[EGH]∎ Read Gratis I Can't Breathe A Killing on Bay Street eBook Matt Taibbi

I Can't Breathe A Killing on Bay Street eBook Matt Taibbi

Download As PDF : I Can't Breathe A Killing on Bay Street eBook Matt Taibbi

I Can't Breathe A Killing on Bay Street eBook Matt Taibbi

Bertolt Brecht wrote, "All power comes from the people. But where does it go?" Advocacy journalist Matt Taibbi in, "I Can't Breathe" gives the reader a pretty good idea where power went in America: it went from the public to the judicial juggernaut, the cutting edges of which are the legions of police agencies backed by all-powerful prosecutors, all nested behind a byzantine, bureaucratic labyrinth, one that would make Kafka proud. The sad and sorry case of Eric Garner (and his staunchest advocate, his recently deceased daughter, Erica) perfectly illustrates the problems faced by those on the receiving end of the judicial cudgel. This book is a perfect complement to Radley Balko's superbly researched and compellingly presented, "Rise of the Warrior Cop".

By now, most Americans are (or should be) aware of rapid erosion of civil liberties, most prominent amongst them, functional elimination of the Fourth Amendment by the legislative, judicial and enforcement arms of government. Much of this activity is relatively out of sight, but police brutality has garnered (pun intended) flashes of public interest. Presence of thugs in The Thin Blue Line are hardly a new issue: the "Third Degree" administered in smokey back rooms by tough cops has been a feature of Hollywood films and hundreds of police procedural and mystery stories for decades. Police back alley "street justice" is a hallowed American tradition.

The new dimension focused on in "I Can't Breathe" is the arrival of digital video, an objective and readily available instrument for publicizing brutality and other depredations visited on the citizenry by law enforcement. These range from routine humiliation ("Stop and Frisk") to beatings and outright murder. While not the first video documenting such outrages, the Eric Garner killing was a catalyst, focusing (albeit briefly) public attention on the problem. Garner's death was followed in rapid succession by a series of additional police murders. Public and legislative attempts to curb judicial malfeasance have, so far, come to naught.

As is oftentimes the case, Eric Garner wasn't an exemplary and upstanding member of the community. In other words, he had an extensive arrest record and a distinguished (mostly by ineptitude) series of other run-ins with The Man. Eventually, the relentless harassment Garner sustained boiled over, as best encapsulated by Popeye the Sailor's immortal statement, "I've had all's I can stand and I can't stand no more!" While Popeye could solve the problem by popping a can of spinach, Garner's resistance culminated in death by asphyxiation, administered by a New York cop using a banned choke-hold. Whatever Garner's past and regardless of the trivial nature of his infraction (selling untaxed cigarettes), the Garner death was murder, pure and simple. While one would hope that Garner's death wasn't for naught, it was: the cop went free, policies did not change, life goes on.

Taibbi does an expert job of contextualizing the Garner case. He deftly integrates the particulars of the Garner story with the insurmountable problems the citizenry faces in attempting to achieve justice, however defined. From the perspective of the judicial machine, justice equates to blood money: the system grinds on, the police perpetrator goes free and the taxpayer foots the bill for a payout to the aggrieved survivors. Case closed. The byzantine maze that must somehow be negotiated before reaching that endpoint is a focus of Taibbi's book. It was designed to frustrate, delay, baffle and intimidate and it succeeds wonderfully in so doing.

The author contextualizes the war on the "black underclass" (swiftly expanding to include all of us) by sympathetically detailing the travails of the Garner clan. To be sure, there’s plenty of social dysfunction and – as always – it’s hard to disentangle elements of personal responsibility from the twisted socio-economic-racial milieu. Perhaps Taibbi’s portrayal of Garner is overly sympathetic and his reliance on some of the same characterizations of Garner’s stature (he was fat and tall) used to devious effect by the fuzz and associated media outlets.

As already noted, this book meshes nicely with the more comprehensive and fact-laden exposition of police militarization written by Radley Balko. The outcome of that (now entrenched) transformation of law enforcement from “the cops on the beat” to “the robo-cops that beat” and kills isn’t too surprising. Maybe the appropriate coda for Taibbi’s and Balko’s books can be found in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s aphorism, “Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.” In other words, by the time the public figures out that police adversarial attitudes with respect to “civilians” isn’t a good thing, it will be too late to fix the rancid mess.


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I Can't Breathe A Killing on Bay Street eBook Matt Taibbi Reviews

I've liked pretty much everything Matt Taibbi has written, but this one was/is one of his best. Full disclosure, I am a criminology professor, and this is is a little denser than some of Matt's other works, but he does a brilliant job of showing how a social structure/institution, one that we have given so much power to in our laws, how they can impact us as individuals, in this case tragically for one person- Eric Garner. It is heartbreaking, but also eye opening. It is too easy to view these incidents in isolation. I did. I looked at the officers, what could have been done differently, and was horrified. What I should have done, and what Taibbi did, was take a step back and look at the system, and not just look at the system and how it failed, but look at what happened with that system over time and what led up to that moment.
Couldn’t put it down. It’s about time, SOME people put down their rose colored glasses and stop believing that all police officers are perfect people. They aren’t. They make mistakes and they are just like the rest of us. I don’t believe that they are all monsters but they are far from saints. As a person of color, these things happen. They get it wrong, and when the police gets it wrong, people die. People lose their freedom for a long period of time. Innocent people are sent to the gas chamber or lethal injection. It’s serious business.

This is a story that most Black people can tell you. This is a story that most Black people will tell you. What sucks is that you have to hear it from a face that resembles you more for it to be more believable. Well if it takes Taibbi to tell the truth, then so be it.
The video of Eric Garner’s July 2014 confrontation with a pack of NYPD officers and his unjustified death is still available on the Internet, albeit not on YouTube. This video makes for troubling viewing and shows two police officers, biding their time, feigning disinterest, as Garner, ranting, says he is being harassed. Then, one officer suddenly pounces, applies a chokehold from behind, and rides Garner, a big man, to the ground while a horde of cops pile on. “I can’t breathe…,” the panicked Garner says (11 times according to Wikipedia) until he is limp and still, his face planted on the sidewalk.

IMHO, the book jacket of I CAN’T BREATHE, the latest work from the estimable Matt Taibbi, captures this deplorable incident with both force and subtlety. This jacket, the creation of Greg Mollica, presents a column of 11 gradually fading entreaties—I CAN’T BREATHE—that eventually plinth on this book’s subtitle, which is “A Killing on Bay Street”. A killing, it certainly was.

In I CAN’T BREATHE, Taibbi is determined to create a sympathetic portrait of Eric Garner, who—dead at 43—had a complex family life, many friends, and made his living selling bootleg cigarettes—mostly loosies—to commuters and street people on Staten Island. Even so, I’d say Matt’s primary subjects are

o The transformation of policing. Starting in the 1970s, urban police departments began to reformulate their mission. Instead of reacting to crime and enforcing the law, the police shifted to aggressive in-your-face tactics to maintain so-called public order, which is a nebulous and flexible concept that the police can twist to justify almost any arrest. Eventually, these tactics, known as Zero Tolerance or Broken Windows policing, reached their nadir in New York City, where the notorious Stop-and Frisk program produced 680,000 stops in 2011. Stop-and-Frisk was data-driven and imposed unstated quotas—so many stops, arrests, and summons each month—on police officers. And the hapless Garner was frequently swept into its maw.

o NYPD acquiescence to police brutality. Before Garner’s death, NYC’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) did a study of chokehold complaints in the period between 2009 and 2014. The report found 1) 1,082 complaints alleging 1,128 chokeholds by NYPD officers. (2) The CCRB fully investigated only 520 of these complaints; and 3) of these, the CCRB substantiated just 10. Observes Taibbi “In nine of these ten cases, the CCRB recommended the strongest possible punishment. But in all nine of those cases, the cop in question ended up getting off with either no punishment at all or a maximum of five vacation days lost… Essentially, out of more than one thousand chokehold complaints, roughly 99 percent of the cases simply disappeared. In five years, the department had never once really punished an officer for a chokehold. “

o The imperfect self-regulation of the NYPD. Writes Taibbi “Only about 5 percent of [all New York] police received eight or more complaints. Pantaleo [the cop who choked Garner] had fourteen. And only about 2 percent had as many as two substantiated complaints, while Pantaleo had four… it was certainly clear now [after this cop’s personnel file surfaced] that between Pantaleo’s CCRB file and his multiple lawsuits for strip-searching…, the NYPD had ample evidence before the Garner incident that he was a problem cop.

o Injustice in the legal system. Observes Taibbi “In police brutality cases, the bad guy is always the individual, not the system behind him… But before the bodies even cool, the crime moves up the chain… family members find themselves facing a series of intractable bureaucracies designed to make cases against police officers vanish in blizzards of political excuses and unintelligible legalese. These bureaucracies are designed to frustrate and exhaust families bent on getting justice, grinding them down… a war of attrition.” In this system, according to Taibbi, the police almost never go to jail. As a result, the best-case for police-brutality victims and their families in NYC is not Justice, which is unachievable, but to get the city to cut a big check. And here, the media leverage exerted by Al Sharpton often plays a conspicuous role.

Matt gets the final word “Garner’s real crime was being a conspicuous black man of slovenly appearance who just happened to spend his days standing on the street across from a string of new high-end condominium complexes… His raw presence threatened property values. Plus, he was an easy bust, and so became a regular target of police mandated to make busts like clockwork.”

Highly recommended.
Bertolt Brecht wrote, "All power comes from the people. But where does it go?" Advocacy journalist Matt Taibbi in, "I Can't Breathe" gives the reader a pretty good idea where power went in America it went from the public to the judicial juggernaut, the cutting edges of which are the legions of police agencies backed by all-powerful prosecutors, all nested behind a byzantine, bureaucratic labyrinth, one that would make Kafka proud. The sad and sorry case of Eric Garner (and his staunchest advocate, his recently deceased daughter, Erica) perfectly illustrates the problems faced by those on the receiving end of the judicial cudgel. This book is a perfect complement to Radley Balko's superbly researched and compellingly presented, "Rise of the Warrior Cop".

By now, most Americans are (or should be) aware of rapid erosion of civil liberties, most prominent amongst them, functional elimination of the Fourth Amendment by the legislative, judicial and enforcement arms of government. Much of this activity is relatively out of sight, but police brutality has garnered (pun intended) flashes of public interest. Presence of thugs in The Thin Blue Line are hardly a new issue the "Third Degree" administered in smokey back rooms by tough cops has been a feature of Hollywood films and hundreds of police procedural and mystery stories for decades. Police back alley "street justice" is a hallowed American tradition.

The new dimension focused on in "I Can't Breathe" is the arrival of digital video, an objective and readily available instrument for publicizing brutality and other depredations visited on the citizenry by law enforcement. These range from routine humiliation ("Stop and Frisk") to beatings and outright murder. While not the first video documenting such outrages, the Eric Garner killing was a catalyst, focusing (albeit briefly) public attention on the problem. Garner's death was followed in rapid succession by a series of additional police murders. Public and legislative attempts to curb judicial malfeasance have, so far, come to naught.

As is oftentimes the case, Eric Garner wasn't an exemplary and upstanding member of the community. In other words, he had an extensive arrest record and a distinguished (mostly by ineptitude) series of other run-ins with The Man. Eventually, the relentless harassment Garner sustained boiled over, as best encapsulated by Popeye the Sailor's immortal statement, "I've had all's I can stand and I can't stand no more!" While Popeye could solve the problem by popping a can of spinach, Garner's resistance culminated in death by asphyxiation, administered by a New York cop using a banned choke-hold. Whatever Garner's past and regardless of the trivial nature of his infraction (selling untaxed cigarettes), the Garner death was murder, pure and simple. While one would hope that Garner's death wasn't for naught, it was the cop went free, policies did not change, life goes on.

Taibbi does an expert job of contextualizing the Garner case. He deftly integrates the particulars of the Garner story with the insurmountable problems the citizenry faces in attempting to achieve justice, however defined. From the perspective of the judicial machine, justice equates to blood money the system grinds on, the police perpetrator goes free and the taxpayer foots the bill for a payout to the aggrieved survivors. Case closed. The byzantine maze that must somehow be negotiated before reaching that endpoint is a focus of Taibbi's book. It was designed to frustrate, delay, baffle and intimidate and it succeeds wonderfully in so doing.

The author contextualizes the war on the "black underclass" (swiftly expanding to include all of us) by sympathetically detailing the travails of the Garner clan. To be sure, there’s plenty of social dysfunction and – as always – it’s hard to disentangle elements of personal responsibility from the twisted socio-economic-racial milieu. Perhaps Taibbi’s portrayal of Garner is overly sympathetic and his reliance on some of the same characterizations of Garner’s stature (he was fat and tall) used to devious effect by the fuzz and associated media outlets.

As already noted, this book meshes nicely with the more comprehensive and fact-laden exposition of police militarization written by Radley Balko. The outcome of that (now entrenched) transformation of law enforcement from “the cops on the beat” to “the robo-cops that beat” and kills isn’t too surprising. Maybe the appropriate coda for Taibbi’s and Balko’s books can be found in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s aphorism, “Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.” In other words, by the time the public figures out that police adversarial attitudes with respect to “civilians” isn’t a good thing, it will be too late to fix the rancid mess.