On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was strangled by a cop from the NYPD. Garner had been approached by multiple police officers on the suspicion that he was selling untaxed cigarettes. After Garner told the officers that he was tired of their constant harassment and is not selling cigarettes, they made a move to arrest him. Officer Daniel Pantaleo then performed a chokehold on Garner, which was banned by the NYPD over two decades ago, and brought him to the ground within seconds. With police on top of him slamming his head into the ground, Eric Garner repeated "I can't breathe" 11 times before being unable to speak. Police officers and EMTs stood around the handcuffed, motionless man without administering CPR. Garner was announced dead on arrival …show more content…
"US President Barack Obama is calling for $75m in federal spending to get 50,000 more police to wear body cameras that record their interactions with civilians. The move, announced on Monday at the White House, comes in the wake of riots in the US city of Ferguson that were triggered by a grand jury's decision not to prosecute a white police officer accused of shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager last August" ("Obama" 2). Using federal money to equip only a fraction of the United States' police force is a waste of time and money. It's clear that this action is only being taken to express that the President is at least giving some thought to police brutality, and is not meant to be a game-changer. In past cases of the murder of unarmed black males, like Trayvon Martin, skeptics claimed that the failure to convict George Zimmerman, Martin's killer, was because of the lack of witnesses. When Mike Brown was killed with witnesses nearby, they called for police body cameras. Skeptics were silent when the footage of Eric Garner being murdered was put online. It is clear that we have reached the threshold; there can be no more cover-ups or short-term solutions to hide the police brutality against black people, especially black …show more content…
This has not been enforced in the slightest. “Despite the NYPD banning chokeholds in the 1990s, New York officer was accused of putting someone in a chokehold, on average, every other day from 2009 through the first half of 2014… Of those 1,048 complaints, the review board substantiated only 10, and at the time of the board’s report, only one officer had been charged and only one had been disciplined, with a ‘loss of up to 10 days of vacation... ’” (McLaughlin 2) There is no discipline or punishment within law enforcement, and with the added ingrained racism, this allows for high levels of police brutality against black people with no indictment, let alone conviction. This is an intragovernmental issue that cannot be curbed by slight changes in