerate these officers. What it does say is that their actions, while not criminal, were nevertheless deeply unprofessional. They failed to pay proper attention to a medical emergency. All NYPD officers must learn to avoid creating positional asphyxia in arrestees.

Yes, Pantaleo violated the rules and should be fired. But there is a more fundamental issue of NYPD policy here.

These officers were doing the job their bosses told them to do: Arrest a person who, along with others in the area, was allegedly selling loose cigarettes and other small goods to passersby. Sometimes they were unruly. Sometimes they interfered with shop owners’ commerce. This is the classic situation to which police should apply neighborhood problem-solving strategies, not arrests.

In 2014, the NYPD brass still preferred to arrest people for committing such offenses.

NYPD executives decided where to deploy officers like Pantaleo to engage in aggressive “quality of life” policing. They chose neighborhoods in which a majority of residents are people of color, encouraging arrests of people committing petty crimes on the discredited and disproven theory that this would prevent more serious crimes in the future.

Garner’s civil rights were violated not only by Pantaleo, who was following orders, but by NYPD brass who insisted on pushing these policies. Today, neighborhood problem-solving is the goal — a welcome alternative and a sign of improvement. A measure of justice will occur when quality-of-life policing in poor neighborhoods stops and problem-solving takes hold.

Although not obvious, a slow march towards justice is happening. Twenty years ago, four members of the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit shot and killed Amadou Diallo, firing 41 shots. Back then, Rudy Giuliani was mayor and Howard Safir was police commissioner. Safir carried forward the “quality of life” enforcement favored by his predecessor, Bill Bratton, and also aggressive patrols. Officers of the Street Crime Unit, who were expected to confront and disarm violent felons and investigate the activities of suspicious residents, were assigned to neighborhoods with high rates of reported crime, all of them inhabited mostly by people of color.

Unlike in Garner’s case, the officers who shot Diallo were prosecuted for homicide and their trial was broadcast nationwide. They proved that the shooting had been a horrible mistake, a train-wreck of misunderstandings. The jury acquitted.

Subsequently, the Street Crime Unit was disbanded and better training and supervision on use of deadly force implemented. Shootings by NYPD officers declined steadily per capita. The improvement was real.

Organizational culture is built daily from this interplay of managers’ goaloriented expectations and employees’ understanding and compliance with them. If discipline does not happen even when the rules are violated, employees’ respect for good policies diminishes.

Thus, in firing Pantaleo, O’Neill would send a strong message to the rank and file: the rules are there for a reason, and they will be followed.

McCoy is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center.