Multiple reports said it was the retail merchants who complained about Garner and rightly so.
That would be an example of the police serving the citizen merchants.
Do retail merchants own the sidewalks? Taxes were paid on the initial pack(s) of cigarettes incidentally so the local tax law wasn’t even being broken. Who are these merchants to say that a man doesn’t have a right to freely compete against them unless he does it from inside his own store? This is all very typical of course and it burns my a55. We all talk about free trade and how in favor of it we are but then when we see it actually happening in our country, we call in the enforcers to shut it down. I have been in Garner’s position before. I have had the police confiscate (steal) my legally owned property for selling it in a park. Were I the mayor of any large city, there would be free trade and there would be no shutting it down.