Burning questions about Eric Garner

In the words of Eric Garner’s family this week, a hefty monetary settlement with the city does not equal “justice.” Nor does it move us any closer to knowing what actually led to the fatal incident exactly one year ago.

Answers to several lingering questions would show how, precisely, the NYPD’s broken windows policing may have contributed to Garner’s arrest and death.

But getting the truth will almost certainly require the intervention of an office not currently mentioned in popular discussion — one that’s been awfully sleepy since it first got underway more than a year ago.

Let’s first review the initial explanations about what sparked Garner’s fateful arrest on Bay St. near Tompkinsville Park.

Last July 21, The New York Times reported that, according to Commissioner Bill Bratton, the “local precinct had received numerous complaints about untaxed cigarettes among the hundreds of 911 calls from the area.”

But in early August, the Daily News provided a different explanation, tying the precinct’s crackdown on the sale of loose cigarettes to a 311 complaint from the preceding March. That same story also mentioned a July 2014 memo sent from 1 Police Plaza to Staten Island borough commanders calling for “immediate attention” to quality-of-life issues.

In a lengthy front-page story in The Times last month, the 311 complaint again played a pivotal role. But missing are the 911 calls and any direct mention of the memo, leading to question No. 1: Where are they?

That same Times story identified the person who contacted 311 as a Bay St. landlord named Gjafer Gjeshbitrai, who explained that he did so “only after physically fighting with the men on the block who sold drugs. The cigarette sellers, he said, provided cover for more illicit activities.”

During the month prior to the Garner incident, the NYPD conducted photo and video surveillance of the area. Thus, question No. 2: Would the department really go to such lengths to catch loose cigarette sellers, or were drug dealers the real target?

Why Officer Daniel Pantaleo was called to the scene is the basis of question No. 3. After all, as The Times notes, it was not his “typical” assignment, as he “usually worked in a plainclothes unit focused on violent street crime.”

The unedited version of the arrest video recently released by The News also bolsters the accounts of several witnesses, as well as The Times story, of Garner being involved in breaking up a fight just before Pantaleo and Officer Justin Damico detained him. In the full version, Garner tells them he was “minding my business. The fight breaks out, I stop it — and all of a sudden you coming up on me?”

Question No. 4 is thus: What are the complete details regarding that fight?

As the uncut video also illustrates, just before making his lethal move on Garner, Pantaleo goes back and forth with someone on his handheld radio. Who was on the other end of that exchange, and what was said, is question No. 5.

Many of these points likely were addressed in the grand jury hearing about the case, but the appeals court seems unlikely to reverse a decision to keep the minutes sealed. We need answers.

Al Sharpton and the Garner family are seeking federal indictments of the officers. Bratton, in turn, says the NYPD has completed its investigation, but is waiting on the feds.

Another office is conspicuously absent on the matter. Created by City Council legislation in 2013, with its first appointee last year, the NYPD inspector general has the power to investigate “operations, policies, programs and practices” in the interest of “improving police-community relations.”

In what some critics see as a flawed design of the office, the inspector general, currently Philip Eure, is appointed by the head of the Department of Investigation, Mark Peters. Peters, in turn, is a de Blasio appointee.

All of this leads to question No. 6: Will a rigorous investigation happen?

A year later, a job for the inspector general