NAACP chief: Don't blame Democrats for NYPD shootings

The head of the NAACP said it is “not fair” for the leader of a prominent police union and former Gov. George Pataki (R-N.Y.) to blame Democratic politicians for the deaths of two New York City police officers.

“I don’t believe it’s fair to link the criminal insanity of a lone gunman to the peaceful protest and aspirations of many people across the country, including the attorney general, the mayor, and the president is simply not fair,” Cornell William Brooks, the president of the NAACP, told CBS's “Face the Nation.”

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot and killed Saturday afternoon while sitting in their patrol car by a man who posted messages to his social media accounts described by New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton as “very anti-police.”

Images of an Instagram account believed to belong to the suspect, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, said he planned to undertake the killing as revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men who were killed in confrontations with white police officers. In both cases, grand juries declined to bring charges, sparking protests across the country.

Those revelations led some to charge that Democratic politicians who had been critical of police tactics and supportive of the protests were responsible for the killing.

"There's blood on many hands tonight. That blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor,” Pat Lynch, the president of the largest police union in New York City — the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association — said at a press conference.

In a tweet, Pataki said the deaths were the “predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric” from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

While Brooks argued the shootings should not be attributed to those pushing for change following the deaths of Brown and Garner, he acknowledged they were “certainly not a step forward” toward that goal.

“We have a violence problem, and the policies we’re pushing forward protect not only the public, but police officers, and the families they hope to go home to at the end of the day,” Brooks said.

It looked like a choke hold to me and the medical examiners said that it was.

Excerpt
Medical examiners concluded that Garner was killed by “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.”,[

Not all choke holds are illegal.

Read your own excerpt and use your own eyes.

Compression of neck AND compression of chest AND prone positioning.

There is a difference between a choke hold and an illegal choke hold. An illegal choke hold cuts off supply of blood to the brain and the person passes out, sometime never to recover. He does not say "I can't breathe, I can't breathe", because the primary effort is to apply pressure to the arteries and shut off the blood, not the air. That is why that technique is so dangerous and why it is illegal.

Eric Garner's air was cut off by the fact that he was positioned on his stomach with somebody sitting on his back, with his arms cuffed behind him. Do an experiment yourself, right now. Lay down on the floor with your hands behind your back, and see how well you can breathe. The fact that Garner was unusually large and had asthma exacerbated this problem. But restraining him in this way was also not illegal. This was proper procedure that resulted in a tragic accident because the person was unusually vulnerable to this kind of stress.

So the crux of the matter is that Garner was not killed by an illegal choke hold. He was killed by the application of a legal choke hold, in combination with other legal restraints that lead to his accidental death.

To say that Garner was killed by an illegal chokehold is a damn lie, and a damn lies tend to have negative consequences.

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