| It's Eric Garner, not Eric Gardner. There was not any really good reason to try to arrest Garner at the point they tried to restrain him. Chokeholds are banned by that police department, so when they did try to arrest him they went about it in the wrong fashion. The Garner case raises lots of questions, including whether or not he would have been treated the same way had he been white. Brown, on the other hand, was walking down the middle of the street with goods he just stole moments ago. Police had good reason to stop him. A white kid doing the same would have been stopped. Brown attacked the officer and tried to take his gun. A white kid doing the same would have been shot. And a white kid who fled after being shot, then turned around and continued approaching rather than obeying an order to get down would get shot more, just like Brown was. The forensic evidence combined with the eyewitness accounts provides a pretty clear picture that Brown got what pretty much anyone would get in those circumstances, regardless of their race. Lumping Garner in with Brown is very disrespectful to Garner and his family. |
In both cases, there was misbehavior by the suspect and misconduct by the officer, but the more important unifying circumstance was the fact that officers on routine patrol in both cases were armed with lethal weapons, so that hand-to-hand conflict was almost guaranteed to escalate instantaneously to deadly force.