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On Firing Pantaleo
May 20, 2019
So how will Mayor de Blasio’s running for president affect the fate of police officer Daniel Pantaleo over the “chokehold” killing of Eric Garner?
How’s it going to look for the so-called “progressive” candidate if the mayor’s normally pliant police commissioner by some small miracle allows New York City’s most vilified police officer to “vest out” so he can at least receive a portion of his pension? Not good for candidate Bill. Which means the worst for Pantaleo.
Indeed, the city’s body politic seems to have been galvanized by the idea that, rightly or wrongly, Pantaleo must be fired. With its voice of authority, the NY Times weighed in with a column, placed in its lead editorial spot, which was misleading from the first paragraph to nearly the last.
“As Eric Garner lay dying,” began theeditorial/column, signed by someone named Mara Gay, “he was gasping for air and bleeding in his neck and eyes. The arm of a New York police officer was pressed hard against his throat.” Well, readers, according to testimony from none other than Ramsey Orta, the man who captured the “I can’t breathe” video, Pantaleo’s arm was not around Garner’s throat when Garner was gasping for air and said he couldn’t breathe.
Gay further claimed that in 2014 cops turned their back on the mayor at the funerals of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos — assassinated in their patrol car by a deranged black man from Baltimore — solely because de Blasio had “had the audacity to say that the Garner case made him think of the possibility of losing his biracial son in an encounter with the police.”
Nope. Cops turned their backs on de Blasio because, as two former deputy commissioners told NYPD Confidential at the time, de Blasio had created a climate of lawlessness that encouraged the killings. [See NYPD Confidential, Dec. 22, 2014.]
Not that it matters at this point. When an outcome turns bad, the NYPD makes it up as it goes along, circling the wagons and setting up the most vulnerable officer. That’s Pantaleo.
Now let’s turn to Garner, a 390-pound man with asthma, a heart condition, and 29 priors, mostly for selling loosey cigarettes. He was a chronic nuisance to the police in Staten Island. Arresting him, as the police did those 29 times, obviously did no good. So what about taking a different approach? What about thinking outside the box? What about consulting with him, his family or his minister? Isn’t that what de Blasio’s “neighborhood policing” is supposed to be about?
Let’s also examine Garner’s resisting arrest, his saying to Pantaleo when he arrested him, “This stops now.” As this column has written, anyone with half a brain gets it that black Americans have historically gotten the short end at every turn from virtually every governmental agency. This is especially true of the police.
Perhaps the beginning of a solution is to train police departments to understand that different racial and ethnic groups view the police differently from the majority white population. To most whites, the police are seen as protectors. To blacks, the police have historically been their jailers and abusers.
Is it possible to train officers to cut certain non-violent perps — at least those, like Garner, who are known to them, who are unarmed, and who pose no physical threat — a certain latitude like calling for backup instead of immediately jumping them?
In Garner’s case, we also have to look beyond Pantaleo. Remember, there were two supervisors on the scene, two sergeants. Neither made any mention of the supposed chokehold. It took Orta’s video to bring it to light.
If the NYPD wants to get real about accountability, it needs to hold public hearings about the sergeants’ role. Otherwise, how can people conclude anything other than that, to the police, Garner’s death — as a Staten Island lieutenant texted before learning the full dimension of Garner’s death — was “not a big deal.”
