And Eric Garner’s family denounced the murders and expressed sympathy for the bereaved on the other side of the thin blue line. His daughter Emerald Garner laid a wreath at the site of the police murders two days later.
“I just had to come out and let their family know that we stand with them, and I’m going to send my prayers and condolences to all the families who are suffering through this tragedy,” she told ABC News. “I was never anti-police. Like I said before, I have family that’s in the NYPD that I’ve grown up around, family reunions and everything so my family you know, we’re not anti-police.Over the past couple of weeks, I have gone through a great deal of introspection about whether to delay the release of this report to a later time. We are clearly in a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not. There may never be the ‘right’ time to release it. The instability we see today will not be resolved in months or years. But this report is too important to shelve indefinitely. The simple fact is that the drone and air campaigns we have launched and pursued these last 18 years have proven to be a stain on our values and on our history.”
Emerald Garner proves that it’s possible to support the police while opposing brutality and excessive force. Maybe those of us who lived through New York’s crime wave and the white backlash have to leave the stage before we figure out a way to do both.
Nobody does, we agreed. The question is whether New York’s relative safety today can only be maintained at the expense of the police stopping, frisking, arresting and sometimes killing black men who didn’t deserve it.But I used to be a true believer. My parents made sure all five of their children were baptized and went to catechism until they had their first communion, which among Catholics is the first time a child receives the body of Christ in the form of unleavened bread and His blood in the form of wine.Say you’re sitting around the tree on Christmas morning and opening presents. You mostly give people gift cards of varying denominations, depending on familial proximity, because what the hell is Christmas presents between adults even about? It’s a mandatory cash transfer among family members, so you figure you might as well give the closest thing there is to cash without it being actual cash, even though that would be better, if people just took out their wallets and exchanged equal amounts of cash, to show off the absurdity of it all …
… So anyway, you give your uncle his $25 iTunes gift card. You hope that he will give you a $25 iTunes gift card in return, the equivalent of neither of you giving each other anything but instead shaking hands and pledging to spend $25 on the iTunes store, because it’s sort of funny when you think about it like that.
But nope, the gift you’re getting isn’t a slender parcel of about 10 square inches. It’s has the width and length of a book and the depth of one really long book. Is your uncle giving you “War and Peace”? Peculiar choice, but OK, been meaning to get around to that at some point. You start unwrapping. Oh wow, it’s several books — quite the expenditure. It’s … it’s … a Bill O’Reilly book bundle! “Killing Jesus,” “Killing Lincoln,” “Killing Kennedy” and a second copy of “Killing Jesus.”
“One for you to give out to one of your commie friends,” he says, chuckling.