Eric Garner died on a Staten Island street 10 years ago this Wednesday, July 17, 2014, and it took more than five years between Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo using an NYPD-banned chokehold that helped cause the death and meaningful punishment for the officer, who was fired Aug. 19, 2019 by Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill on the recommendation of his top trial judge.
During that period, Pantaleo received every possible break from the criminal-justice system and the NYPD, and did desk duty on a cop’s salary while collecting union pay raises and overtime wages.
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan couldn’t obtain a grand jury indictment despite a video of the fatal struggle obtained by the Daily News that other veteran prosecutors said offered the needed evidence of criminal conduct to charge Pantaleo. There were suspicions that Donovan, who soon after won a vacated congressional seat, had not pressed hard for an indictment because it would have been unpopular with voters and cost him police union support.
Federal prosecutors in the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office and Justice Department officials in Washington disagreed on whether a successful case could be brought against Pantaleo for violating Garner’s civil rights.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton deferred taking departmental action against Pantaleo, saying he didn’t want to taint a possible federal case, despite the stalemate. Bratton didn’t budge even after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump virtually assured the Justice Department would bring no charges. Trump’s attorney general William Barr made that official in July 2019 — after Bratton’s successor, O’Neill, belatedly allowed an internal case to move forward.
After Deputy Police Commissioner Rosemarie Maldonado found Pantaleo guilty of excessive force, O’Neill made a final stab at allowing Pantaleo to retire and protect his pension, asking a subordinate to work out a deal with his union. This proved the last straw for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who torpedoed the back-channel effort.
All that maneuvering to shield a cop with the bad judgment to escalate an attempted arrest for selling loose cigarettes into the death 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 found the department had used stop-and-frisks in a discriminatory manner against minority residents.
The irony of all the misguided machinations was that if the department had been more diligent about flagging abusive cops and disciplining or reassigning them, Pantaleo might have avoided the notoriety.
In March 2012, he was among the 120th Precinct cops who pulled over a car in New Brighton. He claimed he saw drugs in the vehicle’s back seat and ordered its occupants to step out so they could be arrested.
The car’s driver, Morris Wilson, would later plead guilty to having crack and heroin in his pocket, but Pantaleo and other cops searched his two passengers, Darren Collins and Tommy Rice. They did so in an outrageous manner: according to a lawsuit the two later filed, Pantaleo and Sgt. Ignazio Conca, after handcuffing them, pulled down their pants and underwear and, in broad daylight, either searched them personally in their genital areas or watched while other cops did it.
The drug charges against the two men were dismissed. The lawsuit brought against Pantaleo and Conca was settled by the city for $30,000. The lawyer for Collins and Rice, Jason Leventhal, later said his clients both had past criminal records that made them dicey trial witnesses, so they settled relatively cheaply.
The treatment of the two men — which also allegedly included Pantaleo and another cop strip-searching them again at their station house — was egregious enough that a more-conscientious look by NYPD officials might have earned Pantaleo a trip to the Psych Services unit and reassignment to a desk job. Instead, he got off with the loss of two vacation days.
While Eric Garner was charged with resisting arrest, he was pleading his case to Pantaleo’s partner, Justin Damico, that he hadn’t been selling untaxed cigarettes when Pantaleo approached him from behind and tried to handcuff him. Garner swatted away his hand and resumed urging Damico not to arrest him, but Pantaleo had heard enough. He tried a seatbelt hold to immobilize Garner, who proved too wide to subdue that way, and Pantaleo quickly moved to the chokehold.
His lawyers claimed there was no intent to choke Garner, but the NYPD trial judge didn’t buy it. The saddest part for all concerned was that it took that killing to make someone in the department finally look closely at a cop who two years earlier had made abundantly clear his willingness to abuse residents whom he encountered and didn’t care how petty their crimes — or even if they had committed one.
Steier is the former editor of the civil-service newspaper The Chief.
