Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:46 UTC Protesters in New York in December, 2014, after a grand jury elected not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner Seven years ago this past weekend, on July 17, 2014, a Staten Island man named Eric Garner was killed by police in a gruesome scene that went viral and helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement. Press reports usually say Garner was stopped on suspicion of selling cigarettes by plainclothes officers who then choked him to death, but the story I wrote about in I Can't Breathe was both stupider and more tragic than that. Garner's death was a confluence of a hundred terrible developments, but above all a grotesque governance failure. It was a classic example of how even the most harmless-sounding ideas can, in the hands of the wrong people, become deadly policy.