Officer firing closes troubling chapter in NYC

As he announced that he was firing the police officer who had put Eric Garner in the chokehold that led to his death, New York City’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, sent the country’s largest police force a message: You may not think I’m on your side, but I am.

As a former beat officer, Mr. O’Neill said the decision to fire Officer Daniel Pantaleo was difficult.

“I’ve been a cop a long time,” he said at a midday news conference at Police Headquarters. “And if I was still a cop, I’d probably be mad at me — ‘You’re not looking out for us.’ But I am.”

It was a powerful message from one of the most prominent law enforcement officials in the country: Police officers who violate the public trust must be held accountable, for the good of the public and the police force.

Mr. O’Neill said he had determined that Mr. Pantaleo’s actions in the Garner case made him unfit to serve, despite a “commendable service record” of nearly 300 arrests.

Mr. Garner’s fatal encounter with the police on a Staten Island street in 2014 helped to propel the Black Lives Matter movement, in which protesters across the country took to the streets demanding accountability in the killing of black Americans by police officers.

New York police officers said Mr. Garner, 43, resisted when they tried to arrest him on charges of selling untaxed cigarettes.

But millions of Americans watched a video of Mr. Garner’s struggle with Mr. Pantaleo and saw something else: an unarmed man struggling for his life.

They saw Mr. Pantaleo’s arm wrapped tightly against Mr. Garner’s neck, a chokehold banned by the Police Department in 1993. They heard Mr. Garner’s desperate cry for help as he pleaded, “I can’t breathe,” again and again until falling silent.

Yet, for five years, justice was elusive. In 2014, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Mr. Pantaleo on criminal charges. Federal Justice Department officials in the Obama administration weighed civil rights charges for years but left the case mired in indecision. On July 16, one day before the fiveyear statute of limitations expired, Attorney General William Barr ordered the case be dropped.

All the while, Mr. Pantaleo continued to serve on the force, even seeing his overtime pay increase in the year after Mr. Garner’s death.

The city’s police union responded to the commissioner’s decision on Monday with its own form of resistance. “We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” the Police Benevolent Association president, Patrick Lynch, said in a statement, appearing to call for a work slowdown. “We will uphold our oath, but we cannot and will not do so by needlessly jeopardizing our careers or personal safety.”

It’s important that Mr. O’Neill and Mayor Bill de Blasio brush off the bombast while continuing to give officers the support they need.

In the past, New York has been too reluctant to discipline its police officers, with grave consequences. Particularly troubling is evidence suggesting that officers rarely face discipline for using chokeholds, even though the move is banned.

Mr. Pantaleo had four substantiated allegations of abuse against him before he choked Mr. Garner — far more than a vast majority of members of the force.

Mr. Garner’s family has suffered immensely. His daughter Erica Garner died in 2017 of a heart attack after years of activism in the wake of her father’s death. Mr. Garner’s stepfather, Benjamin Carr, died of a heart attack last month. Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, has been tireless in seeking justice for her son. It is a small mercy, at least, that she has seen something approaching justice done.

The lack of accountability in Mr. Garner’s death has also remained an open wound in the city, adding to a sense of grievance against the police among black and Hispanic New Yorkers even as crime rates were falling to record lows.

Mr. O’Neill seems to understand this. He said Monday that every time he sees the video of Mr. Garner, he wants to intervene to change the confrontation from turning tragic.

“Every time I watched the video, I say to myself, as probably all of you do, to Mr. Garner, ‘Don’t do it, comply,’” he said. “To Officer Pantaleo, ‘Don’t do it.’”

But Mr. O’Neill said that Mr. Garner’s death “must have a consequence.”

It must. And, after too many years, it finally has.