Is Zero-Tolerance Policing Worth Chokehold Deaths?

Eric Garner arrest last summer
(Image by New York Daily News)   Details   DMCA

Many in the U.S. were horrified at the death of Eric Garner, a 300-plus pound, asthmatic, diabetic African-American man with sleep apnea and six children last summer. Garner was arrested for selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street and when he resisted being handcuffed, an arresting officer applied a chokehold. Though the maneuver is theoretically forbidden in the police manual of procedure, it brought Garner to the pavement, whereupon other police piled in, compressing his chest. A bystander filmed the whole episode on a cell phone and Garner can be heard crying "I can't breathe" eleven times. He died shortly thereafter at Richmond University Medical Center.