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Thoughts on the Killing of Eric Garner
About five years ago I worked in a group home with ten developmentally disabled adults. That kind of human services field requires some training, because without meaning to, people, human beings, who often can’t care for themselves, can be accidentally killed by the staff.
The folks I worked with all had, and this is the technical term, profound mental retardation. It took different forms in different people, and some of the people I worked with had behaviors. So each resident had an individualized behavioral support plan. Something along the lines of “If they do this behavior X, you should do Y.” And the responses to a behavior always started with the least invasive and worked towards the most invasive.
We went through a training called SCIP, Strategies in Crisis Intervention and Prevention, which was mandated by the State of New York. It was a week long training, some of it in a classroom, and some of it in a room with mats on the floor. Put simply, SCIP teaches you how to take somebody down, when necessary, without killing them. It’s very easy to accidentally kill a person with developmental disabilities without meaning to. (In fact, the SCIP that I took was SCIP-R, R for revised, because it was modified based on the potential for accidental strangulation.)
The most simple thing was the one-person escort, where you guide someone out of a room. The final and most invasive thing was a full body wrap when you end up with your arms around a person, basically spooning them on the floor (thus, the mats). This is necessary because sometimes a resident could potentially be a danger to themselves or others.
In my personal experience, other than training, I never had to do anything like that. I never went further than the one-person escort. Why? Because most of SCIP was focused on the non-physical aspects. We were taught how to de-escalate a situation. Every situation is different, but I would have considered it a failure on my part if I ever had to SCIP (we used it as a verb) any of my guys. I wouldn’t have let it get that far.
And so we come to the killing of Eric Garner. I watched the video of this and it really bothered me. I realize that a police situation is different from a group home, but I also realize that not every police situation is the North Hollywood Shootout. That situation didn’t need to get physical.
If I done that in the group home to a resident, taken a person down like that, and put them in a choke hold, I would be in jail right now. Rightly so. The difference is that I was working in a culture where getting physical was the last resort. The NYPD is clearly a culture where non-compliance seems to be immediately met with physical violence. A week or two later, NYPD cops put a pregnant lady in a choke hold for cooking on the sidewalk. And the cops know that even when there’s video that they can get away with it. The incentive structure favors the cops getting physical right away, because as any child knows (until someone tells them not to) it’s a lot quicker and easier to hit someone to get your message across than to talk to them.
Maybe they couldn’t have talked Eric Garner down, but he was pleading with the cops before they wrestled him to the ground and choked him to death. He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have a knife. He was just talking. It didn’t have to go down that way.
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Thats what they were trying to do, preserve the peace. They talked to him for an extended period of time. Long enough for supervisors and backup to arrive. He was given ample opportunity to PEACEFULLY comply. He clearly was resisting when they tried to cuff him. They didn’t use a baton, or taze him or threaten him with their weapons. They tried to quickly get a large, agitated man down and cuffed. Having worked in Emergency Medicine for 30 years, I can tell you from multiple personal experiences that is not easy to do and everyone involved was at risk of serious injury at that point. No one was trying to kill the man. The autopsy showed NO damage to his trachea. It’s an unfortunate result of his resisting and his multiple co-morbid health issues.
I for one kind of like the idea of body cams on cops. With the proviso they stream the video live so that back seat drivers and Monday morning quarterbacks can see what the day to day, minute to minute experience of street cops is.
Yeah, well I see it all the time in the Emergency Room. Take a guy that fat and lay him flat or on his stomach and you can watch their O2 saturation fall. Just google
“hypoxia in morbidly obese body position”
here’s one article:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1381/096089203321136511
No they did not choke him to death. First the autopsy showed NO damage to the trachea. Second, the hold was only applied for about 15 seconds, and he was conscious AND SPEAKING CLEARLY after the hold, both indicating his upper airway was intact and breathing. He is saying ” I can’t breathe”, meaning he has AIR HUNGER, this sensation is common to all kinds of respiratory problems, and cardiac problems.
Did compression of some other structure in the neck kill him? His carotids were not occluded as he did not lose consciousness. His jugular veins were compressed as demonstrated by the petechia on his neck and face, but nobody dies of petechia. I would love to actually read the autopsy and see what mechanism the coroner is proposing for the death by neck compression.
Is that true? I thought that when the dispatcher told Zimmerman to back off he did so. Martin meanwhile circled back–he made cell-phone calls complaining about Zimmerman’s following him–and attacked Zimmerman.
In many cases police are cross trained as first providers, and many departments now carry AED’s in their vehicles since police frequently arrive on scene before EMS can get there. I hope the NYPD does this and I also wonder if they have CPR masks for breathing.
From a professional EMS perspective, I would hate to have to defend this in court.
The person was completely unresponsive for several minutes before EMS arrival. It does not appear he is breathing, or if he is it’s so shallow as to be ineffective. EMS arrives at 4 minutes into this video ( hey, I didn’t title it)
The EMT’s establish the person is unresponsive, and check a carotid pulse. From watching the EMT’s hand on his abdomen, she seems to be trying to establish if he is breathing. Watching the video I don’t think he is. They DONT auscultate for breath sounds, check his pulse oximetry, or check his airway or use supplemental oxygen. I don’t see them put any pads on to check his cardiac rhythm. Their approach to a person who is completely unresponsive is slow, and incomplete. If I were their medical director and saw that video I would be very unhappy.
I know what the word “choke” means. And I know what the phrase “choked to death” means. Garner did not die because someone was denying him air by obstructing his airway. He did not die from asphyxiation. He was not “choked to death.” C’mon, Fred. You’re an official representative of Ricochet now. Quit the agitprop.
Re comment #35 by Kozak; I do not know this for a fact, but cops are probably forbidden to touch the body once an altercation has taken place [involving themselves] and the person is unresponsive. They have to wait for EMT personnel to arrive. I remember when I lived in NYC there were fistfights and sometimes near riots between police and firemen/EMTs arriving at an accident scene and then trying to determine who was in charge.
Re comment #36, I would be interested in hearing Fred’s definitions of and distinctions between the words “libertarianism” and “anarchy.”
I had not seen any video of this incident before reading this thread. Based on news reports, I was predisposed to the conclusion that the police had rushed to use excessive force in this case. Having now watched the only video I could find of the incident, I’m firmly in the opposite camp for the following reasons:
The point that this was a misdemeanor infraction for something that most of us on Ricochet believe shouldn’t even be illegal is irrelevant to the police behavior. There’s a law, police enforce the law, and if you resist they will overcome. This is not a reason to criticize the cops – we count on them to do this. The libertarian cliche that, “Every law is enforceable by penalty of death.” isn’t hyperbole. That some people will be injured or killed in the enforcement of bad laws isn’t a reason not to enforce bad laws. It’s a reason not to enact bad laws. The root cause of Mr. Garner’s death is people electing politicians who pass bad laws and not correcting the mistake after the fact. Attempts to address the more proximate causes are mostly folly. If you think the fact that you don’t approve of the law is a reason for police not to enforce it, then don’t show up here complaining about President Obama’s executive action on immigration. All he’s doing is declining to enforce what he sees as a bad law.
Fred, thanks so much for sharing your experience in the context of the Gardner story. Interestingly, when I first worked in a state hospital, we had several developmentally disabled adults and I was told that a sub-set of the population would eventually have a run-in with the law, because of their inability to understand/follow directions, particularly when they were scared.
Also, I did a little bit of work with the Memphis Model police officers in grad school. These were police officers specialy trained to interact with people who had mental illness. Most of the police officers received basic training in de-escalating situations also. One unintended consequence of this program was that the CIT (Crisis Intervenion Team) officers, were better in de-escalating all kinds of situations, and in the first decade after instituting the program, they only had one hostage crisis.
I’m wondering how the Gardner case might have played out differently with that type of specialty approach–not because he was developmentally disabled or mentally ill–but given his medical problems…
No one addresses the fundamental problem with arrest. In many places, arrest is intentionally punitive before a finding of guilt. I don’t know about New York’s intake procedures, but in my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky, every person arrested is strip-searched. I believe that the policy is fairly common.
I think that for non-violent, misdeamenor offenders, our arrest procedures violate due process rights. The procedures themselves physically punish a person more than the person would likely be punished after a finding of guilt.
To justify a policy of for example, universally handcuffing the arrested, police use the excuse of protecting themselves, but the excuse isn’t universally valid. Not all people being arrested have a record of violence or pose an identifiable risk of violence against the police. Of course, police might have to handcuff and strip-search certain people, people who meet clear criteria like having committed a violent crime, showing signs of agitation, or being under suspicion of dealing controlled substances, but the procedure is completely unjustified when used against people without a record of criminal violence against the police and who pose no physical threat. (In a previous post, I discussed the case of an Indian diplomat arrested, handcuffed, and strip-searched for failure to pay her domestic helper the required minimum wage. Can anyone seriously think that the procedures were justified against an Indian diplomat? No one in India could understand, and the arrest procedure, not the arrest, caused an uproar in India and a diplomatic incident.)
If the police arrested the non-violent Garner without handcuffing him and without the subsequent humiliation in intake, maybe Garner would have felt a lot less distress at the prospect of being arrested.
There’s little doubt in my mind that the people to whom these measures are unnecessarily applied feel that they are punitive, but to say that categorically is to assume motivation that you haven’t established. Arrest procedures are plainly justifiable in many cases. Absent some reliable means to identify in advance who needs to be cuffed, strip-searched, etc., I think the humiliation of the arrested is a small price to pay for the safety of the police and prisoners around them.
Common sense always seems obvious, right up to the point where it’s wrong. Then people die and multimillion dollar law suits get filed. I would not begrudge law enforcement the latitude to apply common sense, but I think we have to allow for that possibility that they already do.
Police are routinely exposed to the worst in our society, and their view of what’s common sense in a given situation may vary significantly from ours as a result. Sometimes the common sense approach is the no exceptions approach. I’ll admit to not knowing enough to judge that when it comes to arrest procedures, but I refuse to assign bad motives to law enforcement en masse. I have no doubt that there are bad cops. There are also cops who, while probably not bad overall, do bad things by mistake or subject to normal human failings. That said, you won’t convince me that cops are bad. You’ll have to provide a lot more supporting information to persuade me that your view is correct.
I hate it when I agree with Fred.
On the front page of today’s newspaper: “Police: Chokehold victim complicit in death.”
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/crime/article/Police-cases-stir-national-protests-debate-5936801.php
The man was overweight and in poor health. Shop owners filed complaints. The story says that though he said he couldn’t breathe, by saying so proved that he could.
Very important also: he was resisting arrest — which is a crime.
I agree with all the troubling aspects Fred mentions as being very troubling. But demonizing the NYC police (or Ferguson Police, etc.) is far, far more troubling to me. Worse yet, a civil war between the Blacks and the Police seems to have advocates and agitators all the way to the top.
You and others have put this situation in a completely different light – and I for one appreciate it. Thank you for that.
But just like the “hands up” meme, sadly the actual facts won’t matter.
First of all, something can be punitive based only on effects, and intentions need not be relevant. Second, I think that you read too much into my comment. Nowhere does my post or any previous post accuse police of being bad in general. I didn’t even accuse police of being bad in these cases. I didn’t accuse the police of criminal liability or bad intentions in Garner’s case. I didn’t accuse the police in Khobragade’s case. I accused the system of bureacratic rigidity in the use of procedures.
I’m not hiding behind vague language. I want to be clear: I don’t think that the grand jury in Gardner’s case need be wrong. The grand jury decision could be right, and my point is that more is the pity. If the rigid application of the policies either contributed to the outcome or encouraged the outcome, then we should reconsider the policies because the policies may be bad. Bad policy creates its own problems. Bad policy can give cover to bad police officers as they humiliate and punish otherwise harmless people, and bad policy can lead otherwise good police to be insensitive to the unnecessarily punishing effects of their actions. Though you might think that nothing similar could ever happen to you, under a variety of current policies, you could find yourself in a similar situation. Maybe you’d never become flustered over an arrest like Garner—I’m not convinced that anyone can really predict their own actions so confidently—but there are many other procedures that could lead to your death. You might make a wrong move during a SWAT-team raid on your home and be shot. (In my opinion, these cases are far too common. I think that more than one incident in a decade should give people pause, and sadly, accidental killings like the one described in the link appear to happen several times a year on average. On this CATO institute map, select Death of an innocent from the drop-down list to see just the SWAT-team mistakes of the last thirty years. Explore the other categories, too. It’s shocking.)
My argument mirrors Hayek’s critique of socialism in The Road to Serfdom. In the name of justice, socialism puts into place bureaucratic machinery intended to frustrate individual aims and advance collective aims, and unsurprisingly, the system naturally tends to reward and promote those who show the greatest disregard for individual suffering and incline to uncaringly using the machinery to greatest effect.
Instead of for social justice, for ill-defined concerns about police safety or law and order, we’re essentially doing the same in law enforcement. We accept procedures of unknown efficacy and unknown net value, and the procedures at the very least enable bad police to hide behind policy if not encourage bad people to enter policing. There was a time when these procedures didn’t exist. Was the world so much more safe then? (The question was rhetorical, but to be clear, I believe that statistically, the answer is no.) To people of an earlier era, the procedures would probably seem as absurd as zero-tolerance policies that suspend children from school for miming a gun with a hand. Shouldn’t we be able to consider and to study changing the procedures? The need for law and order cannot justify all procedures—the right to due process recognizes a limit to acts justifiable in the name of law and order—and the safety of police officers cannot be an all-purpose excuse for procedures. First, people have a right to adjudication of guilt before unnecessary punishment. Second, policing is a job, and like a soldier in a volunteer army, if a police officer is unwilling to assume the risks that we as a society think a police officer should assume, then the officer can find another job.
You’re entitled to think what you want about the trade-offs between police safety and preserving law and order on the one hand and punishing and endangering suspects on the other. I’m not speaking to anyone who thinks that nearly any procedure can be just as long as it is uniformly applied or that a price for safety measured in perhaps hundreds of lives is above question. I don’t know where you stand, but I’m addressing the people who understand that accidental deaths happen but also understand that regular, fatal accidents suggest a problem with procedures.
Ah, I understand the confusion. I did write that arrests are intentionally punitive. First, I was referring to the intentions of the people that institute a policy like universal strip-searches on arrest. Second, I’m usually very careful to label my opinions as my opinions, but in this case, because I obviously cannot know the intentions behind the policy, I thought that I was clearly stating my opinion. I apologize for any confusion.
In any case, my comment made no reference to the intentions of the police making the arrests. The subsequent paragraphs discussing procedures like universal handcuffing and universal strip-searching should have made clear that generally, the punitive dimensions of arrest extend beyond the acts or intentions of a single officer—for example, strip-searches are not usually done by the arresting officer—so I implicitly referred to the intention behind the policy, which is set by police departments, not individual police.
And this is a direct descendent of the “profiling” hysteria of the last few decades the fact that police are forced to use no exception, ie no common sense, approaches in policing. So everyone, including 85 yo ladies get cuffed to prevent any hint of “profiling”. And not just policing, at schools, airports, the DMV, no common sense or discretion allowed.
You make an excellent point. Holder is unlikely to improve the situation because I believe that Holder supports disparate impact analyses of police tactics. If a disparate impact analysis is to be used instead of the manifest intent of an officer or policy maker to determine whether or not a policy is discriminatory, we cannot have meaningful reform. Congress should explicitly forbid disparate impact analyses in federal cases against police departments and establish some kind of standard related to intent.
He is especially unlikely considering that he turned in his resignation in September.
But like a smelly fart his stench lingers on….
I can’t say I have paid close attention to this case. The video certainly looks awful, but I am careful to make judgements either way without knowing the whole story.
1. How long had the cops been dealing with Garner before the take down?
2. What had Garner said or done before the take down, and could any of it have been perceived as threatening by the police?
3. Why did the officer feel it necessary to come up from behind and bring Garner down?
4. Why was that hold used, and is it one that is normally prohibited? (I’ve heard conflicting stories).
5. How long was the hold applied? Was Garner unable to breathe because he was being continually choked, or because he was having a heart attack?
6. If a man in better health would have survived that take down, then is it reasonable to call this lethal force, or reckless use of force, let a lone murder or manslaughter?
7. What is the history of the officer? Is taking down perps with a chokehold part of his normal MO, or is this an exceptional case?
This doesn’t make sense to me.
Arrest by definition is something that has to happen prior to the individual being found guilty of a crime.
Arrest is never a pleasant experience. You cannot expect it to be.
But it isn’t a violation of “due process” rights.
Also, it makes little sense to assume that the police should have different arrest criteria on whether the crime is a felony or a misdemeanor. How are the police supposed to arrest someone without handcuffing them?
Politely ask for them to come to jail? Pretty please, will you get in my police car, maybe, if you’ve got nothing better going on at the moment?
I hate to resolve disputes with an appeal to the dictionary, but arrest is not defined by handcuffing and strip-searching or whatever other procedures are used during the arrest. Arrest is only taking someone into custody. Parents have custody of their children without handcuffing and strip-searches.
Saying that arrest should not be unnecessarily humiliating is not the same as saying that arrest should be pleasant. I have simply pointed out that some features of arrest are a choice instead of a necessity. If the police had asked Garner to accompany them instead of handcuffing him, they might have asserted custody over him and processed him, in other words, arrested him, without a struggle.
If the detailed procedures surrounding arrest serve no clear purpose, then the procedures can be deemed punishing and a violation of due process rights. Sometimes, the police have to put a person into a straightjacket or other restraints. Would putting all prisoners into straightjackets be acceptable? There are clearly limits to what the simple need to arrest can justify, and I think that our procedures like universal handcuffing and strip-searches have become unjustifiable and punitive.
Why do you have trouble imaging treating different crimes differently at arrest? There is already discretion in arresting people breaking the law. Several articles have noted that marijuana possession in New York City is already handled with a summons instead of an arrest. I’m not sure why you think that the idea of issuing a summons is exotic when the practice is used very commonly for some petty offenses.
Are you saying that if a police officer wanted to arrest you, then you would have to be handcuffed and strip-searched to gain your compliance? Are you saying that you wouldn’t answer a summons? Of course, you’re free to advocate an inflexible and completely uniform and draconian style of law enforcement, but you can’t use sarcasm and exaggerations to dismiss criticism and other approaches.
Every conservative discussion site seems to have a segment of people that believe that the biggest problems we have in our society is that we have a government and a police force.
Fred is just our representative of that conservative segment.
Well if I may be so forward, you are relying on exaggerations here too. I at least, do it for comical effect.
To call arresting someone “draconian”, “a violation of due process rights”, “humiliating” etc…is a tad of an exaggeration.
Arresting someone in itself doesn’t “require” handcuffing and searching them. But it is done because if the cop is going to put the person in the back of their car and drive around with them for a few miles, they should probably be assured the person isn’t going to pull out a gun and do something inside the car.
Handcuffing someone and patting them down is…common sense.
As for strip-searching, that happens only once you are processed into a jail. Again…common sense. Should know what the person is bringing into the jail.
As for whether this should be an arrestable offense or a simple summon, that isn’t for the cop to decide.
Seems like Eric Garner isn’t the only one who thinks that the street is the proper place to hold court.
How would the police know where to even send a summons? It’s not like a parking ticket where we have your address on file in connection with your license plate and registration.
There is no avoiding confrontation with people who disregard both the law and the process.
Again, you misrepresented my statement. I said that the procedures surrounding arrest are draconian and possibly violate due process rights. I didn’t make the claim about arrest itself. Your exaggeration is suggesting that there is nothing between strip-searches for everyone on the one hand and simply not arresting people or even enforcing the law on the other. Draconian means unusually harsh or cruel, and unnecessary humiliation as experienced by the person being arrested seems to fit the definition. Since I gave the concrete case of the Indian diplomat and the uproar that our procedures caused in India, where hundreds of millions found the account of the diplomat’s arrest to be humiliating for her and a national insult, suggesting that reasonable people find the procedures to be humiliating is hardly exaggerating—by the way, you conspicuously omit to answer if the procedures would be required to take you into custody or offer an opinion about how you would feel about the procedures if applied to you, and I suspect that you would find a strip-search to be humiliating or a handcuffing in your home or on the street to be humiliating—but intentionally addressing a caricature of a point of view instead of the actual point in opposition to your preferences is a rhetorical ploy intended to obstruct serious, rational discussion and not simply a failed attempt to be funny. Do you have a rational point to make in response to my real points, or are you just interested in making juvenile, provocative quips and arguing with yourself?
I get that you approve of the procedures of universal handcuffing and universal strip-searching, but you don’t get to assert the exclusive claim of common-sense support for the universal use of the procedures. What percentage of strip-searches turn up weapons or contraband? On a strip-search, what percentage of senior citizens, children, or the mentally handicapped are found to have weapons or contraband? What percentage of people who have weapons or contraband discovered in a strip-search are being arrested for a violent offense or a drug offense or have a criminal record? Do you know? If the universal use of the procedure turns up very few weapons or very little contraband and if the same results could be produced with a more selective use of the procedure, then the universal use of the procedure is simply unjustified. Common sense would dictate that if the same offenders can be caught by criteria trying to limit the use of the procedures to the likely offenders, then universal use of the procedures is a waste of time and human resources. The same analysis applies mutatis mutandis to handcuffing.
As for police and discretion, you’re simply incorrect about requirements to arrest people. Police often do have a choice. Some cases are covered in the states’ criminal procedure codes, which obviously vary from state to state. In a state’s criminal procedure code, many cases are not covered. Where the law gives discretion to the police, police departments can set policies, but policies are not set in stone. The purpose of my comment was to call into question policies mandating arrest where another approach may be better. (In my previous post, you ignored my link to the article showing that the NYPD recently set a policy of issuing summonses instead of arresting people for marijuana possession.) Finally, when there are no policies or laws requiring an arrest but the law authorizes an arrest, police can use their own judgement. In my other post on the topic, I included a lengthy reply to a question about the requirement to arrest a person, and after doing a little research into the California Criminal Procedure Code, I found that the law only commands arrest in a few cases, cases like the ones that I described, generally, crimes of violence or failure to appear. Generally, for non-violent offenses, police have the authority but not the duty to arrest.
Do you have an actual argument, or do you intend to just retreat into sarcasm, a terribly weak response to facts?
What exactly are you talking about? I’m not trying to be dense or sarcastic—I despise feigned incomprehension and sarcasm as ploys in an argument, so I wouldn’t put on an act of not understanding your point—but I really don’t follow your thinking. I assume that you or someone you know has received a citation for a moving violation. (In some places, they are called summonses.) Did the police officer mail the citation, or did the police officer hand the citation to the driver?
I assume that most cases would be like Garner’s case, and in Garner’s case, the police were talking to him. If he had valid identification, in theory, they could just write a summons on the spot and put it in his hand. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of a kind of misdemeanor offense where a police officer might investigate but not try to make face-to-face contact with the alleged offender. For arrest to be an immediate option, a police officer must be in personal, physical contact with a suspect, so in any case where arrest is an immediate option, the officer would have the physical ability to place a summons directly into the hand to the suspect.
Again, you seem more interested in hyperboles than in any common sense argument.
Actually I have very little intention to respond to the rest of your points, simply because they are either completely irrelevant, or completely hyperbolic.
But here’s an interesting observation. The police might not have the duty to arrest you in this case, but they have the authority.
So I guess only 1 question separates you from me: do I want to leave the cop to make the judgement call, given their time and place and circumstances…or do I want to hold court in the streets?
You obviously picked your answer.
So what else is left to discuss? See how well that strategy will work out.