Eric Garner's Death, Political Consequences in 2019.

it is completely ridiculous to have a
situation in which two different levels of government compete for who will pursue justice as for the first time we are not waiting on the federal Justice Department which told in the city of New York that we could not proceed I heard this last night in the Democrat primary Democratic Party presidential primary debates last night in Detroit they were saying on stage that the reason why the state government and local government couldn't be responsible was because this federal government Department this part of the Department of Justice was competing with them for the case and was promising that they were going to deliver justice that is completely untrue I'm trying to be straightforward with you and everyone in New York we're following the law we've got to get people due process there will be a result next month if police officers state officials whomever you are whatever you do aren't losing jobs when crimes are committed whether on purpose or by accident regular people don't understand the whole thing doesn't make sense if we could do it all over again and we're talking about this happened over two presidential administrations five years it's just unfathomable it's never happened before and that doesn't take away the pain of the garner family nor the sense a injustice that everyone is feeling the whole thing is messed up from day one right it should never happen to the beginning Justice Department should have done its job we now know we can't depend on them we're going to do things differently going forward the death of Eric garner and the inability of the American political system to cope with it in the years that followed thereafter is a really important case study for all of us to learn from not just Americans for people all around the world in all kinds of different justice systems and by the way no I did not just say the failure of the police to cope with it I did not say the failure of the court system I mean the failure of the whole political system of the whole Democratic Society of the United States I would say that the fundamental problems at work here were already evident back in 1992 with the Los Angeles Riots I am NOT thinking primarily of the police role in the Los Angeles Riots I'm actually thinking of the death of Letitia Harlan's so for those of you don't remember many of you watching this video were not alive and many of my viewers who knocked in united states america one of the most important elements of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles was violence of African Americans against Korean immigrants specifically Korean Americans who owned corner stores small shops grocery stores that sort of thing why was that at the same time as there were other incidents of police brutality and hostility of the African American public against police officers at the same time there was also a brutal at unprovoked slaying of a teenage African American girl in a corner store by a Korean American shop owner now he um the difference between the I can't breathe controversy the Eric garner Cod first see them talking about this video and the trial of Latasha Harlan's is that the trial will attach to Harlan's deeds successfully convict the Slayer of a manslaughter sentence it was they were charged and convicted with manslaughter however after this person was found guilty she was sentenced to merely a $500 fine and 400 hours of community service if the judge had served the sentence by the books and the sentence as recommended by the jury then the killer would have received 16 years in prison and instead she did no prisoner she didn't spend one day in prison she paid $500 and did 400 hours of community service for murder you know now look to reveal my own bias in this in the death of Eric garner I believe the correct charge would be murder of some kind in different jurisdictions as a question of would this be first degree murder secondary murder or third degree murder different societies are going to have to present an array of options for how murder is accounted for in the United States of America a lot of people don't know this the definition for for premeditation is very precise and very exacting so the death of Latasha Harlan's in Los Angeles back in the 1990's that was premeditated murder even though it was spontaneous spontaneity and premeditation are completely different things now it's true the shop owner the woman's sitting behind the counter the shop she didn't wake up that morning and plan in advance to kill this young woman but that's not what premeditation means legally just the span of time where the shop owner got angry at this young woman and then went to get the gun the gun was under the counter and took the gun out and decided to kill this young woman that makes it premeditated murder that that's all it takes to qualify as premeditation the United States for something to be not premeditated it has to be a situation like you're walking down the street and someone jumps on your back from behind and you you know you turn around and shoot them maybe you don't even know who they are it has to be that spontaneous where there's no there's no capacity for judgment there's no option to take another course or there's very little course there's always there's always a choice take another course but it's it's very very narrow what would count as not premeditated and the most charitable thing I could say for the judge in that LA County example from the 1990s Korean shop owner shooting and killing a teenage black girl the most generous thing I can say is I think there is a tremendous reluctance in the American legal system to really impose murder on any situation that is not a Hollywood movie version of what murder is supposed to be many many many Hollywood movies depict the American legal system and they influence the whole world our sense of justice and the process of the law globally even in China even in Europe our sense of what the process of the law is supposed to be is shaped by American TV shows in American movies that partly glamorized the American legal system partly misrepresented and partly criticized it partly Dhafir critique the shortcomings of that system but nevertheless the idea of what murder is supposed to be I think even for judges and people in this culture it doesn't match what this clerk did in the story I think she was the wife of the owner of the store she was more or less the owner and manager of this corner store the the this woman spontaneously decided to shoot someone because she got angry and she was accusing this young girl of trying to shoplift I mean even if she were guilty she shouldn't be shot for shoplifting but never less in fact the police the police had videotape footage here so again you see the comparison Eric Gardner there was video taped footage proving exactly what happened there were also two eyewitnesses I have read the direct eyewitness statements from one of those two people they were very young at the time I forget if they were children or teenagers she was quite a young girl who was in the in the shop playing a video game playing an arcade game and she saw and heard everything that happened so I saw a long written statement from her written years later when she'd grown up but she you know remembered all inflected aren't you remember what she said in court so that was it was really very open-and-shut case eyewitness statements but exactly who said what and who did what and you can match that up with exactly what happened in the videotape there was no possibility that this girl was shoplifting no reasonable rational person could have accused her of shoplifting but of course even if she attempting to shoplift to shoot her dead in this circumstance I mean it wasn't even um it wasn't a situation where for example somebody at the counter was defending themselves when a thief is trying to grab money out of the out of the counter out of the out of the till there are some scenarios of that that legally are very different whether not they should be morally or ethically different this is another story so look we have a situation where cultural expectations do not match up with the framework provided with the legal system there is a tremendous cultural reluctance which of course you hear from conservatives of it and everyone else there is a cultural reluctance to charge a police officer with murder whether it's first degree murder second report or a third degree burn to charge them with murder for the circumstances that are shown in such brutally obvious detail in the the film death the slaying of Eric garner now again I will reveal my bias in this case I have a formal education in political science I studied political philosophy all my life it's really easy for me to say with complete detachment that what happened in that videotape the death of Eric Gardner is murder period it's very easy for me to look at that and say this should be tried as murder for a police officer the same way it should be tried for a normal citizen but the real tangled knot we get into here which has been made even worse by various levels of political dishonesty as different political parties try to package this into a kind of product for popular consumption they are waiting for justice and I'm going to get justice there's finally going to be justice I accomplished that in the next 30 days in New York you know why because for the first time we are not waiting on the federal Justice Department which told the city of New York that we could not proceed because the Justice Department was pursuing their prosecution really there's a very active campaign ongoing right now in 2019 especially within the Democrat Party within the debates for who's going to be the next president in states there's a real attempt to misrepresent the significance of what happened legally and that was probably true to some extent five years ago I think it's worse now the levels of dishonesty and of course one of the most fundamental reasons for that is honesty is the discomfort of members of the political elite with the reality of just how awful and dysfunctional the American justice system is and the total reluctance to actually reform that justice system okay so what emerges a first is not offensive to ever anyone anyone it's not offensive to everyone that's what I should say that this is not offensive therefore it is completely ridiculous to have a situation in which two different levels of government compete for who will pursue justice and that is part of the story of what happened here you had a federal department you had a subsection of the DOJ the federal Department of Justice publicly competing for the opportunity to press charges on this case now if you have an education and political science it is completely obvious from day one that under the writ of the law the DOJ case the federal Department case would fail that it would have to at some point stop be cancelled or be thrown out of court even if you passed a new law you know you can't um you can't make that law retroactive it's too late it could affect future cases okay the the remit of this special section of the Department of Justice is only to handle civil rights cases follow this care for civil rights cases in which the offender in which the the transgressor put it that way the person transgressing the law does so now that is a very poorly written law it's unclear to the general public it's probably unclear to some lawyers what that means why willfully why why would you use an adjective like willfully or willingly what does that mean the purpose of that adjective is to constrain the scope of applicability okay typical situation a person has a conflict with their landlord the landlord is somehow cheating them or ripping them off and then they talk to other tenants in the building and they also say some of them say hey they also have had this problem with the landlord if your landlord is doing this to you that is a violation of your civil rights so can you go to this federal Department of Justice and say hey you have a special section dealing with civil rights violations help me out help us out we have a landlord Valerie supports know the implied meaning the significance of these words willingly willfully the DOJ civil rights Department will only handle your case if it's a situation where the landlord was engaging in in effect racial discrimination or something closely similar to racial discrimination willfully willingly doing so what does that mean it has to be a scenario in which you have a landlord let's say it's a landlord who refuses to allow mixed-race couples to move in to his properties let's say it's a landlord who tries to segregate to have all the black people over here all the way over here so what the law is meaning to imply is that cases are only elevated from the state level to this federal level special department if and when if and only if you're talking about systematic and intentional racism or some other kind of bias that's equivalent to racism violating people's civil rights so as you know by allegory we now have this kind of civil rights discourse being applied to discrimination against homosexuals or discrimination of any kind that's comparable to if the law were written to see that clearly if the the the delimitation of the role responsibilities of the federal government were clear in this way you wouldn't have the ridiculous situation we have now we are having lies I can only call them lies stated by major politicians that the reason why the state government investigation and trial of the police officer or police officers plural a responsible for the death of aircard the reason why those legal proceedings failed they are saying the I heard this last night in the Democrat primary Democratic Party presidential primary debates last night in Detroit they were saying on stage that the reason why the state government and local government couldn't be responsible was because this federal government Department this part of the Department of Justice was competing with them for the case and was promising that they were going to deliver justice that is completely untrue if you just even look up Wikipedia for the timeline of this case the state-level prosecution already failed years ago and now why did it fail basically because the whole system is bad because what you need is a law that states very plainly maybe with some you know maybe with some two limitations a police officer is responsible for his or her own moral conduct to the same extent it's a civilian if a police officer does what you see in the video I think they should be tried with a civilian on a completely equal basis I do not think you should have two classes of human being with two different sets of law appointment now in the United States you know a soldier in combat is not tried under the same law as a civilian in peacetime and of course you could have some distinctions I mean if a police officer breaks into someone's house but they do so because they actually believe they have to help someone inside of course you have to have laws that are distinguishing what police can do things that are special or extraordinary but from my perspective in terms of we're asking in a perfect world what would happen here this absolutely should be a trial for murder how you want to break down the cat of first degree second degree third degree that's another story okay what you know what are the conclusions we can draw from this the United States of America never dealt with these problems back in 1992 when the LA riots drew such profound dramatic attention to them all of these issues of I'm sorry even that one case of a Korean shop owner shooting dead a black teenager and then the reaction happened after that and the discretionary power of the judge to give this woman a zero zero days in prison for murder sorry you can call it manslaughter it's just murder of another kind and it was premeditated by legal definitions premeditated murder call it manslaughter if you want to and this woman didn't spend one taken jailing boy five hundred dollars it's sickening and it's I don't think any amount of money can make up for murder but why was it five hundred dollars and not five million it's sickening okay anyone who was alive at that time could have stopped woken up and said wow we have really profound problems here with you know the American justice system okay of course there are many other cases especially cases involving police misconduct but the variant the knot of questions that came together and was pulled tight in Los Angeles in 1992 anyone who remembers that anyone can live through that could say hey all these questions have been asked before including specifically police brutality against African Americans and what happens in the court system and how everything police do is considered to be in good faith and swept these problems were all spilling guess who was alive back in 1992 and let's do that Barack Obama if any of us are being honest with ourselves the question we have to ask is why did Barack Obama do nothing about this for eight years you know whether you look at the fundamental problem as being federal government departments competing with stake every departments a problem in many ways the problem was created because back in the year 1830 the United States was playing a dishonest game of pretending America was composed of states when a reality was composed of both states and territories there's a reason why the laws are so vague and contradictory and self-defeating about who is responsible for what and that is because a large part of the history at the continental United States had to do with the interaction between states and territories to a limited extent that still does showed up to American Samoa showed it to all the u.s. army bases and other unincorporated territories that are still part of the American Empire in reality there was a much bigger deal between whatever 1750 and 1850 in terms of shaping the way the federal government local government way to each other the creation of the FBI is much later than all that but it only makes things more complicated blah blah blah long story it's a long story of nobody wanting to take responsibility and actually set up a systematic well working justice system for something as obvious as murder you know pretty central to our concept of how the justice system is supposed to work secondly there are even deeper roots here which is that throughout the whole of the British Empire there was a profound cultural and legal standard that no soldier and no police officer could ever be held responsible for actions undertaken in good faith you find that in the British Empire not just in Canada Australia the United States you find that even in India also by the way when you go back to the old days there really was no distinction between a police officer and a soldier when you go back 200 years or something somebody with a gun who represents the government in some sense in Canada could even be something with a gun working for the Hudson Bay Company you know we had corporate armies we had corporations with crown powers given to them by the Queen and then they had their own police all kinds of of course colonisation companies in India and all these things so it was a very different situation and having a really firm distinction between the military and the police or officers of the peace somewhat later development but there was a profound convict that no police officer should be held responsible for anything they do as long as it was done in good faith so thus police recklessness police were immune from charges for anything that was due to recklessness or sincere and competence where they were trying to carry out their duties they just ended up massacring people or they ended up choking one person to death if you go back to the period immediately before the American Revolution it's a great irony that the hatred of Americans against the British Empire was very largely fallen aided by it was based on it was a reaction to the brutality of British soldiers and sometimes British police officers were kind of the same as soldiers he imprecisely these circumstances that many Americans stood up and said hey we don't want to be treated this way and yet they created actually a legal system and a political system that very much continues the same brutal imperious powers of the police and military that the British Army of the British Army was notorious for in those same 13 colonies at that time the British in India set up these terrible practices of where no officer could be held accountable for anything they did in good faith what that meant in effect was the only type of crime a police officer could be held accountable for would be something like corruption taking bribes not acting in good faith or some kind of systematic and intentional exploitation of the people just as and if here's the parallel you have this vaguely written law that this police officer could only be held accountable if he wilfully violate someone's civil rights so this police officer in order for the case to be elevated to that Department of Justice federal charges the reality this is plain as day from day one it was obvious five years ago as always anytime if you just read the law and how Department of Justice federal jurisdiction applied to this okay the only way that this police officer could have been held accountable by the federal government by the DOJ would be if he were systematically and intentionally violating this person's civil rights and that is irrelevant to the charge we're discussing here which is the reckless irresponsible use of authority the reckless use of violence and also not to put too fine a point on it murder the biggest gang in this city you know that the buys you all know we say the biggest gang in the city is the police