rollingstone | He was on the street July 17, selling untaxed cigarettes one
at a time — which, as inconsequential as it seems, happens to be a
crime.
The press and the people who don't live in these places want you to
focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime!
Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a
fat guy with asthma besides!
But the real issue is almost always the hundreds of police
interactions that take place before that single spotlight moment, the
countless aggravations large and small that pump up the rage gland over
time.
Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There's
a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that's
set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of
ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.
I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to
the stories. I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to
court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of
the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in
Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks. It took a year
and multiple all-day court visits to clear up.
I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in
court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch. And
in the case of a Bed-Stuy bus driver named Andrew Brown, it was that old
"obstructing traffic" saw: the same "offense" that first flagged
Ferguson police to stop Michael Brown.
In Andrew's case, police thought the sight of two black men standing
in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them.
In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on
his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he
balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for
"obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court
demanded 50 bucks for his crime.
This policy of constantly badgering people for trifles generates
bloodcurdling anger in "hot spot" neighborhoods with industrial
efficiency. And then something like the Garner case happens and it all
comes into relief. Six armed police officers tackling and killing a man for selling a 75-cent cigarette.
That was economic regulation turned lethal, a situation made all the
more ridiculous by the fact that we no longer prosecute the countless
serious economic crimes committed in this same city. A ferry ride away
from Staten Island, on Wall Street, the pure unmolested freedom to
fleece whoever you want is considered the sacred birthright of every
rake with a briefcase.
If Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon had come up with the concept of
selling loosies, they'd go to their graves defending it as free economic
expression that "creates liquidity" and should never be regulated.
Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked
credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set
up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people
made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds –
the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures
Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.
