Last week we on the right saw the danger inherent in letting the outrage dictate the facts for us. It has barely been a few months since the shooting that left Michael Brown dead, police officer Darren Wilson ruined, a city reduced to ashes, and an entire nation on edge.
The disaster that has been Ferguson, we have often noted, could have been avoided if more people were willing to look at the facts of the situation rather than simply reacting on raw emotion or unverified narrative. (It would also have helped a great deal if Governor Jay Nixon had exercised any degree of competence at any point throughout, but that’s a discussion for another day.) We have argued at length the ludicrous nature of claims that Michael Brown was shot because he stole cigars, pointing out the crucial missing step in the sequence of events: he assaulted a police officer.
And then, within days of the grand jury decision not to indict Wilson (which we applauded, and rightly so), the decision on the Eric Garner case came from a New York grand jury – and conservatives lost their ever-loving minds.
Admittedly, the case was quite different. Eric Garner was guilty essentially of tax evasion – of selling loose cigarettes (“loosies”), a method of avoiding the cost prohibitive “sin tax” placed on full packs of cigarettes by the state of New York. While he did verbally and physically resist arrest simply by trying to avoid being restrained by officers, he never moved to assault any of them or made a grab for one of their weapons. Back up and multiple witnesses were present on the scene prior to and during the event, and someone even recorded everything on video.
So what happened to drive a wedge into the collective right over this case? The video was a major factor. The video combined with the fact that the term “choke hold” was bandied about recklessly by people who had no understanding of the terminology made it very difficult for the truth to come to light. Many conservatives had made the point during the Ferguson discussions that there were real cases of police brutality and racist actions (and there are), but that Michael Brown’s case was a poor example of that (and it is). Many of them saw the video of Eric Garner’s arrest as a gift wrapped example of just such a case, and once they had hitched themselves to it were reluctant to let it go.
The reality is simple: if one is subjected to a true “choke hold,” one cannot breathe or they quickly pass out. If one cannot breathe, one cannot speak. The simple fact that Garner is heard on video multiple times objecting that he cannot breathe is proof that he was not, in fact, being choked. He may well have been feeling difficulty breathing, but that was more likely related to his own previously diagnosed conditions and adrenaline do to exertion. The officer did not even effectively apply a Rear Naked Choke (RNC), a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu submission hold designed to compress the carotid artery long enough to bring the subject to the ground. A RNC has no effect whatsoever on the subject’s ability to breathe, and simply cause them to lose consciousness for a few seconds. For a RNC to kill someone, it must be held for nearly a full minute. Garner was released within a few seconds.
But the biggest problem on the right regarding Eric Garner was the number of people who conflated a fundamental disagreement with the legitimacy of the law broken by Eric Garner with a disagreement with the police officer who was charged with enforcing that law.
The law Eric Garner broke was stupid. It essentially taxes people twice for the same item. The retailer pays a tax on the bulk cigarettes, and then is forced to charge another tax on each individual pack as he resells them. Selling loose cigarettes individually allows customers to avoid that second tax. Add to that the fact that the tax in question only applies to cigarettes – effectively a “sin tax” – and it becomes clear why conservatives would have a problem with the law on its own merits.
The state of New York is currently using their police force as a team of revenue collectors with guns. Instead of making illegal sale of loose cigarettes a civil offense – like a traffic violation – that would result in a ticket being issued, they have not only criminalized the action but increased the number of officers on the street to deal with this problem. There is one legitimate defense of this action – when retailers sell loose cigarettes, there is a potential danger that they will sell them to minors as well.
Most libertarians and conservatives have major problems with both of those things: laws that impose double taxation – especially “sin taxes” – and police directed revenue collection. Many of them felt the same indignation they imagined Eric Garner felt when he was to be arrested – again – for violating a law that they felt was a gross intrusion of individual liberty. They identified with Garner. They wanted him to resist, because they wanted the ridiculous nature of the law he broke to be highlighted.
The problem with that is that when anyone resists arrest, the police are charged with gaining control of the situation. It doesn’t matter what the original law broken was. The police officers cannot – and should not – be expected to evaluate the philosophical merits of the law in real time when being confronted by a belligerent suspect. They cannot assume that a suspect who has never been violent will never become so, and they cannot assume that a suspect who has never tried to grab a weapon will never do so.
At the end of the day, in order for an indictment to be warranted, the grand jury would have had to find that not only did officer Pantaleo like cause Eric Garner’s death, but that he did so by intentionally taking an action that he knew was likely to cause grievous injury or even death. It is no surprise, after a review of the facts, that they did not find either of those things to be the case.
So how do we prevent avoidable deaths like Eric Garner’s? Contest the overreaching laws that put people’s livelihoods at stake for the sake of revenue. Contest the policies that allow police officers to become tax collectors. And by all means, contest the politicians who write these policies.
