December 4, 2014--Chokehold On Staten Island

I need to learn more, but Staten Island, where I worked for 10 years, is more like Ferguson, MO than Manhattan. Though a brief ferry ride away it is as mired as Ferguson in anger and racism.

And now with a Staten Island grand jury concluding not to indite the police officer who in July killed unarmed, African-American Eric Garner with a chokehold, I expect this forsaken borough of New York City to erupt in protest. Hopefully, not violently, but there is a limit to what people of color can tolerate in 2014.

This was all caught on vivid videotape and should have been an easy one. Indict officer Daniel Pantaleo and then let a public jury decide to convict or not.

But, more white police officers live on SI than in any other part of New York City and so this was not unexpected.

Again, as in Ferguson, rather than a traditional grand jury review, which usually lasts for a few hours or perhaps a day or two, this one went on for months and one knows all to well what that means--a version of a trial occurred out of sight. And of course there was no indictment.

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After I wrote this, we met friends for dinner at the Yale Club, across from Grand Central Station. We had not seen them for awhile and had a wonderful time. They are always up on the news but there was so much to catch up about that we didn't talk much about Staten Island or Ferguson.

But at about 10:30, after dinner, when we were saying goodbye at the station, we were swept into a flash-demonstartion--a few hundred young black, brown, and white people who were darting about, herded by an equal number of police, all already organized by Twitter and Facebook postings to protest the lack of an indictment on Staten Island.

We joined them as they dashed into Grand Central. For me it was evocative of others times and other causes. 

"Hands up. Don't shot. Hands up don't shoot," they, we, chanted in reference to what allegedly happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson. "No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace" from earlier days.

And, "Fuck the police. Fuck the police" from today.

One struggling middle-aged commuter, who remembered similar epithets shouted decades ago in anger at the police, the "Pigs," during the Vietnam War said, "That didn't work then and it's is not fair now. At worst, it was only one policeman in Missouri and a few here. So . . ."

Someone who heard that responded civilly, "Don't you understand the frustration, the anger? You expect everyone to be courteous?"

"Maybe you're right," the commuter said as he ran for his train to Stanford. Maybe you're right. Back then I thought we were." 

He disappeared in the crowd.