Eric Garner, the latest very large black man to be
killed by the police, was a 43 year old father of six with a rap sheet that
included 31 arrests. Therein lies the Grand Canyon-sized chasm between white
and black America. I don’t know anyone 43 years old who has 6 kids, and I have
never been in the presence of a single solitary person who has been arrested 31
times.
We have all seen the video a hundred times by now.
There is Mr. Garner resisting an attempted arrest by several NYPD officers, one
of whom slips around behind and wraps an arm around his neck wrestling him to
the ground. Somewhere in the ensuing melee, Eric Garner breathes his last.
Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who administered the chokehold was placed on office
duty after the incident, then the case was sent to a Grand Jury for review.
Yesterday that Grand Jury acquitted Pantaleo and charged him with…nothing.
What heinous crime was Mr. Garner guilty of? What
horrible act was he in the midst of committing that would have justified such a
violent apprehension? He was selling loose, unregistered, (un-taxed) cigarettes…loosies.
Wait,…what?
You see, in New York City, politicians have declared
tobacco to be worse than practically any substance on earth. It has been the
goal of the powers that be to eradicate its use both inside and out. To this
end they have taxed cigarettes out of reach of most New Yorkers. A pack costs $11.00, half of that
price lines the bank accounts of governments from Washington to Albany to New
York City. If I didn’t know better I would think that somebody set out to create
a black market. “Hey everyone, I know what we should do! Let’s make cigarettes
twice as expensive in New York as they are anywhere else in the country. That
way, we’ll create a huge incentive for crooks in Kentucky to bring their 4
dollar-a-pack cigarettes up here where they can sell them on the street for 8
dollars a pack. That will save smokers in our city 3 bucks a pack and rob us of
revenue while making illegal cigarettes a thriving black market!!”
I’m all for law and order and I generally support the
police over perpetually aggrieved race pimps like Al Sharpton, but when I watch
the video of Mr. Garner’s final moments on this earth, I can’t help thinking…all
of this over selling illegal cigarettes? The NYPD has nothing better to do than
go after some 43 year old man selling contraband smokes? Whatever happened to
proportionality? How about the punishment fitting the crime?
I would imagine that in a city the size of New York
there are probably hundreds of thousands of laws and ordinances on the books.
No police force is equipped to enforce them all. Decisions have to be made
because of budgetary restraints, prosecutorial discretion must be exercised. We
see this all the time. For example, it is illegal for anyone under the age of
21 to consume alcohol in the United States and yet, every Friday and Saturday
night on most college campuses, an orgy of law-breaking takes place in full
view of the local police. The police decide that there are bigger fish to fry.
For the life of me I cannot understand why the cops in
New York City felt compelled to take this type of aggressive approach to apprehending
a cigarette salesman. Seriously? How do they actually expect someone 43 years
old with 31 arrests to make a living? At least he wasn’t selling black tar
heroin to school kids. As parents we pick our battles, we seldom choose to die
on the hill of forgetting to make the bed. In the grand scheme of deviance in a
city like New York, Eric Garner forgot to make his bed. Now he’s dead.
President Obama has pledged 75 million dollars to
outfit police officers with cameras that he says will reduce confrontations. This
particular crime was recorded on tape for all to see over and over again on
CNN. The result was another acquittal of a police officer accused of murdering
a black man. Maybe Pantaleo’s actions didn’t rise to murder. But to be cleared
of any
wrong doing? Excessive force? Wrongful
arrest technique? Anything?
On this one, I’m with
the protesters.
