By Susannah Meyer and Chelsea Gardner
Earlier today, on Wednesday December 3, a Staten Island grand jury decided to refrain from indicting Daniel Pantaleo, the New York Police Department officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold, resulting in his death.
Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, was unarmed at the time of his arrest, and his death had already been ruled by the city’s medical examiner as homicide. Pantaleo, who had arrested Garner under suspicions that he was selling unlicensed cigarettes and claimed that the chokehold was simply a wrestling move, stated, “It is never my intention to harm anyone and I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner.”
Though the grand jury has made its decision, Eric Garner’s case is still being investigated. Just after the non-indictment was released, the Justice Department announced the launch of a federal civil rights investigation into Garner’s death. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder described it as an “independent, thorough, fair, and expeditious investigation.” You can watch Holder’s announcement on the investigation here.
You can view the encounter between Garner and Pantaleo below (trigger warning).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1ka4oKu1jo
Following the announcement of the decision, protesters flooded Times Square with signs reading “Black lives matter” and “Fellow white people, wake up.” In Staten Island, protesters chanted “I Can’t Breathe,” which Garner himself repeated multiple times just before his death, and “Hands up! Don’t choke.” Protesters staged die-ins in Grand Central terminal and on the West Side highway by laying motionless on the ground as if they were dead. As Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced, there have been 30 arrests of protesters in New York City so far.
President Obama addressed the grand jury decision, saying that it “speaks to the larger issues that we’ve been talking about now for the last week, the last month, the last year and sadly for decades and that is the concern on the part of too many minority communities that law enforcement is not working with them and dealing with them in a fair way.” Obama mentioned his initiation of a Task Force designed to provide The White House with suggestions for how to heal the relationship between minorities and the police. He is also seeking to improve training for police officers on how to police in minority communities.
Reverend Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who called for federal prosecutors to make the decision on this case, said, “ We have no confidence in state grand juries, whether in Ferguson or in New York, because there is an intrinsic relationship between state prosecutors and the police.”
While there is evidently talk of efforts to prevent unjust police brutality in the future, many cannot help but notice the all-too-obvious pattern taking form following the events in Ferguson, inevitably establishing race as a determining factor in the grand juries’ decisions.