From the Daily Show:
I really don’t know what to say. Eric Garner was basically choked to death by the police. We have a Youtube video.
Eric Garner was killed for what? The Grand Jury said to the world that it was okay to kill Mr. Garner. He was selling cigarettes without a license, so it is okay to kill him? I’m at a loss for words. There is no excuse for this type of police behavior. He was a big guy so we needed to choke him to death?
Oh, and it gets worse. There is a follow-up video. This is where Mr. Garner is down on the ground and nobody does anything. Nothing. No one takes a pulse. No one checks to see if he is breathing. No one does squat. No one calls an ambulance. No one performs CPR.
Damn, this is awful. (Personally, I couldn’t watch after the first three minutes. Garner isn’t moving and …nothing.) May God have mercy on us. This simply isn’t right. Even if you believe the Mr. Garner was a criminal and a thug, why wouldn’t we help him as he is lying lifeless on the ground?
Update – From WaPo:
There is a second Eric Garner video. (see above) It shows not the now-infamous scene that ultimately led to his death — the confrontation with New York Police Department officers, one grabbing Garner around his neck, Garner’s body thrown to the ground — but the aftermath. For seven minutes, a disgusted bystander continues to film as Garner lies, unmoving, on the sidewalk, police officers involved in the incident milling around him.
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.
LRM I’m still at loss to figure out why this man needed to be arrested. Give him a citation and move on. The arrest was simply a way of hassling the poor. He would have been arrested and processed and fined a couple of hundred dollars which he doesn’t have. He would then be back on the street trying to make even more money to pay for court costs and the like. It is crazy.