I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

Bertolt Brecht wrote, "All power comes from the people. But where does it go?" Advocacy journalist Matt Taibbi in, "I Can't Breathe" gives the reader a pretty good idea where power went in America: it went from the public to the judicial juggernaut, the cutting edges of which are the legions of police agencies backed by all-powerful prosecutors, all nested behind a byzantine, bureaucratic labyrinth, one that would make Kafka proud. The sad and sorry case of Eric Garner (and his staunchest advocate, his recently deceased daughter, Erica) perfectly illustrates the problems faced by those on the receiving end of the judicial cudgel. This book is a perfect complement to Radley Balko's superbly researched and compellingly presented, "Rise of the Warrior Cop".By now, most Americans are (or should be) aware of rapid erosion of civil liberties, most prominent amongst them, functional elimination of the Fourth Amendment by the legislative, judicial and enforcement arms of government. Much of this activity is relatively out of sight, but police brutality has garnered (pun intended) flashes of public interest. Presence of thugs in The Thin Blue Line are hardly a new issue: the "Third Degree" administered in smokey back rooms by tough cops has been a feature of Hollywood films and hundreds of police procedural and mystery stories for decades. Police back alley "street justice" is a hallowed American tradition.The new dimension focused on in "I Can't Breathe" is the arrival of digital video, an objective and readily available instrument for publicizing brutality and other depredations visited on the citizenry by law enforcement. These range from routine humiliation ("Stop and Frisk") to beatings and outright murder. While not the first video documenting such outrages, the Eric Garner killing was a catalyst, focusing (albeit briefly) public attention on the problem. Garner's death was followed in rapid succession by a series of additional police murders. Public and legislative attempts to curb judicial malfeasance have, so far, come to naught.As is oftentimes the case, Eric Garner wasn't an exemplary and upstanding member of the community. In other words, he had an extensive arrest record and a distinguished (mostly by ineptitude) series of other run-ins with The Man. Eventually, the relentless harassment Garner sustained boiled over, as best encapsulated by Popeye the Sailor's immortal statement, "I've had all's I can stand and I can't stand no more!" While Popeye could solve the problem by popping a can of spinach, Garner's resistance culminated in death by asphyxiation, administered by a New York cop using a banned choke-hold. Whatever Garner's past and regardless of the trivial nature of his infraction (selling untaxed cigarettes), the Garner death was murder, pure and simple. While one would hope that Garner's death wasn't for naught, it was: the cop went free, policies did not change, life goes on.Taibbi does an expert job of contextualizing the Garner case. He deftly integrates the particulars of the Garner story with the insurmountable problems the citizenry faces in attempting to achieve justice, however defined. From the perspective of the judicial machine, justice equates to blood money: the system grinds on, the police perpetrator goes free and the taxpayer foots the bill for a payout to the aggrieved survivors. Case closed. The byzantine maze that must somehow be negotiated before reaching that endpoint is a focus of Taibbi's book. It was designed to frustrate, delay, baffle and intimidate and it succeeds wonderfully in so doing.The author contextualizes the war on the "black underclass" (swiftly expanding to include all of us) by sympathetically detailing the travails of the Garner clan. To be sure, there’s plenty of social dysfunction and – as always – it’s hard to disentangle elements of personal responsibility from the twisted socio-economic-racial milieu. Perhaps Taibbi’s portrayal of Garner is overly sympathetic and his reliance on some of the same characterizations of Garner’s stature (he was fat and tall) used to devious effect by the fuzz and associated media outlets.As already noted, this book meshes nicely with the more comprehensive and fact-laden exposition of police militarization written by Radley Balko. The outcome of that (now entrenched) transformation of law enforcement from “the cops on the beat” to “the robo-cops that beat” and kills isn’t too surprising. Maybe the appropriate coda for Taibbi’s and Balko’s books can be found in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s aphorism, “Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.” In other words, by the time the public figures out that police adversarial attitudes with respect to “civilians” isn’t a good thing, it will be too late to fix the rancid mess.

Couldn’t put it down. It’s about time, SOME people put down their rose colored glasses and stop believing that all police officers are perfect people. They aren’t. They make mistakes and they are just like the rest of us. I don’t believe that they are all monsters but they are far from saints. As a person of color, these things happen. They get it wrong, and when the police gets it wrong, people die. People lose their freedom for a long period of time. Innocent people are sent to the gas chamber or lethal injection. It’s serious business.This is a story that most Black people can tell you. This is a story that most Black people will tell you. What sucks is that you have to hear it from a face that resembles you more for it to be more believable. Well if it takes Taibbi to tell the truth, then so be it.

This is a riveting, disturbing, heart-breaking work of non-fiction. Taibbi has dug deeply into the life and times of Eric Garner, who was famously killed by a police chokehold during an ostensible arrest for selling individual cigarettes on a street corner in Staten Island.Taibbi takes us through the evolution of stop and frisk, the Broken Windows theory of policing, the use of statistical modeling for fighting crime, the use of statistics for measuring "success", and how all of these factors have become bent and twisted resulting in the victimization of minority communities who are regularly terrorized by law enforcement officers. He also walks us through the lame institutional structures that are supposed to address the abuse of power by individual police officers, which rarely if ever hold officers accountable for the injuries they inflict on the public.The book reads easily and quickly, because the tale is so well told. Despite its comprehensive coverage of the history of modern policing tactics, this is no academic treatment, but rather a caring, feeling recap of what happened to Garner and the factors that led to the fatal convergence of Garner and the NYPD that fateful day.I am a retired career federal prosecutor, and am accustomed to viewing police behavior a bit more favorably than many do, but Taibbi's analysis of how things have morphed over the past two decades makes an airtight case for the need for major reform. So many well intentioned approaches to crime go awry when police discretion gets involved, quotas have to be met, and disparate impacts develop depending upon the demographics of the neighborhood involved. Attention must be paid and Changes must be made. For starters, arrests for blatantly unconstitutional crimes like "disorderly conduct" should be banned, and marijuana possession, if not sale, should be legalized.I underlined many passages in this book, and will keep it and refer back to it as I continue to follow these topics. The ubiquity of cell phones and video taping has undeniably changed things for the better, because there is more sunlight shining on police practices and permanent records are being made which errant cops can less easily deny. The police undoubtedly have a tough job to do, but the tactics that are the subject of this book are not helping in the fight against crime and are deepening the chasm between minority communities and majority culture. Kudos to Taibbi for writing this important contribution to the discussion.

Damaged. Bought as a gift.Can't give it like this.