They Cannot Breathe

"The relationship between police and community has to change. The way we go about policing has to change. It has to change in this city. It has to change in this country."
"People who feel aggrieved are asking for something simple. They are asking for the notion of a society in which everyone is treated equally."
"The message from people who are being hurt the most is that violence will do no good. It will only set back the cause of reform."
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio

New York City once known for its high incidence of crime, decades ago bought into the "broken windows" theory that to stop crime, authorities would have to arrest urban disorder and vandalism on however small a scale it presented, to make an impact on more serious crimes and anti-social behaviour. The prevention of small crimes like public drinking and seemingly pedestrian thefts aided in creating a public feeling of order and lawfulness.

And it worked; by paying attention to the small crimes that were foisted on society and people tended to ignore, a larger realization that crime of any magnitude represented a social ill and in apprehending small crimes, larger crimes fell in occurrence; people began to expect no less. And law enforcement authorities took to the new reality of expunging crime from the public arena in small ways that would pose a detriment to the large ways impacting society.

A case in point: police deciding to arrest a man selling single cigarettes in a poor area of New York. The result of that decision to arrest a man who was evading taxation by selling single cigarettes led to the strangling death of that man who pleaded with the police who assailed him to let him breathe. He 'just happened' to be a black man. A New York 23-member grand jury, however, held that Officer Daniel Pantaleo had no idea he was choking Eric Garner.

Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann was dispatched to a park when someone called in to report a gun was being waved around that was "probably fake". It was, and the person who was waving it around, as children often do, was twelve years old. And he just happened to be a black child. When the squad car stopped in the park it took mere seconds for Officer Loehmann to exit the car and shoot the boy.

This was, incidentally a police officer forced to resign from a suburban police force in Ohio, deemed by them to be emotionally unstable, along with the notation that "his handgun performance was dismal", but when he was hired by the Cleveland police, that file, they claim was never reviewed. The social cultural view of American blacks being somehow expendable and that white authority was on a never-ending collision course with its black demographic represents a dismal national failure.

New York City 'die-in' protest -- Carolyn Sung, CNN