The Real Tragedy of Eric Garner’s Death, and Where the Debate Should be Focused

“I'm minding my business, officer,” pleads the man on the video. “Please just leave me alone.” Minutes later the man, confronted by police for allegedly selling “loose” cigarettes, would be placed in a chokehold and wrestled to the ground, eventually dying from injuries sustained by the restraint.

The video recording of Eric Garner’s death is deeply disturbing, and has once again stoked protests and fiery debates about police tactics and racial biases. However, focusing the anger and debate on racial bias or specific actions by individual police officers, misses the broader and far more important public policy issues raised by this case: the over-criminalization of our society, and the use of the law enforcement power of the state to regulate commercial actions and raise government revenues.

Make no mistake -- whether Garner was targeted because of his race and whether the officers who confronted him employed excessive or improper force, are important issues. And both should be debated and addressed within the context of civil and criminal laws and procedures.

But neither of these questions addresses the far more important issue of why we as a society have clothed police with the authority to consider it within their power to arrest someone for engaging in such a trivial act. Ultimately, it is not so much the police officers who should be the focus of this debate and of our concern; it is ourselves.

If left unanswered, the questions about over-criminalization and abuses of police power to regulate commercial activity and raise revenue, threaten to overwhelm the fundamental principle on which our nation was founded -- that government exists to protect Liberty. Unfortunately, what the Garner and so many other cases have come to reflect is the warped principle that the police power of the state exists to protect government.

How bad this problem has become is illustrated in the growth of the federal criminal code. Just three decades ago, a Justice Department study of the U.S. Code estimated there to be approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. In the years since, the Congress has added nearly 1,500 more crimes to the books. And this does not include the thousands of state and local offenses, or the thousands more regulatory edicts with which individuals and businesses are forced to comply.

While many Americans may believe it is easy to stay out of trouble with the law, and thus avoid confrontations with police, prominent civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate notes in his seminal work, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, this is a myth. Silverglate’s well-documented research into abuses of police and prosecutorial powers establishes that there are so many different and confusing criminal and regulatory laws on the books, that the average person in America cannot make it through a normal day without running afoul of at least three government “gotchas.” As Silverglate correctly concludes, this is no accident. “As a civil liberties matter, a government which has the ability to prosecute innocent citizens at will, is a government which has achieved the power that has characterized all tyrannical governments throughout history,” says Silverglate.

As documented further by Silverglate, despite the sometimes trivial or often technical nature of offenses charged, the laws and regulations on which such prosecutions are based are sufficient to empower the government to use its vast law enforcement powers to control whoever they want whenever they want. This applies whether it is a single citizen attempting to sell something as innocuous as a cigarette on a street corner, or a physician who has prescribed to a patient more of a government-controlled drug than federal or state drug agents have decided is appropriate.

In a broad sense, and as philosopher and noted author Ayn Rand opined more than half a century ago, since there is no way to absolutely control free men, government simply declares so many things “illegal” that it makes it impossible for citizens not to break the law.

Back in the 1930s, federal agents had to spend seven years engaged in creative thinking and investigating in order to find a way to bring to heel Al Capone’s vast criminal empire; finally settling on the then-novel use of the federal tax code. In 21^st Century America, federal agents can choose from a lengthy (and ever-expanding) menu of regulatory and criminal offenses on which to easily and quickly build a case against someone as big as an Al Capone or as small as an Eric Garner.

It is not only the incessant drive to control people and businesses that fuels the engine of over-criminalization. Government at all levels has become so big and so costly, that revenues are never deemed sufficient to meet those perceived “needs.” Hence, the drive to find ever more creative – and liberty-stifling – ways to bring in more revenues; such as outlawing the selling of a cigarette by one person to another as a way to ensure such “commercial transactions” are taxable and taxed.

This expansion of police and regulatory powers reflects the unhealthy crony relationship between businesses seeking favors through tax breaks or government-mandated monopolies; the violation of which then leads often to criminal prosecutions.

Ultimately, of course, it is we the people who elect and reelect to public office the legislators, governors and presidents who both expand and abuse the powers to which their oaths of office were sworn. Let us not squander the current opportunity to seriously debate and reform these fundamental problems, by refusing to see the forest for the trees.

The grand jury got all the facts, including the various autopsies.

It may have been unnoticed by many here, but because of political pressure, the medical examiner changed his original findings after receiving pressure from the office of the mayor, since the original report cited Gardner’s preexisting health problems that the stress of his confrontation and attempting to shove the cop and resist arrest had evidently activated. Calling it homicide (not the original decision) simply meant that it immediately involved another human being in the chain of causation, which in this case would have meant the cops who were trying to pull Garner back from assaulting the arresting officer.

It was Garner’s fault.

He didn’t loose consciousness. He was breathing and talking at least until he entered the ambulance.

EMS was there within 3 minutes, which is pretty darn good. EMS assessed him, got him on a stretcher, which took several minutes due to height and morbid obesity.

According to differing accounts, he had previously been in a fight, or was breaking one up. Either way, his body would have been under stress. Friends indicated he couldn’t walk a block without stopping, due to his asthma (and heart condition, etc.). So, when the police arrived, and he was on probation, his stress level increased. When he decided to resist, up it goes again. The police had no way of knowing these issues, except that he was on parole.

Finally, when he said “I can’t breathe,” the first time, they moved very quickly. Sure, somebody kept him down for another minute or so, but that’s because of his size.

This whole affair is being used as a political issue by both right and left, and shouldn’t be. This guy’s body was a time bomb.

In NYC, you pay $4.35 per pack on smokes. I can say this....if the Alabama or Tennessee legislature ever got the nerve to push their 42-cent/62-cent level to $4.35...we’d have 20,000 Eric Garners out the in various parking lots and selling untaxed smokes just like this guy. And yeah, we’d challenge any cop trying to arrest us for selling loose smokes.

If NYC had a regular tax of 70-odd cents on a pack...Garner and the other 3,000-odd illegal salesmen of the city....wouldn’t be out there and requiring a massive amount of city cop efforts to enforce a stupid smokes tax.

Plus in the Rodney King trial, the police were following current policy To The Letter. That video still makes me cringe and seems wrong to me, but if I’d been on that jury, I would have voted the same way.

I haven’t watched the Garner footage but I’m sure it’d give me the same horrible feeling in my gut — however, I am not going to tell the cops they can’t arrest people who are in fragile health, and I have no better suggestions on how to deal with that situation. Likely I would have voted the same way on that one as well, since I would assume the jury grappled with that situation and judged it based on Standard Procedure, which seems the reasonable approach to me.

I see a lot of these arguments coming from the same place as “we ought to be able to eliminate death from cause x entirely” sort of things. But even on that front, people pick and choose. Swimming pools cause more accidental deaths than guns, but nobody’s out there demanding the elimination of swimming pools. Cars and high speeds cause more accidental deaths than anything, but notice how lowering the national speed limit to 55 went. Life is risk, and Garner was the one with the knowledge and the ability to minimize the risk of that situation. He chose not to, and that isn’t the fault of the arresting officers.

If you owned a small ‘store’ that sold mostly tobacco products and someone kept hanging out in front of your store selling loosies from black market cigarettes, harrassing customers, and you were losing money because of it, AND the same guy kept coming back every day and doing the same thing, would you call the cops ?

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