Analysis: For Blacks and Latinos, a Police Officer’s Indictment Isn’t Enough
New York police officer Peter Liang, 27, on Wednesday pleaded not guilty to a manslaughter charge in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man last November. That man, Akai Gurley, was later described by Police Commissioner William J. Bratton as “totally innocent” after details of the incident went public. Liang, who’d been on the force barely 18 months, was on patrol with another novice officer on the night of Nov. 20. They walked down a darkened stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, when Liang’s gun went off. The bullet reportedly ricocheted down the stairwell, mortally wounding Gurley, who had been making his way up the stairs with his girlfriend.
Bratton went on to call the shooting an “unfortunate accident,” but it placed the beleaguered department under a mountain of scrutiny. Gurley’s death happened within the context of an often painful national debate about the over-policing of predominantly black and Latino communities. That same month, a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to indict former Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black teen, whose death led to months of sustained national protests. Also that month, a New York City grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choke-hold death of Eric Garner, a 42-year-old black man.
In the eyes of many black activists who had taken to the streets with the rallying call of “black lives matter,” the failure of the American criminal justice system to hold few people accountable for the deaths of unarmed black civilians was proof that even New York City’s progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio—elected on a platform of police reform—and the nation’s first black president had done little to deal with the over-policing of black communities.
In New York City, that over-policing had touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of mostly young black and Latino residents. In 2002, police made fewer than 100,000 stops. But by 2011, that number had skyrocketed to just under 700,000. One in five people stopped by the department in 2011 was a teenager between the ages of 14 and 18. Eighty-six percent of those teens were black or Latino, mostly boys.
Garner’s case was particularly indicative of the dynamic that had long played out between police and communities of color. He had been arrested dozens of times for minor offenses and on the day of his death had been stopped by officers for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. In a video of Garner’s fatal encounter that later went viral, his frustration is palpable: “Every time you see me, you want to mess with me,” he told officers. “I’m tired of it. It stops today…. I’m minding my business, officer. I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. Please, please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”
But those officers did touch Garner, wrestling him to the ground and choking him despite his repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe.” The idea of penalizing minor crimes, supposedly to prevent more serious ones, is known as the “broken windows” theory of policing. It is, in part, what led Liang and his partner to that darkened stairwell in Brooklyn—and, ultimately, part of a strategy of flooding poor black communities with rookie officers.
Liang may or may not be convicted in Gurley’s death, but this much is clear: Deadly police policies are the real culprit. True accountability lies in institutional change of the NYPD—ending broken windows policing and engaging with local communities through foot patrols. So often, residents encounter police only during arrests. It would also help to stop flooding working-class black and Latino communities with novice police officers. The bottom line: The NYPD must serve residents, not kill them.
Original article from TakePart
