« I can’t breathe », « j’étouffe ». These last words expired by George Floyd, died May 25 during his arrest by a police officer in Minneapolis (Minnesota), had also been pronounced six years earlier in New York by Eric Garner.
This 43-year-old African-American died on July 17, 2014, during his arrest in Staten Island, strangled by the elbow of a police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, while two others weighed on his chest. He was suspected of having smuggled cigarettes. The affair, filmed, had caused a scandal, contributing to the outbreak of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But a New York grand jury refused to indict the police officer, and Donald Trump’s justice minister, William Barr, waived any federal prosecution five years after the fact, in July 2019. It was not until August 2019 for the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and the Chief of Police to fire, finally, Daniel Pantaleo from the police.
Six years after the tragedy, New York has made tremendous strides in managing police-minority relations and ending the mass incarceration of African Americans. The city’s police chief Terence Monahan took up the side of the protesters, kneeling on Monday 1is June, at a demonstration near Washington Square in lower Manhattan.
“It has to stop. We all know Minnesota got it wrong. Not a single policeman here thinks what happened in Minnesota is justified. We are on your side on this point. ”
Lowest crime rate
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is married to an African-American and has mixed-race children, is particularly sensitive to the subject, even though he tries to spare his 35,000 police officers. Massive reduction in the incarceration of blacks, removal of facies checks and abandonment of financial guarantees that led to keeping the poorest in prison: the record of Mr. de Blasio and the Democratic Governor of the State, Andrew Cuomo, is impressive , while the crime rate is at its lowest in the city populated by 8.5 million inhabitants.
A little flashback to the end of the 1980s. New York was then ravaged by the drug and gang war. It was the time when a jogger was brutally raped in Central Park, leading to the conviction of five innocent African-American teenagers. Homicides reached a record 2,262 in 1990: six deaths per day; the city’s prisons are overflowing with 21,600 inmates. A series of measures will follow, which will divide this rate by seven (in 2019, there were only 320 homicides in New York). At the cost, first of all, of extremely brutal measures.
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