Transcripts For ALJAZ The Stream 2017 Ep 172 20171027 : vima

ALJAZ The Stream 2017 Ep 172 October 27, 2017

A phone call with the army chief senior general being out on thursday at miramar Security Forces to support the government doing the violence and allowing the safe return of ethnic ringer who fled the area you can follow those stories on our website at aljazeera dot com is updated twenty four hours a day ill be back with more news in thirty minutes to stay with us here the stream is next. As native amazonian is increasingly struggling to survive in todays world and. Talk to aljazeera travels to brazil to meet leaders of endangered tribes. And those trying to protect them at this time. I am really could be and here in the stream today journalist and author mad t. V. Joins us to discuss his new book on the life and death of eric garner an arm to black man who was killed in twenty fourteen by a white Police Officer in the United States. If. Those were ever garners last words spoken in desperation after a new york city Police Officer put him in an illegal chokehold that cost him his life his final words became the rallying cry for the black lives Matter Movement in the us formed in the wake of high profile deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of mostly white police joining us now to discuss the eric garner slice and the policies that he says led to gardeners that. The author of i cant breed a killing on bay street and a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine welcome to the stream and i want to start with two tweets from a person whos actually read your book this is from erica out of arizona who writes reading eric garner book i judge coroner too harshly i think she told the stream her biggest take away that i had judged him more harshly for not seeming respectable than was warranted now matt you spent nearly three years writing about the life and death of eric garner tell our International Audience describe for us who was eric garner. Her car was a. Small time dealer in untaxed cigarettes. And father of six. Criminal history you had been in prison for dealing crack but when you got out. He was looking for something that was less dangerous and. Less likely to our prison time than we had it says that he doubts that use trying harder to stay with them so he was trying to get out of crime but he found it hard to get a job and so what he ended up doing was selling the tax cigarettes which is typically it was that you were going to meet or a fence. Sitter big party guy very funny contradictory slow. But well liked everywhere everybody that i talked to at the park what are leaving the store owners area i pulled up a picture here this from the New York Daily News of garner and his wife now the the the video that we showed in the beginning of the program was the one that i think most people around the world recognize and know garner by this picture maybe less so you have all these anecdotes in your book that are really interesting you have his pizza eating preferences you have his spending habits or lack there of you have things about his knack for numbers i dont know is there any other that that made it through your book what stuck out to you the most what was what was your favorite anecdote. People told me lots of funny stories about him right off the bat. But pete the biggest name is i heard one of the first days was that he would go in and order a whole pizza and fold it in half you know like a taco so his eating habits were kind of legendary on the street up there and he also had this unbelievable the syllabi with numbers you miss that actually kind of your tickets of people on the street you would go around challenging people. To try to stump him about sports its things and things like that he was always right. And you know he would he would say things like you know cool that. He was challenge is not something and about his clothes he had you know a little bit of a sloppy if your hands but that was there was a reason for that. He was kind of phobic about buying new things for himself so he is you want every dollar that you are good with kids so he would wear clothes so they almost that lead fell foul of his body. It was but thats how he felt most children. So you know so much to add comes across in the book with all of the interviews he dined with the people who made appearances on erics life those who were in his neighborhood his family members clearly was very well researched. What i wonder that was what was your inspiration behind thats what what was it that sparked you teevan get into researching eric garner so life and was there any hesitation at all given youre a white man you know definitely. I had done a story. A previous book was about the criminal Justice System it was about white people and wall street dont go to jail and that i was hearing. You know these guys who are do a billion dollar fraud its. Two people who do go to jail in this country and how they go to jail and why i was interested in the whole concept of Community Policing to. Again with and. And so that was sort of my initial interest in the case and yes i did house and trepidation about it as i went along you know thinking you know as a white person as a white man and by the reverse and tell the story. But the more i thought about it its not just a book about her carter about that he put that he lived in and im its also a book about the criminal Justice System. About the bureaucracy that was behind those that Justice System and the politicians and which are almost entirely a construct of White America so its a white story too and i think its or for people like me to own a little bit more i pulled up my screen here one of the things that we saw circulating in the days after gardners killing and since this is from franchisee on twitter justice for eric garner a hash tag i cant even you can see that illustration there those were his last words said several times to life seventeen twenty point teen so that was caught on videotape but tell us about the events leading up to this encounter with police this day what happened well one of the Amazing Things that i found was that eric garner wasnt actually selling cigarettes that day. But the evidence strongly suggests and you can construct this even from police statements but i also talked to probably twenty five people who were there that day and so i put together a timeline of what do you still make. And i know that he was on well that day and that he spent most of the afternoon in a bathroom he came out of the bathroom he broke up a fight in the street and he was leaning up against the wall catch its breath when the police approached him now when i think kept it was that. Somebody like a lieutenant it is a local precinct wrote i earlier that saw garter and then told these to serbia. So. When they went back there they had a mission to arrest. You know unluckily for everybody it. Had not actually been committed a crime. So it was. That mentions that with the video we produce that you know youre arresting me and you know what im actually doing. I have a suite here from sippy who of course saw that video and says these pictures disgusts me absolutely no regard to the mans existence so disturbing no she tweets this october twenty sixth twenty seventeen of course right now for our show this happened nearly three years ago i want to bring molina into the conversation now shes professor and chair of patrick and studies at California State University in los angeles but we now welcome to the show now weve seen these killings on camera time and time again you were involved early on for the black lives matter has anything changed anything since this incident since the killing of eric garner that makes you hopeful. Yeah i mean i get great hope from the way in which we as Community Members have well lead ourselves weve claimed our own power weve said we understand that the system of policing in this country is really designed to produce these outcomes and so its up to us as Community Members to imagine something that actually brings in a real safety for our community so i think the conversations around you know how do we create safe communities by having livable wage jobs by having resources for communities rather than pouring doubters and to a policing system thats meant to brutalizing killa so you mention the police and system so with that i want to bring in the voice of a former Police Officer detective in fact this is Garrick Waller former stream cast on a show about reforming the police from the inside hes now retired but this is what he told us about that policing system broken windows. When i was when i was a young officer. I used to i used to think people were but as you grow of seniority you see it doesnt work i mean the best thing to work is the office is just offices offices just i mean somebody does something small kron so tons of best advice is to give them break sometimes a number from that group you cant go and locking up everybody for every single thing doesnt work is not going to prove that its not going to improve can be Police Relations its not going to do anything but increase the numbers in the precinct and thats basically what stemmed from so matt he mentions there are broken windows and that of course is a theory that by fighting smaller crimes fixing things neighborhoods you could then detract and deter away from more serious crimes of course its been heavily criticised but he has a Police Officer and an africanamerican one of that says in the beginning he thought that was a good thing how do you link that in with their daughter stuff. Well eric carter had the misfortune to be a minor criminal at the time. Exactly what his policies are being ramped up and they were targeting people exactly like him. And. You know that in an earlier period of history i think policemen of terms maybe a white guy to somebody like him or would have focused more on the drug dealers in the locker or more serious offenders but but because of this this is the space regime and also coincidentally because of that specific incident on that day you know when those two officers were sent. To to pick him up one of the things that was explained to me by their former officer was that you can just tell he got to walk around the corner and that the sort of broken windows era that you have to get a number you have to get an arrest you have to get proof that you did something or that the whole regime was this designed to create with a call activity and so they needed to arrest him in order to satisfy that is the mission and that was. And i think its a really important we understand broken windows policing is not something new its something that has been you know theres a renewed commitment in a more extreme version of broken windows policing but its important we understand that this is a concept that was assured in one thousand nine hundred eighty two right where there was this theory that if we look at minor crime will be able to clean up neighborhoods for gentrifiers and i think what matt does really well in the book is talk about the relationship between over policing of black brown and poor communities and the a string in. Kind of new gentrifiers into communities that we used to reside and so thats what were talking about when we talk about communities like Staten Island communities in South Los Angeles communities throughout urban america. Is this notion that somehow broken windows policing is really fighting crime when really theyre fighting is black brown and poor people on behalf of white folks who are you know more affluent and want to move in and take over these communities to bring this in from one see what watching the show he says hold justices system whole Justice Systems need to be reformed even black officers targeted more minority drivers than whites so this is more than just discrimination this person puts but i want to bring this headline in nexis is from the Los Angeles Times in new york major crime complaints when cops took a break from proactive policing that of course in quotes and this is from september of this year does this mean that the broken windows policies are jane ching do you see that happening at all. Well i mean its just this is just six or change you know if youre a member of it its everything that you hear about crime stats in a city like new york you know theres a stick with a grain of salt because the police are responsible not just for. You know deterring crime. Theyre also responsible for monitoring compiling statistics but its russs one of the things which was stop and frisks use even though its struck down in court they claimed almost immediately that you know Something Like ninety five percent subset. Have been done away with you know anecdotally you know youre here at the street but theyre still doing the same things its just that theyre not sure about these forms that more so its hard to really say. Yes or right policing isnt really changing there i think what matz pointing to is theyre getting as new rules come into play individual officers and entire departments are getting. Kind of smart about how they play what they do and so i think whats really required when we talk about creating safe communities and i dont want to confine our conversation to just policing because if we also look at the data what creates safe communities its not spending more on police its actually investing in resources if we look at eric garner right if we think about what could have happened as a returning citizen if we poured resources into programs that could get him a livable wage job where he could support his six children then you know that would be a different outcome right if we could create conditions so the rest of the folks in the neighborhood that he found himself a part of could you know have resources and really be able to do the work that they needed to do then we would have a different outcome instead were pouring our dollars and in most major cities were spending more than fifty percent of general funds have to. X. Dollars on police on straight up police if we spent those dollars on afterschool programs on jobs programs on Mental Health resources on Health Resources we would have much much Safer Communities so i think in response to that tweet its not just about forming police its about transforming the way in which communities in their dollars and elevating humanity above all else here someone who might agree with you this is someone watching live on you tube mr potts he says police should be made to attend Public Meetings with the communities they work in just one idea here but we got a specific question this is for you matt this is from ariya who says she she she hones in on one specific thing that came out of the killing of eric garner the chokehold she says so how was the band chokehold allowed why wasnt the abusive officer arrested punished or fired officers can do illegal techniques this is an International Community kind of watching this in the us seeing this and wondering how does this allowed to happen. Sure this is going to be a complicated answer because its a its a convoluted thing to try to explain how disciplined process works with Police Officers but. Typically internal police discipline. Has to wait for the criminal Justice System to first play out so in other words they had to do so the side first whether or not they were good or arrest him and charge him with a crime before the police could discipline him and go through that process so he this case went to a grand jury and they used kind of this ancient technique where they. Convened a special grand jury to call fifty witnesses. And the suspicion is that this actually put out a defense case story and a grand jury and months later the grand jury decided not to indict the officer so thats how he was arrested the question of why was he disciplined well the city did just. Hold a complaint against him and rule that he did use it and technique but its going to be a long time we have to wait before the federal authorities decide whether or not to file charges civil rights charges before they can go through the discipline i think that with a thin man can say thank you for explaining never go into the audience a million ahead. And that actually varies from state to state and county to county so in los angeles its actually the exact opposite that the disciplinary process can happen first and then the criminal process actually waits on that disciplinary process whats common throughout the United States however is that the criminal justice process and the Police Disciplinary process are tied together and they shouldnt be right so district attorneys prosecutors are basically and bed with Police Departments they rely on them for every other case and so you have a reluctance on the part of prosecutors to prosecute police when they commit crimes right and you also have Police Departments that want to protect their officers above all else so we still have daniel pants alayo really patrolling the same streets. Working for the same department where he is basically he committed an act of terrorism on on a neighborhood and hes still out there on the streets right and thats common throughout the United States very very rarely i think last year there were six officers who were even charged in these killings of folks right and that doesnt mean that they were convicted six charged period and so when you think about this it really kind of makes communities especially black brown and for communities extremely vulnerable to police there was however one arrest in the murder of their garner and it was the arrest of ramzi or to the man who was brave enough courageous enough to film the murder and bring it to the publics eyes so thats an additional injustice that we need to be aware of that r

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