I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  Garner meanwhile was making it clear that he wasn’t budging from the spot. At some point in the confrontation it seemed to dawn on Garner that these two officers had come for him specifically, that they’d ignored a fight to get him, and that there was nothing he could have done, or more to the point nothing he could have avoided doing, to have headed this situation off.

  His arrest may have been inevitable from the moment he woke up that morning.

  Even worse was the fact that this harassment was coming from two undersized weightlifters, parodies of cops who, despite looking to be in their twenties, were talking to a grandfather like he was a child.

  “If it had been anyone else, Eric might have gone,” McCrae said later.

  Garner looked at the two men and shook his head. His face seemed to express equal parts despair and hopeless determination.

  “Every time you see me, you mess with me,” he said. “It stops today!”

  They argued some more. Garner pleaded: “I’m minding my business, Officer! Please just leave me alone!”

  Damico approached as if to grab Garner, then retreated quickly. He stood for a while, staring forward, audibly chewing gum. From time to time Pantaleo spoke into his walkie-talkie.

  Garner kept repeating, over and over, “I did nothing. I did nothing. I did nothing, y’all.”

  Finally the two police began moving toward him. Pantaleo swung his arm over a time or two, like a baseball pitcher loosening up. Backup had arrived. They were going in.

  “Hands,” Pantaleo said to Garner, approaching quickly.

  Garner recoiled.

  “Don’t touch me, please,” he said.

  Pantaleo reached out to grab him.

  —

  Sometime later, after he’d had more than a year to ruminate on what happened on Bay Street that day, James Knight would recall another story from his younger days.

  He remembered being in Brownsville in the early nineties, watching police checking people outside an old folks’ home for open container violations. The sight of young white police smugly manhandling and questioning gray-haired black folks about their beverages left James openmouthed.

  “You’re talking to an eighty-five-year-old lady for carrying a can of something, not even beer. This is an older person, who’s lived through things, someone you should have respect for,” he says. “Would you ever see that go on at an elderly home in a white neighborhood?”

  This was during a time when James himself was a fugitive from a drug charge. While he avoided detection, James watched police arrest others for things like jaywalking and continued to be bothered by the same thought: Are they arresting people for jaywalking in white neighborhoods?

  “It’s ridiculous. Give a nigger a ticket and walk away,” he thought. “Why arrest him?”

  Later, Knight would reflect on all of this and shake his head at how similar the new policing tactics were to the excesses of America’s past, in particular the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws.

  “It’s not like it’s new,” he said. “They just repackaged it under a new name.”

  Ultimately, the fatal flaw of Broken Windows was its ignorance of history. Even if you put the best possible spin on it and stipulated that it was conceived by well-meaning people as a race-neutral tool for an ostensibly race-neutral problem, in its implementation it drifted inexorably in another direction. To the black people who were its most frequent targets, the real-life, nontheoretical version of the program instantly evoked overtly racist policing programs from the past. For them, Broken Windows and Stop-and-Frisk never had a chance of being taken seriously as anything but the latest excuse to harass minorities.

  George Kelling had the foresight to understand that the optics of blasting homeless people with fire hoses in the Commando subway cleanup program would be bad. But somehow nobody worried that ticketing hundreds of thousands of people a year for obstructing pedestrian traffic or loitering might strike a particular chord with a population of people once targeted en masse for crimes like vagrancy and “impudence” for nearly a century after the Civil War.

  The Black Codes that arose in the years after the end of slavery placed criminal law at the center of almost every part of a black person’s life. They barred the ownership of weapons, restricted property rights, outlawed assembling in groups, and imposed severe penalties for extremely minor crimes.

  The practical impetus for these laws was often a labor shortage. A black vagrant could be taken off the streets and conscripted to work as free labor for white landowners, who of course had been stripped of a huge pool of cheap workers by the emancipation.

  But even after the economic reasons for the Codes passed, the same legal concepts survived almost everywhere in America. No matter what the time period, police from the Civil War through the later Jim Crow period always had series of highly flexible laws ready if they felt the need to arrest any black person uncooperative enough not to have committed an actual crime.

  Vagrancy, like a furtive movement or obstructing government administration or refusal to obey a lawful order, was so loosely defined as to be legally meaningless. Even after fighting a major battle to end slavery, white America remained fearful about integrating in any real sense. The Black Codes were transparently designed as a ready-made legal excuse to act in any situation when black people started to get too comfortable exercising their basic rights in the presence of white people.

  Just as the Codes appeared after the end of slavery and the fall of Reconstruction, Broken Windows grew out of a brief but powerful moment of racial reconciliation in the sixties: the end of segregation, the passing of civil rights laws, and the launching of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The Great Society programs that came out of that War on Poverty set into motion a series of unintended consequences. The assistance programs always had a strong bureaucratic and even punitive element. The government created armies of inspectors and social workers who, in the process of administering public assistance, got involved in regulating every aspect of life in poor black neighborhoods. This regulation became even more intrusive when the Supreme Court in the seventies gave the state a permanent right to enter any home of anyone on public assistance. Even sexual freedom wasn’t absolute. Housing inspectors asked single mothers who their boyfriends were, and how many nights a week they slept over, to ensure that the women were eligible for the aid they received. No other form of government aid—from corporate welfare to agricultural subsidies to the mortgage interest deduction—required this level of intimate intrusion.

  With the nineties and the welfare reform movement that was pushed by Republicans and by Bill “the end of welfare as we know it” Clinton alike, parolees and welfare recipients all had to show proof of employment, or else.

  And thanks to the drug war, huge numbers of young men came home from prison sentences unable to vote, live in public housing, or obtain licenses to be barbers, pet shop owners, even sanitation workers. They were kept under constant surveillance, watched even when they urinated for parole officers. New programs like “predictive policing” told residents of high-crime neighborhoods and people with criminal records that even their future selves had already been judged threats to society.

  On top of all of this came Broken Windows and Stop-and-Frisk, which had made going from anywhere to anywhere problematic, though standing in place was just as bad.

  All of this came into play in the life of Eric Garner, whose world got smaller and smaller every single day, and who felt so much pressure from all sides in his last days, until finally he was literally crushed under the weight of it all.

  —

  Pantaleo made the first physical contact. He grabbed Garner’s right arm with both hands. As Garner turned back toward Pantaleo in protest, Damico reached out and grabbed Garner’s other arm.

  Garner now turned, glanced at Damico, and recoiled, pulling his left arm away.

  The act of turning around to face Damico proved disastrous. Garner’s hands were raised, and with his a
ttention on Damico, his back was now turned to Pantaleo, who on film disappears behind Garner’s giant upper body. This afforded Pantaleo the opportunity to snake his right arm under Garner’s right arm, reaching upward and grabbing him by the shoulder. With his other arm, he reached up and over Garner’s left side.

  Pantaleo was so small in comparison to Garner that he nearly needed to jump up to get his arm up over the man’s shoulder. Because of this, he was unable to get his arm fully around Garner’s neck at first, and his hand came to rest under Garner’s chin.

  But Pantaleo then gathered himself and pulled, seemingly with all his might, knocking Garner backward.

  The two men rolled sideways together, crashing up against the plate glass of the beauty supply shop at 202 Bay. By then two more uniformed police had arrived on scene, men named Mark Ramos and Craig Furlani. They rushed in to assist. But for many crucial seconds this melee was pointedly a two-man affair, with the mute Garner struggling and Pantaleo doggedly straddling him from behind, determined to bring his man down.

  —

  Garner was caught in the crossfire of a thousand narratives that had little or nothing to do with him personally. Everything from a police commissioner’s mania for statistics to the opportunistic avarice of real estate developers had brought him in contact with police that day. So he was fighting one man who rode his back, but also history.

  Experienced police would later second-guess Daniel Pantaleo on a number of fronts, beginning with the question of whether or not an arrest was even necessary, given that Garner may not actually have been selling cigarettes at that moment. Also, he’d just been in the middle of a fight and was likely to be wound up, a “bad time to jack a guy up for nothing,” as one currently serving New York officer puts it.

  Pedro Serrano would later look at the tape and shake his head. “It’s exactly what happens when a two-fifty goes wrong,” Serrano says. He talked about times in his career when cops opted to get aggressive from the jump rather than just talk to a guy man-to-man. Now, he says, it’s a takedown situation and you’ve got to call backup and brace for war. “You turned it into something else,” he says.

  The irony of the stats regime is that an increase in the overall volume of stops makes it an inevitability that more brutality cases will happen. Garner was the victim of that crooked dice roll. Wrong day, wrong time, wrong moment in his life, and as it turned out, the wrong arresting officer.

  —

  For a moment after the two men slammed against the window, it appeared that Garner might fall on Pantaleo. But the detective shifted sideways, and in an instant Garner was on his hands and knees, with the detective still behind him, clasping him in a chokehold.

  Garner then fell to the ground and rolled slightly onto his right side, but still Pantaleo did not shake loose. If anything, he appeared to readjust and tighten his hold around Garner’s neck.

  As he lay sideways on the ground, surrounded by four police, Garner for one brief moment thrust his right hand out. His fingers were all extended, his palm facing upward toward the sky. He appeared to be indicating surrender and reaching for open space at the same time.

  Then the outstretched hand twitched, as if in a spasm. Garner now coughed and for the first time gasped, “I can’t breathe.”

  One of the uniform cops saw his outstretched hand and grabbed it, hoping to throw cuffs around it.

  “I can’t breathe,” Garner repeated. “I can’t breathe.”

  The four officers bent and twisted Garner’s great body around so that his arms were now behind his back, his face pressed into the sidewalk entrance to the beauty supply shop. A hundred people a day stepped on this spot. Crucially one of the uniforms now lay atop Garner’s back, increasing the pressure on his chest. Pantaleo by then had released his chokehold and repositioned himself near Garner’s head.

  With his right hand, Pantaleo pressed downward onto Garner’s face, pushing him into the sidewalk. Pantaleo then pushed down with such force that he lifted his own body, a kind of kneeling push-up.

  Garner now called out again, in obvious distress, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

  More police arrived on the scene, and Orta was asked once again to back off. He kept filming, but it was no longer possible to really see what was going on under the pile.

  —

  Inside the beauty shop store, Kwan Lee, the store owner, heard a loud banging noise. From his usual spot near the register he couldn’t see very well out onto the street, so he had no idea there was a commotion outside. But he heard one now and rushed up to the door to see what was happening.

  Lee, like most of the store owners in the area, was friends with Eric Garner. He talked to him almost every day and liked the man. “I even bought a loosie from him a few times,” he remembers. One of his main recollections about Garner is that right up to the day of his death, he’d never heard the man curse, which was unusual for the crowd outside the store.

  “If we had old ladies, or people who used walkers coming in, he always opened the door for them,” he remembers.

  So he was shocked when he ran to the front of his store and saw police on top of Garner. He arrived at a critical moment, just as Garner was losing consciousness. Pantaleo, he recalls, seemed unaware of how far gone Garner was. He was still pressing down on Garner’s face with all his might when Kizzy Adonis, the sergeant and ranking officer at the scene, rushed up. Adonis, a black woman, tried to get Pantaleo to release Garner.

  “Let up,” she said. “You got him.”

  It would later come out that in an internal police report on the incident prepared later that night, Adonis would tell investigators she didn’t think Garner was really in trouble. “The perpetrator’s condition did not seem serious” and “he did not appear to get worse,” she reportedly said. But she was concerned enough at the scene to tell Pantaleo to let up.

  Lee recalls at that moment, Pantaleo looked up, saw Adonis’s face, and for a moment appeared confused as to who she was. He reached his hands toward his weapon at the sight of her.

  “He didn’t put his hand on his gun, but he put it around his gun,” recalls Lee. “It was like, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ ”

  Soon after, the officers got off of Garner, who by then was unconscious, handcuffed, and facedown in the doorway of the store. Nobody was even considering the need to administer aid. Lee was mortified. He turned to one of the officers, a uniformed white man, and asked him what was going on.

  “How come you’re not giving him CPR?” he asked.

  The cop looked down at Garner and shrugged.

  “He’s fine,” the cop said. “He’s breathing.”

  Minutes passed. Garner lay unattended, facedown on the sidewalk, alone.

  —

  The entire confrontation with police had taken about twenty minutes, sixteen of which were on Orta’s tape.

  At approximately 3:32 P.M., after Garner had lain on the ground unattended for a period of minutes, police radioed for an ambulance. A similar request was made a minute or so later. Officially, paramedics arrived at 3:36 P.M. Their behavior was filmed by another bystander, a woman named Taisha Allen who had come down to Bay Street to shop for clothes.

  The medical professional who arrives on the scene either late or on time and uninterested is a consistent character in police brutality controversies. In this case, Allen captured an eight-minute scene in which Garner lay on the ground like a piece of meat, essentially ignored by officers. She would later claim that when paramedics first approached Garner, they blithely asked him to wake up, as if he was “faking it.”

  An EMT worker named Nicole Palmieri finally leaned over to Garner, took his pulse, and felt his neck. Another EMT named Stephanie Greenberg went to get a stretcher. In all, there were five medical professionals there, and none seemed in a great hurry to get Garner squared away.

  It took some time for Garner to get into an ambulance, which incidentally was parked up the street from the actual scene. Ludicrously, Officer
Damico was told to ride in the ambulance with Garner.

  Eric Garner’s pulse gave out at 4:15. EMTs administered CPR in the ambulance, but it was no use. He was pronounced dead at 4:34.

  —

  Gwen Carr, born Gwen Flagg, had raised six children.

  Three were her own. Eric was her first, born in 1970, and her daughter Ellisha the baby, born in 1975; son Emery had come in 1972. The children’s father, Elliott Garner, died in the mid-seventies. This was a primary reason Eric Garner grew up feeling like he needed to be the man in the family, even though his mother had remarried, to a North Carolinian named Ben Carr, when Eric was still young.

  Of those three children, baby Ellisha was the hellion, always trying her mother. Gwen tells a story of coming home one day and hearing Eric and Emery jumping up and down on their beds. Gwen burst into the room and told them to cut it out, or else. Eric and Emery tried to blame it on little Ellisha, saying she had been the one doing the jumping, but Gwen wouldn’t have it. “I heard y’all, and don’t blame Ellisha, she’s just a baby and she doesn’t know any better.” Ellisha wasn’t even three at the time.

  A week later, she came home and heard the same ruckus. This time, however, she heard Eric from behind the door, warning his little sister to stop jumping up and down, because their mother would hear and she would let them have it.

  Gwen again threw the door open to see Ellisha jumping up and down. When she asked her daughter what she was doing, Ellisha snapped, “I’m a baby and I don’t know any better.”

  She spent much of the seventies raising those three. Then, after she moved to an apartment in the Gowanus projects in Brooklyn, the children of her brother Joe unexpectedly came to live with her. Both Joe and his wife died young. “I knew Joe would have done it for my children,” she says, about taking them in. Stevie, Kim, and little Joe came to Gwen. The neighboring kids in the Gowanus projects thought all six children were brothers and sisters.

  Gwen was strong and strict and dragged herself to difficult jobs day after day, year after year to keep her family together. She worked for the New York Telephone Company in the early seventies, then had a long career working at the central post office in downtown Manhattan, and then finally became a subway operator for the MTA in the early nineties. As they would be for her son Eric, holidays were important for her. Stevie tells a story of a special Christmas tree she made one year, one that was covered all over with money as ornaments. A hundred-dollar bill was at the top.