In Police Violence Cases, Time Works Against Justice

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

15 July 16

 

While the nation is gripped by new police killings, hope quietly fades in the Eric Garner case

had the honor of appearing this morning on Democracy Now! with Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, on the depressing subject of the approaching anniversary of her father's killing at the hands of an NYPD officer. Her family's story is a cautionary tale.

With the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile cases still fresh in the public's mind, this might be a good moment to reflect on what tends to happen with these cases years down the line.

In researching this subject for a book, a few things have become clear. One is that unless there's video, or multiple witnesses, there's usually no consequence at all for police violence, not even on the civil side. The overwhelming majority of incidents simply disappear.

For instance, New York Inspector General Phillip Eure, who oversees the NYPD, did a study of chokehold incidents in the city two years ago.

He found that between 2009 and 2014, there had been 1,082 complaints alleging 1,128 chokeholds by NYPD officers.

Of those complaints, the Civilian Complaint Review Board fully investigated only about half, or 520 total. And of those 520 complaints, the CCRB substantiated just ten.

Eure found that in nine of the ten cases he examined, the CCRB recommended the strongest possible punishment: departmental charges. But in all nine of those cases, the cop in question ended up getting off with either no punishment at all, or a maximum of five vacation days lost. And in six of the nine cases, then-commissioner Ray Kelly personally overturned the CCRB's recommendation.

Essentially, out of more than 1,000 chokehold complaints, roughly 99 percent of the cases simply disappeared. Of the remaining 1 percent that actually made it all the way through the disciplinary process, nine out of ten ended with either no punishment or a maximum of five days' lost vacation. Another officer died before his case could be resolved.

In five years, the department had never once really punished an officer for using a chokehold.

The Garner case might have just as easily disappeared into that grim statistical picture. Reports have surfaced that the official police account of the incident didn't even mention a chokehold, saying only that two officers took Garner to the ground "by his arms." Minus the famed video taken by civilian Ramsey Orta, the world might never have known what happened that day.

But even in cases where there is video and/or some other kind of indisputable evidence, these cases rarely end in a way that the families would consider just. Police officers are rarely indicted, much less convicted, and families are rarely provided with even the most basic answers. The families sometimes receive settlements, but that's it. That's the political calculus now: money, but no change and no reform.

Two years into the Garner case, this pattern has played out more or less exactly. The family was granted a $5.9 million settlement a year ago. But the city has dug in and refused to budge at all on a whole range of other issues, from unsealing the grand jury testimony to releasing any information about possible abuse complaints in the file of Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who placed Garner in a chokehold.

The latter fight, over the information in Pantaleo's CCRB file, has been going on for nearly a year and a half.

Way back in December 2014, a few weeks after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo, the Legal Aid Society submitted a Freedom of Information Law request to the CCRB.

The group asked the agency to disclose information about Officer Pantaleo's complaint history: the number of complaints made against him, how many of those complaints were substantiated, and a series of other questions.

The CCRB told the Legal Aid Society to stuff it. It cited a series of court cases to deny the requests, including Daily Gazette Co. v. City of Schenectady, which concerns a bunch of goofball off-duty cops in upstate New York who in 1997 pelted a civilian's car with eggs while on the way back from a bachelor party.

In that case, two local newspapers tried to get information about the incident via a FOIL request. Citing section 50-a of the New York State Civil Rights code, the court held that the records were exempt from FOIL because "all personnel records used to evaluate performance" of police were to be considered "confidential" and "could not be released without the express written consent" of the officers.

This preposterous loophole means anything that the government deems "personnel records used to evaluate performance" of police can't be released unless the officers themselves personally approve.

Citing this and other cases, the CCRB said any request about Pantaleo's history amounted to an "unreasonable invasion of privacy."

Legal Aid fought back, formally petitioning the court on February 17, 2015, to order the release of a summary of Pantaleo's file. They were not even asking to hear the full stories behind each case. The main piece of information they were after was how many complaints against Pantaleo had been substantiated by the CCRB — not even gory details, just a number. Given how many hurdles a complaint had to go through to be substantiated by the CCRB, how high a number could that be, anyway?

The CCRB responded that the release of even that much information would be "inherently stigmatizing and subject to abuse."

Pantaleo argued to the court through his attorney that he had already suffered hardship and threats because the press had published information about one of his CCRB cases.

A judge named Alice Schlesinger wasn't impressed. She didn't think CCRB records were Pantaleo's problem. Without passing judgment on Pantaleo's actions in the Garner case, she noted it was likely that "any adverse reactions expressed toward Mr. Pantaleo" would "have their roots in the video of that incident, which speaks for itself."

So the judge ordered that the CCRB release the summary. Coincidentally, that order came on July 17th of last year, exactly a year after Garner's death.

Both the city and Pantaleo appealed, however, and the case has been tied up ever since. It will be a surprise if it's resolved anytime soon. Very long stretches of waiting, piled upon more stretches of waiting, are another consistent feature of these cases.

Erica Garner filed her own FOIL request last year. She'd watched as police union chief Pat Lynch issued a full-throated defense of the man who'd killed her father, in a rant reporters sometimes colloquially deride as the "literally-an-Eagle-Scout speech."

"He's a model of what we want a police officer to be," said Lynch. "He's a mature, mature police officer, motivated by serving the community. He literally is an Eagle Scout." Lynch added that Pantaleo had had "very few" citizen complaints against him in his career.

What did Lynch mean by "very few" complaints? What had Pantaleo done before?

Erica Garner filed a FOIL request, asking for information about Pantaleo's history. But at virtually the same moment when the city comptroller's office was deciding how many millions of dollars to offer her family in a civil settlement, other city offices were clamping down and drawing a line in the sand, refusing to tell her family anything at all about the history of the man who'd killed Eric Garner.

The city denied Erica's request, using language similar to the arguments the CCRB had thrown at Legal Aid.

Releasing the information requested, the city told Erica, would constitute an "unwarranted invasion of privacy," and "could endanger the life or safety of any person."

As Erica mentioned this morning on Democracy Now!, these answers came as a shock to her. Her request was an "unwarranted" invasion of privacy? Her father had been killed by a police officer with a history of abuse incidents. What would have constituted a "warranted" request?

And why is there an expectation of privacy surrounding the work history of a public employee like a police officer? Why should what a police officer does at work on behalf of the public ever be considered private? The same goes for a politician, or tollbooth operator, or anyone who works for the government, for that matter.

In brutality cases like the choking of Eric Garner or the shootings of Alton Sterling or Philando Castile, there is often an enormous amount of public scrutiny in the immediate days and weeks after the incident.

But often, some of the more egregious behavior takes place months and years later, when the cameras have moved on. These cases die slow, painful deaths in windowless bureaucracies over long periods of time. Something always comes into play — some weird bureaucratic detour or legal loophole — that keeps bad police out of jail, and families and the public in the dark.

It's important to pay attention in the beginning. But it's just as important later on.

Trump on Nuclear Weapons: “By Whatever Means Necessary”

By Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News

15 July 16

 

tarting 32 years ago Donald Trump has spoken publicly about nuclear weapons much more and much more alarmingly than Hillary Clinton. During the present presidential campaign the candidates have almost totally avoided and ignored – an ominous and dreadful concord of denial and silence – this, the only “issue” that rivals climate change in its threat to the fate of life on earth. In contrast, though, Trump, in his campaign, has been showing his attitudes and some of his thinking on the subject. He has been brooding about nuclear weapons during much of his adult life.

Trump believes nuclear weapons will certainly be used again. He fears the proliferation of heads of state who are mentally off and will use them against us. In the 1980s he said that the deterrence that works with the U.S. vs. Russia wouldn’t work with, in his example, India v. Pakistan. He has contemplated the U.S. bombing nuclear weapons plants in foreign nations. Three decades ago he revealed a hope and plan he had to be the chief negotiator for the U.S. with the USSR. “The Big Two,” as he said, would plot and act together, we with trade power and they with "their powers of retaliation," to coerce or force other nations to abandon their nuclear weapons so that “[b]etween those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries.”

Trump and Russia’s President Putin have now struck up a warm alliance through the media.

As President Johnson once exclaimed angrily to me over dinner in the White House in 1967, “I’m the one who has to mash the button!” If Trump is nominated and elected, for four or eight years he will be the one and only American whom we have trusted with total deciding power and control over the launch and detonation, or not, of our country’s nuclear weapons, almost 5,000 of which are kept night and day on hair-trigger “launch on alert” by our military fellow Americans at airbases and in submarines and silos.

Gorbachev, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush achieved treaty agreements that reduced the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals by about 85%, but our country and Russia together still own about 90% of all the omni-potent nuclear weapons that are left on the earth. Any one or a small swarm of these shiny phallus-like atom-exploders, on command by the president into his always-with-and-near-him “football” of nuclear codes and commands, can kill and maim the people and destroy the existence of any city or nation on earth.

The second Cold War and a new nuclear arms race have begun since Russia annexed a nearby island and moved militarily into Ukraine, and the U.S. and NATO, breaking a U.S. promise under the first Bush, have moved troops and nuclear-weapons equipment into nations smack-dab up against the eastern border of Russia. The new Putin-era arms-and-H-Bombs race also entails most notably China and England.

While “Russia” was still the dictatorial and communist USSR locked with the U.S. in the mass-overkill first H-Bomb race, we and they very nearly fell into a potentially life-ending nuclear war. Donald Trump, then in his late 30s, had been nurturing a notion, an idea in fond prospect, that he become the principal U.S. negotiator with the USSR and that the two countries work together to strip lesser nations of their nuclear weapons, leaving them and us astride the world unchallengeable. He had been thinking about this for some time, and his “good friend” and adviser Roy Cohn (famous as Senator Joe McCarthy’s sidekick during McCarthy’s anti-communist crusades) told him that his forthcoming interview with reporter Lois Romano in 1984 was just the time to reveal his thoughts.

He was 38 then, already rich and famous. Romano, after the interview, wrote about “his fantasy of becoming the U.S. negotiator on nuclear arms limitations with the Soviets.... He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets. He wants to be the negotiator.” While acknowledging that someone else might be chosen, she reported, “He would know what to ask the Russians for, he says.” Quickly he would learn about nuclear missiles: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is about missiles…. I think I know most of it already. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation…. You know who already wants me to do this? Roy…. I’d do it in a moment.”

Three years after that, Ron Rosenbaum (who is the author of an insiders’ book on nuclear-war thinking in Israel, How the End Begins) opened one of his magazine pieces, “Donald Trump with his finger on the nuclear trigger…. China yes? Moscow no? Donald Trump with the power to destroy life on earth.” In Trump Tower three decades ago Rosenbaum had learned from Trump, in his office, of his special interest in the subject. “... he confided to me he was talking to ‘people in Washington,’ ‘even the White House,’” and while they were talking Trump took a (“probably rearranged”) call from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. “‘I won’t be nuking anyone,’” Rosenbaum quoted Trump, then adding last March, “He didn’t sound eager to pull the trigger…. There had to be a deal!”

Trump denigrated President Reagan’s negotiations for arms control treaties with Soviet premier Gorbachev. He had been told by his uncle, Dr. John Trump, a scientist-professor at MIT, that a few years back “only a few brains in the world” comprehended nuclear technology, but now thousands and thousands do and “someday it’ll be like making a bomb in the basement of your house…. very frightening.” Trump had heard, he said, from a pilot of Libyan Quadaffi’s that the dictator there was “a total schizo…. He’d get into a plane, he’d scream, shout, slap people. He was crazy. You never knew. Trigger-happy.” Rosenbaum reported in 1987: “Trump foresees a situation soon when such hair-trigger heads of state will have their hands on multiple nuclear triggers.” He told the reporter this was “the” great problem of the world.

As the pair approached the iron gate of Club 21, Rosenbaum asked why there was little action against such proliferation.

“People don’t believe the inevitable,” Trump replied. “You know … it’s always going to happen to the other guy.” Over the writer’s beer and Trump’s Virgin Mary the sipping real estate tycoon berated U.S. negotiators for thinking only about the U.S. and the USSR when France was “openly and blatantly selling nuclear technology … to anyone and it’s a disgrace.”

In his writing then, coming to Trump’s thinking of bombing suspected nuclear weapons facilities, Ron Rosenbaum now as it were took the floor:

So what’s the solution? I ask him. How do you get the French to stop, how do you get French technology out of the hands of the Pakistanis at this point?

“I think you have to come down on them very hard economically or whatever way,” Trump says. “I think the solution is largely economic. Because there are so many of these countries that are so fragile and we have a vast power that’s never been used. They depend on us for food, for medical supplies. And I would never even suggest using it except on this issue. But this issue supercedes all other things.”

He pauses.

“I guess the easy thing would be to say you go in and clean it out.”

“Like the Israelis did with the Iraqi plant?”

“I don’t necessarily want to advocate that publicly because it comes off radical.

“And you know, without a lot of discussion prior to saying that, it sounds very foolish and that’s why I get very concerned about discussing it at all.”

Trump continued that most U.S. negotiators are long-term bureaucrats who don’t get the deals done and that the masters of dealmaking are “only a roomful … in the whole country.” People from Harvard say a deal is dead. “I go in and make the deal … better than they could have.” He said it was “now or never” and the people in Washington were not getting the deal done.

Rosenbaum asked why others don’t feel his urgency. Trump then clearly declared his passionate and potentially momentous conviction, which he has expressed again during his presidential campaign, that nuclear bombs will be used again. This belief might well affect a president’s actions in a perceived or actual nuclear crisis between or among nations.

“Those people think that because we have it and the Russians have it, nobody will ever use it because they’re assuming everybody’s not necessarily mad…. They don’t see Quaddafi as the psycho he is.… I mean, what if he’s got the bomb and something happens like the time we shot down two of his planes. And he’s enraged and he can’t see straight and he’s got 20 missiles pointed at the United States. Washington, I mean, do you think there’s a chance he won’t press the button?”

So, Rosenbaum asked at the rolling top of the 20th century nuclear arms race, what is the Trump deal?

“It’s a deal with the Soviets,” Trump replied. “We approach them on this basis: We both recognize the nonproliferation treaty’s not working, that half a dozen countries are on the brink of getting a bomb. Which can only cause trouble for the two of us. The deterrence of mutual assured destruction that prevents the United States and the USSR from nuking each other won’t work on the level of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange. Or a madman dictator with a briefcase-bomb team. The only answer is for the Big Two to make a deal now to step in and prevent the next generation of nations about to go nuclear from doing so. By whatever means necessary.”

The only now-declared candidate to become the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States next week in Cleveland continued 29 years ago:

“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries. So we should use our power of economic retaliation and they use their powers of retaliation and between the two of us we will prevent the problem from happening.

“Maybe we should offer them something. I’m saying you start off as nicely as possible. You apply as much pressure as necessary until you achieve the goal. You start off telling them, ‘Let’s get rid of it.’ If that doesn’t work you then start cutting off aid. And more aid and then more. You do whatever is necessary so these people will have riots in the street, so they can’t get water. So they can’t get Band-Aids, so they can’t get food. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to do it – the people, the riots.”

And, Rosenbaum asked, what about the French? “I’d come down on them so hard,” Trump said. “… if they didn’t give it up— … If they didn’t give it up— and I don’t mean reduce it, and I don’t mean stop, because stopping doesn’t mean anything. I mean get it out. If they didn’t, I would bring sanctions against that country that would be so strong, so unbelievable …”

Trump’s recent flattery of Russia’s President Putin and Putin’s reciprocating de facto endorsement of Trump as the best candidate for U.S. President thus brings closer to reality Trump’s dream of being the chief U.S. negotiator with the Russians, which as president he of course in fact would be.

The author wishes to thank Jeffrey Lewis on FP Online for assembling the reporting of Lois Romano in the Washington Post in 1984 and Ron Rosenbaum in the magazine Manhattan in 1987, reprinted in Slate last March 1.

[Editor’s note: A second report from Dugger, on Trump on nuclear weapons during the current presidential campaign, follows shortly.]

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Ronnie Dugger won the 2011 George Polk career award in journalism. He founded the Texas Observer, has written biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, a book on Hiroshima and one on universities, many articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, and other periodicals, and is now writing a book for new thinking about nuclear war. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.