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Category: New York City
Two years ago this December, then Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would proceed with a federal civil rights investigation into the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed resident of Staten Island who died five months earlier after an NYPD officer put him in a chokehold while trying to arrest Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes.
DOJ’s investigation would be handled by prosecutors in Brooklyn and Washington, Holder said. In civil rights cases, U.S. attorneys’ offices such as the one in Brooklyn and their counterparts at the Civil Rights Division in Washington work as partners. But last Monday, the department shifted the investigation to D.C. exclusively, taking the Brooklyn prosecutors off the case.
Though federal investigators convened a grand jury in Brooklyn, the investigation has dragged on, reportedly because of a disagreement among prosecutors there and in D.C, with the group in Brooklyn doubting whether they can prove in court that force used by Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who applied the chokehold to Garner, was unreasonable based on the circumstances. Their colleagues in Washington reportedly think they have enough evidence to proceed.
“It is taking quite a bit of time,” William Yeomans, a former acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, told the Times. “I’d almost say it’s been longer than expected, especially since a video exists.”
The video, of course, is the footage that shows Garner’s death after being subdued by Pantaleo. The city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.
Holder convened the investigation within hours of a decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to charge Pantaleo. (The Staten Island grand jury considered whether Pantaleo’s conduct violated state law.)
The grand jury’s failure to charge Pantaleo sparked sparked protests world-wide. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” which he repeated 11 times, have become a rallying cry against mistreatment of Black people by the state.
“This is a small step forward,” Erica Garner, the victim’s daughter, said in a statement following the decision by DOJ to move the investigation to headquarters. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Holder, is a former head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
The city agreed last year to pay Garner’s family $5.9 million to settle a claim of wrongful death in connection with his killing. The state’s highest court declined to order the release of transcripts from the grand jury that might have shed light on its deliberations. Pantaleo remains on desk duty and is likely to be disciplined by the department following the federal probe.
The NYPD in 1993 banned the use of chokeholds after the maneuver was implicated in a series of deaths. For his part, Pantaleo told the grand jury that he meant merely to tip Garner so that Garner would fall to the ground. Upon hearing Garner say he could not breathe, Pantaleo testified that he sought to separate himself from Garner as quickly as possible. But in the video, Pantaleo seems to continue to restrain Garner by the neck.
Now it falls to prosecutors in Washington to determine whether the NYPD violated Garner’s civil rights. What Garner says, as much as what the video shows, commands our attention.
“I can’t breathe,” he told the officers who pinned him to the pavement. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”
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Remembering 9/11
Writing in the Times recently, Dwight Garner described the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer as “precious,” which it kind of is. But the book continues to resonate with me as a remembrance of 9/11.
The novel tells a story of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old in New York City whose father died that day in the World Trade Center. After his father’s death, Oskar sets off on a journey through the city to find the lock that matches a key that belonged to his father. Early in the novel, Oskar remembers his father:
“Dad always used to tuck me in, and he’d tell the greatest stories, and we’d read the New York Times together, and sometimes he’d whistle ‘I am the Walrus,’ because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn’t explain what it meant, which frustrated me. One thing that was so great was how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at. Sometimes they were grammar mistakes, sometimes they were mistakes with geography or facts, and sometimes the article just didn’t tell the whole story.
I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.”
The novel ends with a series of photographs of a man whose fall from the Twin Towers was captured by Richard Drew, a photojournalist on assignment with the Associated Press in an image that captures the horror of that day. Oskar reverses the series, flip-book style, so that the man appears to be falling upward. Oskar describes the effect:
“And if I’d had more pictures, he would have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would have poured back into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston.”
The chronology continues in reverse, with Oskar’s father walking backward to the subway and home, spitting coffee into his mug, unbrushing his teeth, and, the night before, telling Oskar a story, in reverse, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time…”
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Heat dome
On Saturday at 7:00 p.m. in New York City the temperature was in the low 90s, which we imagine had something to do with a “heat dome” moving across the country. That sent us to the Angelika for a screening of Café Society, the new Woody Allen film.
Midway through the movie, we felt our pulse slow and the city cool. And by the time we emerged afterward onto Houston Street, a light wind had come up.
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On the waterfront
For what seemed like an instant on Friday, a fit of labor unrest at the New York-New Jersey seaport left us daydreaming about the docks.
The reverie arose after thousands of longshoremen walked off the job to protest either oversight by the state agency charged with regulating hiring practices at the port or a federal criminal investigation into the leadership of their union.
Reality depended on which unnamed union official provided which explanation to which news outlet. “It was totally unannounced and unexpected by anyone,” one of those anonymous sources told the Times, which noted that the reason for the action “remained shrouded in intrigue.”
Apparently some workers felt the same way. They told the local NBC affiliate they didn’t know the strike was happening when they reported for work on Friday and were awaiting instructions on what to do next.
Whatever the grievance, the stoppage caused containers to stack up in Newark and Elizabeth, as well as on Staten Island. The terminal at the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn either shuttered or remained open depending, again, on whom you asked.
By Friday evening the walkout was over. The terminals, the country’s busiest after Los Angeles and Long Beach, would reopen Monday as scheduled, the Port Authority tweeted about nine hours after the strike began.
Still, however briefly, thoughts turned to a modern-day “On the Waterfront,” or to the contents of all those containers. We imagined life as a stevedore. We Googled the dimensions of a ship that can pass through the Panama Canal: maximum length, 967 feet; maximum beam overall, 106 feet; maximum draft, 44 feet.
Some of us looked away from our labors (which take place at screens, mostly) and out through the narrows, toward a curtain of clouds in steel blue that hemmed the horizon.
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Memorial Day
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Palm Sunday
“It’s nice out here,” said a man in a navy down vest and Yankees cap as he swung through the lobby door of his building out onto Frederick Douglass.
“Yeah,” I replied, agreeing.
“I thought it would be chilly,” he said.
It was about 31 degrees but the sunshine felt warm.
At corner of 147th and Eighth, a man and woman hailed a car. Though I saw them from behind – they looked sharp, she in a long coat with a pattern of flowers, her Afro catching the sunlight. He wore a gray flannel suit.
“It’s Palm Sunday,” the cashier at Pathmark told me.
The beginning of Holy Week.
Along Eighth, a deli prepares to open. “Mo’s Gourmet,” says the red sign with yellow letters. Brown butcher paper held in place by blue painter’s tape fills the windows right now.
Back at my building, the sound of Drake drifts through a second-floor window.
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Cold nights, big city
February here in New York City started cold and ended colder.
The temperature on February 1 reached 36 degrees. Today, the 28th of the month, is slated to reach 29. This month is the third-coldest February on record, according to the National Weather Service. That makes it the coldest February since 1934.
The month will end cold. Highs today in the 20s and overnight lows in the single digits and teens. Slightly colder highs on Saturday.
— NWS New York NY (@NWSNewYorkNY) February 27, 2015
I realized recently that the temperature displays atop the old bank building at 73rd and Broadway and the one above Columbus Circle seem to change by fewer than 10 degrees no matter when I see them. Whenever I pass, the digits rarely, if ever, exceed 30.
“It was like the most sick month you can think of,” Jay Engle, a meteorologist with the weather service, told the Times, which noted that it even has been cold on subway platforms and other places that don’t usually get cold.
Which brings me to the one redeeming thing I can say about February. I never hurried home from the grocery store for fear that my frozen yogurt would unfreeze.
On Presidents Day, I went into a movie at 4:00 p.m. Though the feature was fine, I bought a ticket mostly because I wanted to warm up.
That reminded me of a piece from The New Yorker that I like. It’s about the Bleecker Street Cinema, an art house theater that closed in 1991. In the piece, from 1974, a guy named Larry emerges from the ticket booth. Les Rubin, the impresario behind showing old movies, tells the reporter:
Larry has an M.A. in meteorology. It wasn’t until tonight that he realized there was a difference between William Powell and Dick Powell. And look what it’s done for him! He just had a brilliant idea. We put a big sign out front that says, ‘40° WARMER INSIDE.’”
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Snow day
