Reform must come from the top down
ONE YEAR ago, a 43-year-old man lost his life outside a store on Staten Island. He wasn’t shot by a gang member, nor was he the victim of a random act of violence. No, he died after being placed in a chokehold (which violates police policy) by those who were hired to protect and serve us. One year later, the officer who put Eric Garner in that chokehold has never been indicted, and the district attorney who handled the case has been elected to a congressional seat. When local prosecutors are too busy playing politics and advancing their own careers instead of fighting on behalf of victims, we need a structural change from the top. We owe it to Garner’s still-grieving family, as well as all victims of police brutality around the nation.
Last August, about 12,000 people attended a rally on Staten Island that my organization, the National Action Network, convened along with other groups to demand justice for Garner and his loved ones. That same night, I left New York and flew to Ferguson, Mo., after receiving a call from the grandfather of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by police — and whose body lay in the street for some four hours afterward. I preached at this boy’s funeral, and NAN led the first protest rally in Ferguson as we worked to get answers for his death. Sadly, we have seen incident after incident since these cases that lead us to demand police reform immediately.
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, was shot and killed when cops claimed they mistook his BB gun for a real weapon in November. John Crawford, 22, was killed by police in a Walmart in Ohio while holding a pellet gun that was sold in the store last August. Akai Gurley, 28, was fatally shot by an officer as he simply walked in the stairwell of a building in Brooklyn in November.
Walter Scott was fatally shot in the back in April by a cop in North Charleston, S.C. Just weeks later, Freddie Gray, 25, died of a severe spinal injury following an encounter with police in Baltimore (video footage showed a limp Gray being dragged by officers).
And just last month, we all watched the shocking video of an officer in McKinney, Tex., who pulled a gun on teenagers at a pool party, and threw a 15-year-old girl in a bathing suit to the ground, facedown, and placed her in handcuffs. The list of these kinds of horrific incidents goes on and on.
While there have been some measures to hold people responsible in some of these cases, justice should never be a game of Russian roulette dependent on the discretion of local prosecutors. A year since Garner’s death, we still need Congress to enact legislation so that independent outside prosecutors can handle cases of policeinvolved shootings and deaths. A year later, the call for reform rings loud and clear from coast to coast.
Next Saturday, NAN will hold a rally in front of Justice Department offices in New York as we continue to demand accountability for Eric Garner’s death, as well as to demand urgent changes to our criminal justice system. A year later, we must confront racism whether it’s in a horrific church shooting like that in Charleston, or in the subliminal racism found when law enforcement profiles, stereotypes and criminalizes entire segments of the population.
One year later, police reform should be a top priority — that is the least we can do for Garner and all of the other victims around the country. Justice delayed is justice denied.