The Brooklyn Rail

Community Policing Is Not The Solution To Racist Police Violence

In the summer of 2014 an NYPD officer choked Eric Garner to death in an altercation that began because the officer suspected that Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” were caught on a video that captured the attention of the country and, along with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of the nation’s attention.