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 announced that it declined to bring federal civil rights charges against New York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who choked the life out of Eric Garner. Tomorrow marks the five year anniversary of the homicide. 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 killing about 1,100 people annually, prosecutors charge on average 7 cops a year with murder or manslaughter. About 80 officers total (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%).

Prosecutors often don’t indict because they are also law enforcement and will pay the consequences for charging one of their own. St Louis County district attorneys, the ones who mishandled the grand jury process for Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson after killing Michael Brown, Jr, joined the local police union earlier this year. Police unions donate to prosecutor races, oust prosecutors who charge cops, and condemn district attorneys who might.

Juries also sympathize with police officers who do a “tough job” everyday, despite having low on-the-job fatality rates. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, police scholar Kristian Williams found that more truck drivers, maintenance workers, and fishers 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 13,000 killer cops and 83 officers were charged, and significantly less were convicted: “In the past 13 years, only 19 officers have been convicted and most of those convictions were for lesser manslaughter offenses. Only one officer has been convicted of intentional murder during that time period.”

And when cops are convicted, they barely serve prison time. Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle spent eleven months in prison for killing Oscar Grant. NYPD officer Peter Liang will not spend a day in prison for killing Akai Gurley. After securing the conviction, the black prosecutor said that Liang was not a threat to public safety.

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

Yet it is completely understandable why families and communities still want killers cops to go prison. In a society where the options for killer cops seem like prison or nothing, prison and punishment feel like justice. Even when we know a conviction is unlikely, I cannot imagine being someone to tell a grieving parent: “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 not.

Yet deep down, many of us believe that prisons can deter police officers from violence – that if we send killer cops to prison, it warns 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 amount 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. Thus, police officers will rarely be found guilty if killing black people is part of the job, like stop and frisk, walking the beak, and jumpouts. Regular, everyday “community policing” is violent.

Rather, in these moments, I hope that we also follow 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 can drain 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 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?” There is no one answer. Mariame Kaba captured my views when she wrote about Darren Wilson’s pending non-indictment in Ferguson, “My response is always the same: I am not against indicting killer cops. I just know that indictments won’t and can’t end oppressive policing which is rooted in anti-blackness, social control and containment. Policing is derivative of a broader social justice. It’s impossible for non-oppressive policing to exist in a fundamentally oppressive and unjust society.”

In these moments, people can (and should) use their anger to rebel. Police officers must know that we will always resist the spectacular or mundane forms of violence that they inflict on our communities, or empower others to try We should protest and reject calls for peace and task forces, and the other ways that people in power waste our time and energy until they announce some future reform that won’t get us free, like body cameras or community relations boards.

The officer should be immediately fired and never allowed to work in public or private law enforcement. We need an expansion of CopWatch programs until police departments shrink. 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, multi-racial movement against the carceral state, but more broadly, against a society that uses police and prisons to manage black rebellion, oppressed people and social inequality.