In the Staten Island neighborhood where Eric Garner uttered his dying words, 'I can't breathe,' some residents say they don't necessarily see the New York Police Department's ensuing distance as a good thing.
Doug Brinson collects candles to prevent a fire at the make-shift memorial, Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2019, where Eric Garner died in a police chokehold five years ago, in the Staten Island borough of New York.
“If the police are here, they just move to the other side of the park and do their business there,” said longtime resident Lisa Soto, taking a long drag from a cigarette. “They sell everything here. Nothing has changed.” “I remember, me and my friends, if we were goofing off on the corner and the cop waved a nightstick at you, you knew, get the hell off the corner and don’t give him any lip,” Bernan said. “Back then, you didn’t have hoodlums hanging out on street corners; what we have here is a disgrace.”
In March, it finished outfitting all patrol officers with body cameras. And the department now requires officers to detail the actions they took each time they used force — not just when they fired their gun. “The NYPD of today is a different institution than it was just a few years ago,” de Blasio said Monday after the department fired Pantaleo.
In the years since Garner’s death, use-of-force complaints against the NYPD have fallen sharply, according to data compiled by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. In 2014, there were 2,412. In 2018, there were 1,752, marking a 27% drop.
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