The decisions not to bring charges in the killing of two black men at the hands of white police officers have ignited a wave of public outrage and intensified a national debate about race relations and over-aggressive policing by American law enforcement.
Civil rights legislation making Americans of all colours equal in the eyes of the law may be a half-century old this year but the criminal justice system has lagged behind the law in practice and remains racially divided.
Up to 40 protesters staged a “die-in”, lying on the floor of Grand Central Terminal during evening rush hour in New York City on Wednesday. They were later joined by hundreds more marching through the streets of Manhattan, chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” in reference to what they see as the latest miscarriage of justice.
The incident, on July 17th, was captured on video and seen online around the world. Police apprehended Eric Garner (43) on a Staten Island street on suspicion of illegally selling loose cigarettes. Police officer Daniel Pantaleo (29) grabbed Mr Garner in a headlock or “chokehold”. Mr Garner, an asthmatic, gasped for air, saying repeatedly: “I can’t breathe.” He died later in the hospital.
Deliberating for less than a day, 23 grand jurors concluded on Wednesday that Mr Pantaleo should not face any charges.
This is in contrast to the view of the New York City medical examiner who concluded in August that Mr Garner died from compressions to the neck and chest and “prone positioning during physical restraint by police”. The manner of his death was homicide, the coroner said. Chokeholds have been banned by the New York police department since 1993.
The Grand Central protesters sat motionless staring at the ceiling. A lone police officer spoke calmly to several, watching to make sure they didn’t interfere with commuters rushing about. Around the station police officers stood with bundles of plastic handcuffs on their belts ready for use. They didn’t need them; elsewhere at least 83 people were arrested overnight in New York as protesters blocked streets in Manhattan.
Fresh rioting
The New York ruling came a week after another grand jury decided there was nothing criminal about another white police officer, Darren Wilson, shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown 12 times after a scuffle, and killing him in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson in Missouri in August – a decision that led to fresh rioting on the town’s battered streets.
President Barack Obama has made correcting racial imbalances in law enforcement a priority of his final two years in office. Soon after the Garner decision, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that the department of justice would investigate whether Mr Garner’s civil rights had been violated, similar to the ongoing investigation into the killing of Mr Brown.
The pattern of deaths and absence of charges confirms suspicions that police treat black Americans differently to others and get away with it.
In another police death, on November 22nd, white officer Timothy Loehmann gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was carrying a toy pistol in a playground in Cleveland, Ohio. The shooting, captured on surveillance video, showed Officer Loehmann shooting the boy within two seconds of pulling up in his car.
The department of justice said yesterday than an investigation of 600 use-of-force incidents between 2010 and 2013 found that Cleveland police engaged in “a pattern and practice of using excessive force”. The rate of police killings of African Americans has fallen by more than 70 per cent over the past half century but the risk for younger black men is still much higher than that facing white, Latino and Asian males.
An analysis by USA Today found on average 96 homicides a year in the seven years to 2012 involved a white officer killing a black person. African Americans, who make up 13 per cent of the population, account for 26 per cent of police shooting victims and are 2.8 times more likely to be killed than whites, according to the Centre on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, which examined the 4,531 killings by police between 1999 and 2011.
The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report said that police fatally shot 461 felony suspects in 2013, the highest number in two decades, amounting to 3 per cent of the 14,196 homicides committed last year. This data is incomplete, however, as some states, such as New York, the third most populated, are not required to submit “justifiable homicide data”.
Research by criminologist Philip Stinson at Bowling Green State University in Ohio found that 41 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter over on-duty shootings in the seven years to 2011. This is out of 2,718 justified homicides reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBI during that period.
In America’s “violent police subculture” jurors and judges tend to tip the balance of justice in favour of law enforcement in the case of on-duty deaths, said Dr Stinson, a former police officer and lawyer. “They are just not willing to deny the officer the benefit of the doubt for the allegations against them relating to a violent street encounter or even using force, even if it is excessive force or using guns to kill people,” he said.
