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CITYWATCH TODAY--It took five years of advocacy and righteous rage for NYC cop Daniel Panteleo to face even minor consequences - losing his job but alas not his freedom - for choking Eric Garner to death with his own two hands in broad daylight for the heinous crime of selling loose cigarettes. Pantaleo was finally fired after a judge said his "reckless" chokehold, which he lied about, “fell so far short of objective reasonableness (to be) a gross deviation from the standard of conduct," even for NYC cops.
Meanwhile, white nationalist mass killers keep getting taken alive as scores of unarmed black men continue getting gunned down by police - Darren Wilson (Mike Brown), Betty Shelby (Terence Crutcher), Blane Salamoni (Alton Sterling), Jeronimo Yanez (Philando Castile) and Stephon Clark's killers – who suffer only some short-lived (much like their victims) bad press.
One of the latest casualties, in a roll call so gruesomely routine many don't make the news, is 19-year-old De’Von Bailey of Colorado Springs, Colo., shot seven times and killed by police claiming he was a burglary suspect who'd reached for a gun. Less than shockingly, body-came footage released this week clearly shows Bailey running away from the cops when he was hit at least four times in the back. He did have a gun in his pants, but never got it out and police only found it as he lay dying in the street.
His death, said a community leader, "fueled something that's been ticking for decades" thanks to racist cops who act like "cowboys in the old West." "We knew something like this would happen at some point," he said. "We didn't know who it was going to be or when it was going to be, but the ingredients (were) there."
That sense of inevitability is borne out by grim reality. In findings deemed "macabre" if bleakly unsurprising, a new study by the National Academy of the Sciences named police killings, from guns to choking and other excessive force, as a leading cause of death among young black men. Though the numbers still lag behind car accidents, suicide and homicide, at least 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police, a risk ratio about 2.5 times higher than that of a white man; Latino and Native men, as well as black women, are also much more likely to be killed by police. Those chances of carnage by fearful, thuggish, murderous, ill-trained cops - again, no surprise here - rise in states with more permissive gun laws and more guns.
Despite serious efforts to effect change by the Movement for Black Lives and many others, racist cops are still everywhere. Like hideous grub worms emboldened by our Proud-Boy-In Chief, they came out of the woodwork after Panteleo was fired. Poor guy: According to a GoFundMe account started after that injustice, the victim in the unconscionable death of a hapless, unarmed, ailing Eric Garner was this noble "brother in blue" who was "just doing his job."
As proof this country still condones, if not relishes, the grace act of wiping out another black body, Panteleo's fellow bros, thugs and MAGA fans quickly raised almost $100,000 in a generous bounty payment. Many donors posting racist comments, later deleted, were police - again unexpected, noted a NYC public defender who worked on a study finding one in five cops regularly posts white-supremacist poison online.
There is nothing new under the racist sun: In 2014, right after Garner died, a like-minded fundraiser for Darren Wilson sprang up after he gunned down Michael Brown. “We appreciate your service in the animal control division of the Ferguson police department,” wrote one donor. From another, “Don’t let the savages win.” To the racist brutes still out there, we damn sure won't.
The great, late, deeply radical Toni Morrison, in a 1993 PBS interview, on Americans so afraid of losing their blessed, desperate sense of superiority they're willing to shoot black men in the back: “If I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out. And all you got is your little self, and what is that? What are you without racism?”
Five years since Garner and Brown, three years since former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling to protest police violence and systemic oppression. To the recent questionable, self-serving claim by quintessential black capitalist Jay-Z, who just announced a deal with the NFL, that "We’re past kneeling" - nope.
(CityWatch guest columnist Abby Zimet writes for Common Dreams.)
-cw
Tags: choke hold, NYC, cops, Daniel Panteleo
