The police officer who killed Eric Garner five years ago has been dismissed from the force, and from everything I've seen about this tragic story he should've been. The officer's name was Daniel Pantaleo and the death occurred as he was trying to arrest Garner, a black man who was illegally selling cigarettes and refusing to cooperate.
Officer Pantaleo and Garner grappled during the confrontation and Pantaleo applied a choke hold the use of which, according to the police training manual, should have been terminated as soon as Garner was subdued. It was not. Garner protested that he couldn't breath, suffered a heart attack and died.
Garner should not have resisted, but Pantaleo had subdued him, had backup to assist him and was in violation of official procedures by unnecessarily continuing the deadly chokehold. Although I generally support the police as far as possible, and although I recognize that they have a very difficult job dealing with recalcitrants like Garner, I have to ask how I'd feel about what happened if Garner had been my own father or my son.
Applying that test, I have no doubt that I would think that but for the officer's lack of disciplined response my loved one would still be alive.
Having said all that, I also have to wonder what the motive of the national media has been in giving this case and others like it such prominence. Is the media trying deliberately to provoke racial antagonism and bitterness in this country?
The reason I ask is because there was another case of an officer killing an already subdued miscreant four years ago that no media people outside the local area showed any interest in at all, and in that case the officer wasn't even fired.
In the incident to which I refer the officer actually shot and killed the man being arrested as he lay on the ground, immobilized by the officer's taser (there's body cam video at the link for those who can bear to watch), so why have you probably never heard about this tragedy? Why didn't Al Sharpton rush to get himself in front of all the cameras on behalf of this victim?
Here's a possible answer: The officer was a white female, the man she killed was a white male fleeing from a traffic stop. No racial angle there. Nothing to inflame passions and stir up civil unrest. Nothing to stoke peoples' hatred for each other. Nothing to fit the narrative of "racist" cops. Ergo, this is a non-story as far as our national media are concerned.
What other reason could there be for the constant publicity for the Eric Garner death and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, both of which involved the deaths of black men at the hands of white officers, and the total media indifference toward the case in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania?
Little wonder the national media is held in such contempt by so many Americans.