New York – The New York Police Department will revamp its training on the use of force amid outrage over the custody death of a man suspected of selling untaxed cigarettes, officials said Tuesday.
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Police Commissioner William Bratton said the nation’s largest police force will receive additional instruction following the death last week of Eric Garner, who was asthmatic.
“The department needs to do a lot more in terms of training,” Bratton said at a news conference.
Garner’s arrest last week was captured on a widely distributed amateur video that appears to show an officer putting him in a banned chokehold after he refused to be handcuffed. As several officers take Garner down, he can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”
Autopsy results are pending in Garner’s death, which has sparked protests, a criminal probe and a warning by the Rev. Al Sharpton that Garner’s family would explore asking for a federal civil rights investigation. The family was to hold a candlelight vigil Tuesday night on the eve a funeral set for Wednesday.
The death has raised questions about the NYPD’s embrace of the “broken windows” theory of policing. Critics say the theory — that low-grade lawlessness such as drinking in public and making graffiti can invite greater disorder including traffic fatalities and violent crime — can needlessly put nonviolent people at risk and fuel tensions in the city’s minority communities.
Such enforcement “leads to confrontations like this,” City Councilwoman Inez Barron said Tuesday at a news conference about Garner’s death. Added City Councilman Andy King: “I don’t think it’s a necessary police tactic.”
Bratton vowed on Tuesday to stick with the program, saying the NYPD plans to next target illegal vendors who rent bikes in Central Park. He credited a similar crackdown on subway fare beaters in the 1990s with being the “tipping point” for a drastic reduction in overall crime in the subway trains.
“There’s no change in that focus at all,” Bratton said of broken windows. “That’s a key part of what we’re doing.”
Who are the City Council members to know what excessive force is? Any of them served on a police force?
To #1 - Get real, will you! If you were on the receiving end of excessive force, I guarantee that you would know what it is. If the victim had been a respectable businessman, who was dressed in a suit and tie, the reaction from the public would be a lot different. However, because he was an overweight, large man, with a record of arrests, the assumption is that “he had it coming”. People should try to be a little more objective in these matters. As Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet used to state “Just give me the facts”.