Eric Garner wasn’t much of a criminal kingpin—an affable cigarette hustler who peddled tax-free cartons of smokes and “loosies” from his chosen corner on Bay Street in Staten Island, New York. He liked it that way (“Felony money for misdemeanor time,” he called his chosen hustle). That low profile might have led the 43-year-old man’s killing at the hands of the NYPD on July 17, 2014, to have gone unnoticed by many outside of Tompkinsville Park. Instead, an observer, Ramsey Orta, videotaped it and turned it over to the New York Daily News. The footage soon went viral—countless millions watched as police officer Daniel Pantaleo held Garner in a chokehold and pinned him down on the concrete. Garner kept gasping the words “I can’t breathe” until he died.
What inspired you to write about the Garner case?
There is a lot of drama in this book, even though we know the simple version of this story and saw Garner die on video with our own eyes.
We were told in the media that he was arrested for selling cigarettes. But that’s not exactly what happened—it was a lieutenant who drove by that park in the morning who probably saw Garner. Having already been yelled at because the block looked unpleasant in Comsat meetings, two dingbat detectives were told to go back and pick [Garner] up. They were probably ordered to arrest him regardless of what he was doing. So all this is more complicated than a 140-character summation of these stories. To me, it was an exercise in the limitations of Twitter-age journalism.
The metaphor is big and clumsy, and it’s not exactly subtle, but it definitely holds. He was being squeezed from all sides. He was not safe on the street from either people on the street or from the police. His health was a problem. He was having money issues. He didn’t have a stable place to live. And he was just kind of constantly hustling to find a little bit of room for himself, and it just didn’t pan out. And in the end he literally had no place to go.
So that’s a big problem for people to get past intellectually when they’re thinking about this stuff: It’s bad if you live in one of these neighborhoods and get thrown against the wall 40 or 50 times a year, but the trade-off is I get to go shopping in Times Square and feel safe. But I don’t necessarily think that’s true, and I think a lot of cops don’t really believe it either. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to talk to a lot of cops who were willing to speak on the record for this book, but I think most of them feel the same way: the job sucks now. The stat-chasing aspect of it, the constant shaking people down for minor violations—they don’t want to be doing that shit. They want to be, you know, busting real criminals. There’s an argument to be made that broken windows isn’t what was behind the drop in crime.
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