The Role Data Played in Eric Garner’s Death
A protestor attends a Dec. 8, 2014, rally outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn against a grand jury's decision not to indict the police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner. John Minchillo / AP Photo
311 information and ‘broken windows’ policing strategy were intertwined in the circumstances that led to a tragedy in New York City.
It’s been nearly a year since Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk in a horrific incident involving the New York Police Department that was captured in bystander video seen countless times around the world.
While a grand jury declined to indict the white police officer who used a chokehold on Garner that a medical examiner determined led to the black Staten Island resident’s death, the Garner case, which prompted public protests in New York City and elsewhere, remains under scrutiny.
This weekend in an in-depth investigation, The New York Times published new details about Garner’s deadly encounter with law enforcement and the circumstances that lead up to it and the subsequent response by police and emergency medical personnel.
The timeline of what lead up to Garner’s July 17, 2014, death actually began months earlier.
As The Times reported, the location where Garner died in Staten Island’s Tompkinsville neighborhood was the site of “at least 98 arrests, 100 criminal court summonses, 646 calls to 911 and nine complaints to 311” so far that year.
Garner, who had been previously arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes on the sidewalk, and other men would hang out regularly at that location along Bay Street near Tompkinsville Park.
That March, an apartment building landlord, Gjafer Gjeshbitraj, filed complaints with the city via 311 regarding the sidewalk loiterers, according to the The Times.
And it was at that point where the worlds of 311 municipal data and the NYPD’s “broken windows” policing strategy met.
According to The Times:
The complaints eventually reached Police Headquarters, where leaders track spikes in 311 calls for problems such as noise or graffiti as harbingers of more serious crime. Staten Island commanders were briefed in March on the conditions around Tompkinsville Park, a triangle of land just south of the borough’s main courthouse. Mr. Gjeshbitraj was not the first to lament the disorder there. But after his March complaint, he saw swift changes, mostly in the form of arrests.
Despite the extra attention, he said the problem persisted.
A few months later after Gjeshbitraj filed reports to 311 about the loitering men, Garner died on the sidewalk while struggling to say “I can’t breathe” while being held in a chokehold by a police officer.
According to a final autopsy obtained by The Times, the Garner’s death was the result of a chokehold and chest compressions from the NYPD officer, which had been captured in the shocking bystander video.
While municipal data didn’t kill Garner, it did play a big role in the circumstances leading up to the tragedy involving police use of force on that Staten Island sidewalk.
The integration of 311 complaints with crime data can be a powerful tool to deploy effective on-the-street localized policing strategies in cities across the nation.
But with those data-tapping powers come great responsibilities for law enforcement personnel on patrol, something New York City is still grappling with.
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Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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