Heavy Policing

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WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 26-28, 2014

"Broken Windows" Policing and the Violation of Civil Liberties

Is Zero-Tolerance Policing Worth Chokehold Deaths?

by ROBERT WILBUR and MARTHA ROSENBERG

Many in the U.S. were horrified at the death of Eric Garner, a 300-plus pound, asthmatic, diabetic African-American man with sleep apnea and six children last summer. Garner was arrested for selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street and when he resisted being handcuffed, an arresting officer applied a chokehold. Though the maneuver is theoretically forbidden in the police manual of procedure, it brought Garner to the pavement, whereupon other police piled in, compressing his chest. A bystander filmed the whole episode on a cell phone and Garner can be heard crying “I can’t breathe” eleven times. He died shortly thereafter at Richmond University Medical Center.

The Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City, in a signal act of courage because the office must deal with the police constantly, declared the death a “homicide.” Garner, 43, was killed by “the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police,” said medical examiner spokeswoman Julie Bolcer.

Then, earlier this month, a grand jury decided to not indict the police officer who killed Garner, igniting tempers and linking Garner’s death to that of Michael Brown’s. Since the two deaths and grand jury acquittals, the issues of abusive police tactics and the use of military style weapons by police forces have been forced on the national stage.

When the chockhold death occurred, Mayor De Blasio postponed a vacation to conduct some damage control over the disturbing incident. Meanwhile, Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, dismissed the medical examiner’s report as “political” and commented on the video that, “sometimes force is necessary, but it’snever pretty to watch.”

Heavy policing for minor crimes as selling cigarettes began in the late 1980s after the Central Park jogger case. While New Yorkers, like any city dwellers, always had a fear of crime, those fears reached a crucible in 1989 when a young woman stockbroker jogging in Central Park was assaulted, raped and left for dead. The woman, later identified as Trisha Meili, had been a vice president at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers. Neurosurgeons at Metropolitan Hospital were able to restore her cognitive functions after the attack but her acuity with the financial markets and ability to be a stockbroker were forever lost.

At about the same time that Meili was attacked, some 30 teenage ruffians were tearing through the park on a night of “wilding”–beating joggers and bicyclists, smashing car windows along Central Park West, and in general wreaking havoc on anyone with the misfortune to cross their path. “Wilding” was a term to become a new part of the American lexicon.

Five of the wilders were seized by the police and, not surprisingly in light of the climate of fear, charged with the attack on Trisha Meili. Years later, after the five had served full prison terms as adults, it would turn out that they were framed by the police and the district attorney’s office and a $41 million settlement is now underway.

Even with the wilders behind bars, fear of violent crime ate away at New Yorkers who demanded more Draconian policing measures. Such measures arrived in 1992 with New York’s new mayor David Dinkins, a gentle, soft-spoken African-American man and ex-Marine and his no-nonsense police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. Dinkins’ and Kelly’s solution: breed respect for the law by enforcing all the laws on the books, no matter how seemingly trivial, such as smoking marijuana in public, petty drug dealing or even jumping a subway turnstile. “Squeegee men” were even targeted.

Such letter-of-the-law police work is also called “zero-tolerance” policing and is based on the “broken windows” theory of crime which postulates that crime flourishes when apathy for enforcement of minor laws is perceived. For example, when an abandoned automobile with no license plates and its hood up was left in a Bronx neighborhood, its radiator and battery were taken in a short period of time and windows smashed and upholstery ripped, reported Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, in 1969…

Read more at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/26/is-zero-tolerance-policing-worth-chokehold-deaths/