Oh dear god. Worse than ever.
There’s a second video of the killing of Eric Garner.
The second video shows the choking while one officer grabbed Garner around his neck, and threw him to the ground. It also, however, shows the seven minute long aftermath, where a disgusted bystander films the lifeless body of Eric Garner left on the sidewalk with police officers shuffling around him and seeming relatively undisturbed by the fact that they had just killed an unarmed man for not paying a few pennies of tax on cigarettes.
Watch video below of NYPD officers and EMT standing around, and failing to give aid to Eric Garner, who was lifeless on the ground, but technically did not die until he was on the way to the hospital.
I could only watch a minute fourteen, given what we know.
Could Garner have been saved if they had administered proper aid? Perhaps. But that is speculative. What is not speculative is the attitude and demeanor of the officer who had just choked him until he was lifeless, thus leading to his death. Pay close attention at 6:55 in the video, when you can see the officer who choked Garner to death, NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, actually wave jokingly at the camera, with no apparent concern for the fact that he had just killed a man.
I didn’t watch that far, but there are stills in the story.
The video was originally posted on Facebook over the summer but has received renewed attention after a grand jury decided not to indict an officer involved in the altercation. As Harry Siegel at the New York Daily News points out, this video is almost more disturbing — or disturbing in a way that says something slightly different about Garner and the officers in question. About Garner: If he appears in the first video as the subject of police aggression, here he barely seems to warrant their attention at all. About the officers: They betray no sense of urgency or concern as they wait for first responders. It’s as if the event were almost banal.
Maybe that’s their “professionalism” – not getting all emotional on the job. But since Eric Garner shouldn’t have been slammed to the sidewalk in the first place…
It’s ugly.
“So how did your day go today?”
“Nothing special. I killed a black guy but, you know, same old same old.”
Quoting, from memory, Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn:
Oh jeez, yes. About a fictitious steam-boat explosion, I think.
Also relevant: the passages from Frederic Douglass I quoted here last week.
Hey now, in New York City, we’re talking dollars. Rand Paul told me so.
This has been my latest pathetic attempt at using sarcasm to deflect sheer horror. Didn’t work too well.
@5 PatrickG –
But was it a fistful, though? Because I thought that was considered the bare minimum.
I watched a lot more than Ophelia … though I had it muted and I tried to make sure I was watching everyone and everything except that poor man’s face.
I have several questions. What kind of training do cops have? Once they saw that he wasn’t breathing I don’t much care what they thought of him or of what they’d done, why weren’t they in lifesaving first aid mode. They didn’t know precisely why he’d died nor whether he could be successfully resuscitated, why on earth were they not administering CPR until the experts arrived? Don’t they have any training at all? Or, I dread to think it, was that business of keeping him on his side (but keeping the handcuffs on) some weird, misguided, incompetent version of “Recovery Position” for accident victims? If so, who ever could have thought that keeping the handcuffs on in that position was compatible with “Recovery”.
Apart from the callousness, the most shocking thing to me is the casual display of gross incompetence. It’s one issue to make a mistake or a wrong choice in the first place. It’s another thing entirely to compound it by total incompetence exacerbated by some strange kind of ignoring what’s happening right in front of you. I didn’t watch it beyond them beginning to put the victim on the stretcher, but I failed to detect, even once, by anyone, any sense of urgency or emergency. I’ll leave the indignity of a handcuffed corpse for another time. We’ll never know whether resuscitation was or wasn’t possible, but that’s because no one even tried, (or asked anyone else if they could try). Of course, my observations might be a bit different if I were willing to unmute the sound on that video, but once was enough.
(Where I live, police trainees must have a properly issued first aid certificate, CPR and bleeding control are explicitly required, before they’re even allowed on the street under supervision. http://www.achievemore.com.au/police-officer-careers/about-you/)
@mildlymagnificent #7, that was my thought too. Recovery position might be argued if he was unconscious but breathing. But he’s not breathing, and that’s obvious to everyone. On his back, now! start CPR, now! Keep going until paramedics take over. And if paramedics see that you’re doing effective CPR, maybe they’ll tell you to keep going. So keep doing that CPR.
Hard to tell what the paramedic thought upon arrival – several cops all unable to give clear account of what his medical condition is, all of whom have clearly decided that basic life support was not something the victim would get. So the paramedic does a perfunctory check of breathing and pulse and decides it’s too much trouble to follow training.
This seems to be a chilling example of group-think.
No they won’t. The professionals don’t do it for more than a couple of minutes per person. It’s actually an extreme form of violence that’s unbelievably taxing on the person doing it. When they took over from me resuscitating my husband, the ambos rotated about every two minutes, sometimes less.
The whole objective is to crack a few ribs in order to get a “soft” chest so that the power of the thrusting of the hands is transmitted more directly to the heart. The violence is, in fact, a bit of a side issue because the person is actually already dead unless and until the CPR is successful in restoring blood flow and breathing. But it is really hard to do, the only way someone can do it without being a professional is the wonderful gift of adrenaline. But that only kicks in if you see it as an emergency. Clearly these police officers didn’t do that.
OK, surely there is severe (criminal?) negligence in not aiding a restrained and unconscious prisoner for so long? Even ignoring for a moment the questionable method of restraining him (which of course shouldn’t be ignored), they are obligated to give aid to anyone in their custody.
But was it a fistful, though? Because I thought that was considered the bare minimum
I hear 30 pieces of silver’ll do.
It is past time for the Feds to step in. If this is not enough evidence for a civil rights rights violation leading to wrongful death (I say murder)… ? There are no words,
The policeman didn’t kill Garner, although he did precipitate his death. Garner was *monstrously obese* ( that’s the term used by healthcare workers) and that condition ( he weighed 400 LBS) was probably the main factor leading to his death.
This reminds me of the death of the drag queen Divine. He, too, was monstrously obese. So much so that doctors had told him to try cand never to sleep on his back for fear that chest compression, due to his weight, would stop him from breathing. He died at 42, a combination of an enlarged heart ( due to obesity) and chest compression from sleeping on his back. He was found lying on his back.
What I find most surprising and shocking with this is the idiot shooting the video. He does nothing but film the scene accompanied by an insipid, self-righteous, self-serviong narrative. He films while the guy lays dying and does absolutely nothing to help Garner. I guess he was dreaming about becoming a U-Tube star, or something. The guy shooting the video is without doubt the most obscene and insouciant of everyone present. He badmouths the police, who have at least called for paramedics, while shooting what is for all intents and purposes a god-damned SNUFF film.
Is it any wonder the cop gives him a sarcastic wave?
How many Black males in the short time since Garner’s death have been killed by other Black males? How many drug deals gone bad resulting in deaths no one ever, EVER talks about? Why are fully 50% of homicides in The States committed by Black males between 18 and 32, a demographic that only accounts for about 4% of the country’s population? Why is this selective indignation always dependent upon the race of those deemed to be the aggressor?
I think the cops, particularly White cops, should all walk off the job for just one single day, if only to give the public an idea of what can happen when those cops are not around to “kill” Blacks…
“the idiot shooting the video. He does nothing but film the scene accompanied by an insipid, self-righteous, self-serviong narrative. He films while the guy lays dying and does absolutely nothing to help Garner. ”
Well Garner was still handcuffed & surrounded by cops whom he had just watched beat & strangle Garner to the ground – I expect that had he tried to help he would have received similar treatment for ‘aiding a suspect & interfering with an arrest’ & that he knew it.
But I suppose that you think the cop waving & acting cute was okay as long as he didn’t do ‘bunny ears to Garner for the camera.
Decker, I’m pretty sure the “main factor” was being choked the fuck out like the coroner reported. Obesity can make it hard to treat injuries, but if he hadn’t been brutalized in the first place somehow I doubt he’d have just up and died the next day. Probably could have had another couple decades. But, no, just go ahead and talk about how it was his fault for being fat and not the cop’s for not only committing unnecessary violence against him in the first place, but doing jack to fix his own fuck up by administering first aid like cops are trained to do. And thanks for implying that if cops have any beneficial effect in society that we can’t criticize their failures and recommend improvements (like, say, holding officers accountable for their actions). Whatever it takes to stroke your authority boner, I guess.
Decker, you’re a damned racist.
Seriously, you’re trying to use “black on black” crime to derail the discussion.
“How many Black males in the short time since Garner’s death have been killed by other Black males? How many drug deals gone bad resulting in deaths no one ever, EVER talks about? Why are fully 50% of homicides in The States committed by Black males between 18 and 32, a demographic that only accounts for about 4% of the country’s population? Why is this selective indignation always dependent upon the race of those deemed to be the aggressor?”
See? What does any of that have to do with the topic? Imagine the topic was cancer and you decided that we should all be focusing on heart disease because it kills more people. That example should show exactly how callous and bigoted your behavior is.
How about the fact that people of color are 21 times more likely to be shot by a cop than white people? That’s a relevant statistic.
Decker is doing the racist shuck and dive to try to deny the responsibility of the police. First a policeman chokes a man near to death for no valid reason at all, and then they don’t even bother giving him medical help while they wait for the first responders to arrive, they just stand there! These actions have nothing, NOTHING to do with Garner being “fat”, holy shit man! It’s beyond disgusting. The fact that there won’t be an indictment is obscene.
Decker,
What happened to “Those who would give up a little Freedom for a little comfort, deserve neither”?
Anyway, going from Franklin to Jefferson, I’m pretty sure the tree of Liberty is supposed be watered with the blood of tyrants, not niggers.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/05/1349673/-About-the-strange-behavior-of-officers-after-they-killed-Akai-Gurley-Tamir-Rice-and-Eric-Garner?detail=email
I think we are starting to see an end game here.
In phase one the relatives bring civil cases against the police. When these are settled out of court or go to court and the police lose we go on to phase two and a new grand jury is called.