NYC police officer cleared
Grand jury returns no indictment in chokehold death.
NEW YORK — A grand jury cleared a white police officer Wednesday in the videotaped chokehold death of an unarmed black man stopped for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, triggering protests in the streets by hundreds of New Yorkers who compared the case to the deadly police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.
As the demonstrations mounted, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said federal authorities would conduct a civil-rights investigation into the July 17 death of Eric Garner at the hands of officer Daniel Pantaleo. Federal authorities are conducting a similar investigation in the Ferguson case.
Protesters gathered in Times Square and converged on the heavily secured area around the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting with a combination of professional-looking signs and hand-scrawled placards reading, “Black lives matter” and “Fellow white people, wake up.”
In the Staten Island neighborhood where Garner died, people reacted with angry disbelief and chanted, “I can’t breathe!” and “Hands up — don’t choke!”
Garner’s stepfather, Benjamin Carr, urged calm but said the ruling made no sense.
“It’s just a license to kill a black man,” he said, adding that the justice system is “not worth a damn.”
In his first public comments on the death, Pantaleo said he prays for Garner’s family and hopes they accept his condolences.
“I became a police officer to help people and to protect those who can’t protect themselves,” he said in the written statement. “It is never my intention to harm anyone and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner.”
A video shot by an onlooker and widely viewed on the Internet showed Garner, 43, telling a group of police officers to leave him alone as they tried to arrest him. Pantaleo responded by wrapping his arm around Garner’s neck in what appeared to be a chokehold, which is banned under New York Police Department policy.
Garner, who had asthma, was heard repeatedly gasping, “I can’t breathe!”
The medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide and found that a chokehold contributed to it. A forensic pathologist hired by Garner’s family, Dr. Michael Baden, agreed with those findings.
But police union officials and Pantaleo’s lawyer argued that the officer used a takedown move taught by the Police Department, not the banned maneuver, because Garner was resisting arrest. They said his poor health was the main reason he died.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan said the grand jury found “no reasonable cause” to file charges. The grand jury could have considered a range of charges, from murder to a lesser offense such as reckless endangerment.
Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said the grand jury decision “just tore me up.”
“I couldn’t see how a grand jury could vote and say there was no probable cause,” she said. “What were they looking at? Were they looking at the same video the rest of the world was looking at?”
After the decision was announced, Mayor Bill de Blasio canceled his planned appearance at the Christmas tree lighting to hold a news conference at a Staten Island church while protests started to gather steam.
“Today’s outcome is one that many in our city did not want,” he said in a statement. “Yet New York City owns a proud and powerful tradition of expressing ourselves through nonviolent protest.”
But unlike the protests after a similar grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo., the demonstrations in New York remained mostly peaceful.
Just after the New York decision, several dozen demonstrators at the site of the arrest scattered cigarettes on the ground in homage to Garner and lit candles.
“Coldblooded murder!” said Jennie Chambers, who works nearby and saw Garner daily. “We saw it on TV, it’s on video. The whole world saw it. Ferguson, now us.”
While details on the grand jurors were not disclosed, Staten Island is the most politically conservative of the city’s five boroughs and is home to many police officers and firefighters.
Donovan said he filed a court order to release information on the investigation.
Pantaleo had been stripped of his gun and badge and placed on desk duty while the case was under investigation. Police Commissioner William Bratton said Pantaleo would be suspended while the department conducts an internal probe that could result in administrative charges.
The case prompted Bratton to order police officers to undergo retraining on use of force.
The department also is taking steps toward outfitting its 34,500 uniformed police officers with body cameras in an experimental program announced Wednesday by de Blasio and Bratton. It will begin testing devices this week that digitally record street encounters between officers and civilians to provide reviewable evidence when an officer’s conduct is questioned, Bratton said.