Eric Garner and the Cops

People in New York are protesting in the streets after  the decision not to prosecute the cops who killed Eric Garner. They are right to do so.  This case does not have the ambiguity of the more publicized killing in Ferguson, Missouri. The event  was recorded  on video. Garner was not doing anything  actually wrong or harmful to anyone.  His so-called crime was selling untaxed cigarettes, and a group of cops jumped him, choked him as he shouted he could not breathe, and killed him. As a writer at Reason magazine said, harshly but accurately, he was in  a sense killed for city of New York revenue enhancement.

 

One can agree with conservative apologists for the police that Garner made a pragmatic mistake when he resisted (though it is easy to see how a person fed up with continued bullying and harassment might put pragmatism aside and imprudently but bravely stand up for himself) without thinking that absolves the cops who started the trouble by hassling Garner for no good reason and then brutalized and killed him.  It is usually imprudent  to resist the demands of armed and dangerous cops just as in a police state it is usually a bad idea to try to run when the Gestapo officers surround you and say “papiere, bitte”, but such practical considerations miss the point.   In a free society there are  no Gestapos, and the cops do not have the authority  to accost or abuse  or kill citizens who are not doing anyone harm.  America is far from  a police state, but neither is it a fully free society. It is somewhere in between, and since 2001 it has moved in the wrong direction.

As a start toward correcting  things,  Americans need to oppose and reverse the militarization of the police, the expansion of police powers  at all levels of government, and  the tendency to give enforcers of laws and rules  too much authority and leeway and to fail to hold them accountable for their misdeeds. It will not be easy. Too  many leftists tend to ignore or excuse abuses and  thuggery when the enforcers are employed by the federal government or the victims are people they hold in contempt (such as a Randy Weaver),  while too many conservatives tend to ignore or excuse abuses and thuggery when the enforcers are employed by local governments or  the victims are people they hold in contempt (such as an Eric Garner).   Both need to realize that dangerous police power is dangerous, and their friends will not always be the ones wielding it.