The killer cop who took Eric Garner's life walks free. How do we secure justice?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/16/killer-cop-eric-garner-life-justice

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On Tuesday, the Department of Justice declined to bring federal charges against New York police department officer Daniel Pantaleo, who choked the life out of Eric Garner. Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary. This refusal of an indictment is unfortunately unsurprising. Killer cops are rarely sent to jail.

In his study on police crimes, criminologist Philip Stinson found that despite police killing about 1,100 people annually, prosecutors charge on average seven cops a year with murder or manslaughter. A total of 90 officers (out of approximately 13,000 officers who killed someone) have been charged since 2005. This figure is astounding since prosecutors secure grand jury indictments at remarkable rates, 99% for federal grand juries, and most cases end in defendant pleas (97%).

Indictments are rare. Prosecutors don’t indict because they work closely with police, or they don’t think they’ll win. Police unions donate to prosecutor races and have even organized to oust prosecutors who charge cops. Juries also sympathize with police officers who do a “tough job” every day, despite having low on-the-job death rates. More truck drivers, maintenance workers and electricians are killed every year than cops. But many juries don’t care.

After two failed attempts, Cincinnati prosecutors declined to prosecute University of Cincinnati police department officer Ray Tensing for shooting Sam DuBose in the face – on camera – because both previous trials had jurors who stated that they refuse to convict an officer. Tensing settled a civil suit for back pay and legal fees with the university for almost $350,000.

Convictions are more rare. Stinson reports that of those 90 officers charged, 16 pleaded guilty, another 16 were found guilty at trial. That’s 13,000 officers who killed someone; 32 guilty.

And when cops are convicted, they barely serve prison time. Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle spent a little over a year in jail for killing Oscar Grant. NYPD officer Peter Liang will not spend a day in prison for killing Akai Gurley. After securing the conviction, the prosecutor said that Liang made a genuine mistake and requested no prison time.

Movements cannot look to local or federal prosecutors for relief. Donald Trump’s Department of Justice did not prosecute Pantaleo, but neither did either Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch in President Obama’s justice department.

Yet it is completely understandable why families and communities want killers cops to go prison. In a society where the options for killer cops are prison or nothing, prison and punishment feel like justice. Even when we know how unlikely it is for a cop to go to prison, I cannot imagine being someone to tell a grieving mother, “I know this is hard, but we need to think about systemic change and not the individual consequences for the officer who took the life away from your child.” I could never.

Yet deep down, many of us believe that prisons can deter cops from violence – that if we send killer cops to prison, it sends a message to other potential killer cops of their fate. But more police officers have been prosecuted in the last five years than in any point in history, and the police have still killed the same number of people each year. According to some reports, the killings have increased. This logic affirms that prison can keep us safe and keep more black people alive. Cops lie, but numbers don’t.

In Ferguson, we often chanted, “Indict! Convict! Send that killer cop to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!” Myself included. Here lies a painful truth: we can’t rely on these guilty systems for our liberation.

Rather, in these moments, I hope that we follow the traditions of organizing that seek to reduce the size of police departments, officers and their capacity to be violent. All of the organizing for the unlikely prosecution of killer cops drains movements of their capacity to also organize for more transformative outcomes, like eliminating encounters between police and black people, one definite way to stop officers from killing them.

For example, Critical Resistance and Stop LAPD Spying in Oakland organizes workshops for people to set up emergency communities to rely on instead of calling 911. Organizers in Minnesota successfully stopped a local government from increasing their police department’s budget, and instead, shifted that money to communities. Organizers in Los Angeles successfully campaigned to get the school district to return military equipment to the federal government.

Reducing the overall capacity of police officers to harm does not immediately solve the question of, “What should happen when Daniel Pantaleo kills Eric Garner?” People should use their anger to rebel. We should protest and reject calls for peace and taskforces, which is how people in power waste our time and energy until they announce some future reform that won’t get us free, like body cameras or a community relations board.

The officer should be immediately fired and never allowed to work in public or private law enforcement. We need a way to keep track of him and other killer cops through programs like CopWatch. There must be radical and beautiful trauma and healing responses for those neighborhood and families who experienced the killing. People organizing in that community should work to come up with a range of responses to all violence, which are more than prison or nothing.

Most importantly, we need a democratic, multiracial movement against police, but more broadly, against a society that uses police and prisons to manage black rebellion, oppressed people, and social inequality.