Eric Garner
Media meme: Innocent, generous, congenial, "neighborhood peacemaker", father of six children (grandfather of three), was attacked, choked out, and killed by the evil NYPD for the crime of walking while black as part of "stop and frisk".
Truth: Stop and frisk was ended long ago because it was too effective. Tobacco smuggler (selling illegal untaxed cigarettes), and repeat violent felon (30 arrests including assault and grand larceny), was in poor health and resisting arrest. He was on bail for smuggling and illegal selling, driving without a license, marijuana possession, identity theft/fraud (false impersonation), and that's what the cops were taking him in for. He didn't die of Daniel Pantaleo's chokehold, he died in the ambulance that the police called for him, after had a heart attack violently fighting with the cops. Either his life was given up over his own stupidity, or over the lefts war on tobacco. The race baiters blamed a racist system, instead of admitting any truth or culpability by Eric Garner, or the law they supported that empowered the cops to arrest him in the fist place.
Obama jumps in, does nothing to correct the record, magnifies the problem, encourages the violence and frustration felt over black thugs being killed for resisting arrest, and being obese and in bad health. He sicks the DOJ on the case, then silently, nothing comes of it, because they knew all along that this was an unfortunate consequence of over zealous tax laws (local cigarette taxes making dug/tobacco smuggling profitable), and normal arrest procedures meaning that if you fight and have a heart condition, you might die.
Factoids
Facts I've pointed out that only angered the delusional who wanted to believe the racist myth:
- Garner was resisting an arrest for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes
- Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik: "You cannot resist arrest. If Eric Garner did not resist arrest... he wouldn't be dead today." "Regardless of what the arrest was for, the officers don't have the ability to say, 'Well, this is a minor arrest, so we're just going to ignore you.'"
- The video of the July 17 incident clearly shows Garner, an African-American, swatting away the arms of a white officer seeking to take him into custody, telling him: "Don't touch me!"
- Garner, 43, had history of more than 30 arrests dating back to 1980, on charges including assault and grand larceny.
- Garner was out on bail after being charged with illegally selling cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession and false impersonation.
- Garner was 6' 3", 350 pounds, suffered from a number of health problems, including heart disease, severe asthma, diabetes, obesity, and sleep apnea
- Garner did not die at the scene of the confrontation. He suffered cardiac arrest in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and was pronounced dead about an hour later
- Chokeholds by police are prohibited in New York City. But between 2009 and mid-2014, the Civilian Complaint Review Board received 1,128 chokehold allegations. It's hard to take someone down and restrain them, without arms going around necks and chests, and many takedown techniques involve wrapping your arms around a person in the same way.
- The 23-member grand jury included nine non-white jurors who found Officer Pantaleo not guilty of the crime that 'he knew there was a "substantial risk" that Garner would have died due to the takedown' -- and of course there are many takedowns and very few deaths.
- Ramsey Orta, who shot the much-viewed videotape of the encounter, was indicted on weapons charges (he slipped a .25-caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice's waistband outside a New York Hotel).
