I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

by Matt Taibbi

While the federal government in the infamous Tuskegee Study in rural Alabama was leaving black men with syphilis untreated, researchers at Holmesburg were paying inmates to allow them to perform tests and biopsies on patches of their skin. The studies were for developing skin creams, deodorants, moisturizers, suntan products, and other substances. This was the 1970s.

He leaned over, took a line, and any heroin addict knows the rest of the story. He spent the next thirty-three years getting high.

Garner went to jail for crack dealing at a time when 72 percent of the illegal drug users in New York City were white, but 90 percent of the people who went to jail for selling drugs were black or Hispanic.

Terry v. Ohio reached the Supreme Court. There is no way to understand what took place in Staten Island in the summer of 2014 without understanding this case.

The question before the court was whether or not McFadden had had the right to stop, question, and physically pat down the three men based on little more than a detective’s hunch that something was up.

They ruled McFadden’s arrest had been a good one and thereby created a new legal framework for police interactions with people on the street.

Translated loosely, what Warren was saying was that even if all of those complaining black people are right about police abuse, my Supreme Court lacks the power to do anything about it. It’s going to happen no matter what.

We can’t do anything about racism or police brutality. But we can do something about crime.

To enforce these ambiguous codes of conduct in a bigger community like a city neighborhood, Kelling and Wilson theorized that it may be necessary to allow a certain amount of, well, ambiguous behavior on the part of police:

“How do we ensure…that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?” they wrote. In the end, Kelling and Wilson weren’t sure. Their conclusion was that they just had to hope it wouldn’t turn out that way.

like Justice Warren, were saying that they didn’t have a solution to the problem of how to prevent systematic discrimination and police abuse, except to hope it wouldn’t happen.

Kelling, unwittingly perhaps, had set in motion a massive government program that would be warped from the beginning by a chilling syllogistic construct: New Yorkers who are afraid of crime are already victims. Many New Yorkers are scared of black people. Therefore, being black is a crime.

Black kids born in the seventies and beyond, like Garner, were far more susceptible to disease than the national average—roughly two and a half times more likely to suffer from asthma, and more than five times more likely to die from it. No one is exactly sure why; even the CDC has said it doesn’t know for sure.

the city argued that it was not stopping people because they were black or brown. Instead, they were stopping them because black and brown people were statistically more likely to be criminals.

The city’s defense against accusations of profiling was to argue that profiling works.

in many places in America, a convicted murderer can get public housing but not a former drug dealer.

Black brutality victims are almost always described as beings of superhuman strength, next to whom police are frail mortals.

Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan, for example, told reporters that “the video speaks for itself” and “appears to show negligence.” However, he added, “if we learned anything from the Brown case, it’s the power of prosecutors to construct and manage a narrative in a way that can shape the outcome.”