You may not live in a big city, but when a block gets taken over by people doing petty illegal activities, it soon becomes unliveable for regular people, and it was actually the normal folk (who are mostly black, in this neighborhood) who had been asking for enforcement. Selling loosies, that is, individual cigarettes, attracts nothing but hoodie teenagers and bums, along with the people who provide them services: hookers, drug sellers, etc.
Garner had several other citations for this, as well as other arrests, so I don’t know why he freaked out on this particular occasion. As soon as they realized that he had a real problem and wasn’t just doing the usual complaining, they tried to help him, and the ambulance was there in 4 minutes.
It’s just my opinion that after several “I can’t breath” pleas the hold should have been loosened. I don’t think he couldn’t breath because of the choke hold or whatever you want to call it. He couldn’t breath because he was having a heart attack. The cops should have backed off as soon as he started complaining and gasping for breath. Chances are he would have died anyway from the heart attack. But the cops wouldn’t have looked near as bad and it wouldn’t have looked like they contributed. Obviously, the grand jury came to that conclusion. The public never will.
On top of that, there are way too many deaths occurring at the hands of cops. Some are unavoidable. Some are for petty crimes. And some are just trigger happy cops. Two of the three needs to stop.