To paraphrase what one of our Apollo astronauts said: We have a problem. Along with the tragic events in Ferguson, Mo., the death of Eric Garner in New York after a chokehold was put on him by police is both a tragedy and an outrage. In the New York case, based on publicly available tapes of the killing, the policeman applying the chokehold should have at least been charged by the grand jury with the use of excessive force.
{mosads}The alleged crime for which Eric Garner would have been arrested involved his selling a few individual cigarettes without paying a few pennies or a few dollars of taxes. Garner posed no physical threat to the policemen. He engaged in no violence. He did not attack them. He had no weapon. He threw no punches. For Garner to be thrown to the ground by a group of policemen and then held in a chokehold that was banned by the New York Police Department, and for that chokehold to continue after Garner repeatedly said that he could not breathe, clearly involved the excessive use of force, at a minimum. For this to be on tape, and for the grand jury to refuse to act after reviewing the, is beyond all reason.
In situations like Ferguson, where there is a heavily black population policed by a mostly white police department, there should be major outreach to recruit, hire and train black policemen and women. This should happen in countless communities throughout America where there is a racial disparity between the local population and the local police.
We should expand the use of small cameras on the uniforms of police, which might have prevented death or led to justice in the Ferguson case, but would have done no good in the New York case where the tape was seen by the grand jury and the nation.
Most members of the police force perform honorable work under dangerous conditions to serve their communities well. But there are bad apples, there are mistakes occasionally made and there is a problem when so many black citizens are killed by police in ways similar to the cases in Ferguson, New York and countless other communities.
The U.S. Department of Justice should investigate, and act.
Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), who was then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. Contact him at brentbbi@webtv.net.