Eric Garner died on a Staten Island street 10 years ago today, July 17, 2014, and it took more than five years from the moment Officer Daniel Pantaleo used a chokehold banned by the NYPD that helped cause the death to the significant punishment for the officer, who was fired on August 19, 2019, by Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill on the recommendation of his trial judge.
During this time, Pantaleo received every break possible from the criminal justice system and the NYPD, performing desk duties on a cop’s salary while collecting union pay raises and overtime.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan failed to obtain a grand jury indictment despite video of the deadly fight obtained by the Daily News that other senior prosecutors said provided the necessary evidence of criminal conduct to charge Pantaleo. There was suspicion that Donovan, who soon won a vacant congressional seat, had not pressed for an indictment because it would have been unpopular with voters and cost him the support of the police union.
Federal prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and Justice Department officials in Washington disagree over whether Pantaleo should be prosecuted for violating Garner’s civil rights.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton postponed any action against Pantaleo, saying he didn’t want to taint a potential federal case, despite the impasse. Bratton didn’t budge, even after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, which all but ensured the Justice Department wouldn’t bring charges. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, made the decision official in July 2019, after Bratton’s successor, O’Neill, belatedly authorized an internal case to move forward.
After Deputy Police Commissioner Rosemarie Maldonado found Pantaleo guilty of excessive use of force, O’Neill made one last attempt to allow Pantaleo to retire and protect his pension by having a subordinate negotiate a deal with his union. That proved to be the final straw for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who torpedoed the attempted diversion.
All of this maneuvering to protect a cop who had the poor judgment to turn an attempted arrest for selling cigarettes into the murder of an unarmed petty criminal that rocked the city. The incident further damaged the NYPD’s relationship with the black community, less than a year after a federal judge ruled that the department used ID checks in a discriminatory manner against minority residents.
The irony of all these misguided machinations is that if the department had been more diligent in detecting abusive officers and disciplining or reassigning them, Pantaleo might have avoided notoriety.
In March 2012, he was among the officers from the 120th Precinct who stopped a car in New Brighton. He claimed to have seen drugs in the back seat of the vehicle and ordered the occupants to get out so they could be arrested.
The driver of the car, Morris Wilson, pleaded guilty to having crack cocaine and heroin in his pockets, but Pantaleo and other officers searched his two passengers, Darren Collins and Tommy Rice. They did so in an outrageous manner: According to a complaint filed by the two men, Pantaleo and Sergeant Ignazio Conca, after handcuffing them, pulled down their pants and underwear and, in broad daylight, personally searched their genitals or watched other officers do so.
Drug charges against both men were dropped. The lawsuit against Pantaleo and Conca was settled by the city for $30,000. Collins and Rice’s attorney, Jason Leventhal, later said his clients both had criminal records that made them risky trial witnesses, so they settled for a relatively low price.
The treatment of the two men — which also reportedly involved another body search of Pantaleo and another officer at the precinct — was sufficiently outrageous that a more thorough review by NYPD officers would have earned Pantaleo a stay in psychiatric wards and a reassignment to a desk job. Instead, he got away with losing two vacation days.
While Eric Garner was charged with resisting arrest, he was pleading his case to Pantaleo’s partner, Justin Damico, claiming that he had not sold untaxed cigarettes when Pantaleo approached him from behind and tried to handcuff him. Garner pushed his hand away and continued to urge Damico not to arrest him, but Pantaleo had heard enough. He tried to restrain Garner with his seat belt to immobilize him, which proved too large to restrain him that way, and Pantaleo quickly switched to the chokehold.
His lawyers claimed there was no intention to strangle Garner, but the NYPD judge didn’t buy it. The saddest part for all concerned is that it took this murder for someone in the department to finally take a serious look at a cop who, two years earlier, had made it clear that he was willing to mistreat any residents he encountered and didn’t care how petty their crimes were – or even that they had committed any.
Steier is the former editor of the civil service newspaper The Chief.