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When Cops Do Bad Things: The Eric Garner Incident

This video of a man being choked to death by police is getting a lot of attention lately:

http://youtu.be/GhqHEgIgSGU

Even The New York Times covered the incident. This sort of thing is normally New York Post territory. Of course, the video does come from the Post.

You can hear people in the background talking about police bullying an innocent man whose only crime was trying to break up a fight. Police claim he was initially approached for “illegally” selling cigarettes, and that he resisted arrest. The video clearly shows the man, 43-year-old Eric Garner, dropping to the ground while complaining he can’t breath.

The video is being shared and re-shared all across Facebook. It’s appeared in my news feed four times in the last week, usually with comments welcoming viewers to the new police state — a place where no one is truly free and the cops get to kill whoever they want.

Is that an accurate picture?

It’s easy to see how people feel that way when we see daily instances of government abusing its power and invading our liberties.

But I don’t think it’s entirely accurate.

I know a lot of people who work in law enforcement; they love liberty. Their first concern is public safety and they serve the public faithfully. I think the majority of police officers fit that description, albeit with variations in political belief.

When people see police brutality and cry about this becoming a brutal police state, they fail to see incidents like these for what they are: the actions of individuals rather than accepted police or government procedure. The police in this case acted like idiots, especially the cop who put Garner in a chokehold. As the NYT article noted, the chokehold was banned by the New York Police Department more than 20 years ago.

I feel for Eric Garner’s family and don’t blame his friends and neighbors for being outraged. These officers ought to be fired. Or, at the least, they need to be suspended and retrained as a condition for returning to the force.

But cops doing bad things and a police state taking hold are not the same thing. Trust me: If a police state begins to emerge, you’ll know it.

Eric-Garner

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Gross Overreaction Still Haunts Kiera Wilmot

A year ago, I wrote about Kiera Wilmot, a student at Bartow (Florida) High School who was expelled and criminally charged for setting off an explosive after her science class volcano experiment backfired.

Mood music:

The trumped-up charges were eventually dropped, but Wilmot’s brush with the law continues to haunt her. According to civil liberties site Police State USA, the charges continue to taint Kiera’s record and impede her chances for success.

“All my charges have been dropped, but the lawyer says that it takes 5 years to clear each felony off the record,” Wilmot told the publication. She wants to be an engineer “building robots that can do tasks like surgeries or driving cars.” Here’s a young woman who was an honor student with no record of trouble. The principal described her as a “good kid” before expelling her anyway because he felt bound by the school’s zero-tolerance policy.

Suspending her might have been justified, but expelling her was over the top. The law slapping her with criminal charges for so obvious a mistake was shameful.

These are the incidents that make me lose faith in our institutions of education and law enforcement. The fear that has taken root in the aftermath of 9-11 and various school shootings has turned officials into overreactionary fools.

The year Wilmot has endured is tragic. Parties involved should atone for the injustice by helping the teen get back on her feet. I doubt they will, though. That would involve an admission of wrongdoing.

I suspect that Wilmot will achieve her dreams with hard work and determination, with no thanks to the society that should have supported her.

Kiera Wilmot