Charles Pierce: The Eric Garner Case And Police Lawlessness

[muriel_volestrangler]

Are we still having the national conversation? And what, pray tell, is it about now? Race? Fear? Trigger-happy policin'? (By the way, the phrase comes from a Marvin Gaye song that was released on September 16, 19freaking71.) The decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for anything in the videotaped strangulation death of Eric Garner seems to have rocked even those people who are completely convinced that Darren Wilson had no other good option but to exorcise the demon that was Michael Brown.

(Chief among these is the formidably awful Joe Scarborough, who is terribly upset by this police killing and would like you to know that his opinions on police killings are completely color-blind, that he is a brave truth-teller who examines all the evidence and bases his opinions on the empirical facts of each case -- Michael Schiavo just had a good laugh, by the way -- and that selling loose cigarettes should not be a capital crime in the way that shoplifting cigarillos is, and that Ralph Waldo Emerson and he agree totally on the subject so shut up.)
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And then there is the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was passed by Congress in 1994. This law requires that local police forces report to the Attorney General and to the Department Of Justice all charges of the use of excessive force by their offices so that the DOJ can publish an annual report. The local chiefs of police simply have blown this off, which is, I would remind you, against the law. (A blogger named Jim Fisher has tried to keep a thorough account of these incidents.) The king irony of the whole thing is that the Act itself was a get-tough measure that also created 60 new federal death-penalty categories. The assault weapons ban was part of it, as was the Violence Against Women Act. The reporting requirement was added in the wake of the beating of Rodney King, which also was on videotape, and which also changed, well, nothing.

This flaunting of both departmental rules and federal law on the part of local police departments is the clearest indication that they consider themselves beyond the law they are sworn to enforce. And why shouldn't they? The systems by which they are supposed to be held accountable are intolerably weak, where they are not broken altogether. Where are the stiff fines for the police chiefs who ignore the requirements of federal law? What good are departmental sanctions when officers get filmed blithely using techniques that those sanctions supposedly banned two decades ago? It has become plain that, in far too many cases and in far too many places, local police departments have made of themselves what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 concerning the use of British troops to enforce the law in the colonies -- "independent of and superior to the civil power." Once there, these departments operate with impunity according to the informal dynamics of American law and American justice that were born when the country was. And, among other things, that means more Eric Garners and Michael Browns and Tamir Rices, the latter a 12-year old shot down by a cop in Cleveland who'd been hired anyway despite the fact that responsibilities of being a cop in a suburb were too much for him. Makes me wanna holler, too.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Eric_Garner_Case_And_Police_Lawlessness??src=rss

[Blue_Tires]

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