Five years later, the cop who killed Eric Garner has finally been fired.
NYPD commissioner James P. O’Neill announced the news on Monday, two weeks after an administrative judge recommended Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s termination. The judge, according to the New York Times, found Pantaleo’s statements to investigators were “untruthful” during an internal disciplinary trial.
“In this case, the unintended consequence of Mr. Garner’s death must have a consequence of its own,” Commissioner O’Neill said at a press conference Monday. “It is clear that Daniel Pantaleo can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer.”
You can watch the commissioner’s press conference here:
Pantaleo was one of nearly a dozen officers implicated in Garner’s death in Staten Island in 2014. According to video taken of the incident, Pantaleo put Garner in a choke hold while arresting him for illegally selling cigarettes. Garner repeatedly said he could not breathe, but officers ignored his pleas, and he was pronounced dead less than an hour later. The medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide.
Garner’s death came just a month before the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent protests across the country.
Shortly after Garner’s death, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, leading to further protests across the United States, and understandable outrage from Garner’s family. A year later, in July 2015, the Garner family settled with the City of New York for nearly $6 million. One of Garner’s daughters, Erica, became a leader in the movement against police brutality and led marches to the scene of her father’s death twice a month for a year, but she died of a heart attack in 2017 at the age of 27.
Earlier this year, Attorney General William Barr decided not to bring criminal charges against Pantaleo under federal civil rights laws. This decision was announced the day before the five-year anniversary of Garner’s death. According to the New York Times, Barr’s “intervention settled the disagreement between prosecutors in the civil rights division, which has pushed for an indictment, and Brooklyn prosecutors, who never believed the department could win such a case.”
Prior to the Garner case, Pantaleo was sued three times for allegedly violating the constitutional rights of black men, including for allegedly forcing two men he’d arrested on suspicion of drug possession to strip in public. The charges against the men were later dropped, and the men settled with the city out of court, but Pantaleo was allowed to keep working. Two years later, he killed Eric Garner.
