In what imaginary world does it make any sense that advice is sought from an arsonist on putting out fires?
It's a question that comes to mind whenever I see the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose decades-long experience in fanning hostility between blacks and whites makes him singularly repugnant, pontificate on the latest racial controversy.
There was Sharpton on Meet the Press this morning, duly armed with kerosene, doing his part to make matters worse in the aftermath of a Staten Island grand jury deciding against indicting a New York City police officer in the death of Eric Garner last July in a so-called chokehold --
MTP HOST CHUCK TODD: I want to get you to react to something that Patrick Lynch, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association president in New York, said on Thursday. Here's what he said --
LYNCH: You cannot resist arrest because resisting arrest leads to confrontation, confrontation leads to tragedy. ... So we feel badly that there was a loss of life, but unfortunately Mr. Garner made a choice that day to resist arrest.
TODD: Blaming Mr. Garner.
SHARPTON: Well, first of all, to blame the victim, the insensitivity of that is striking. (Right up there with Garner's widow, sitting alongside Sharpton on Meet the Press, describing her late husband as "very lazy"). But it's also, when you look at the video, the difference between Ferguson and Staten Island, even though we bring them together for this march, is there's a video. And if you see in the video a man taken down, on the ground with police over him, and then you continue to choke him and the chokehold is illegal, are you now saying at the worst case scenario, if he had resisted arrest and clearly he didn't, that the penalty then is you choke him to death? I think it's the most absurd premise that this person could have resisted.
If the chokehold by police in New York City is illegal, as Sharpton claims, why is there a push for legislation to make it illegal? According to a Dec. 3 story at Huffington Post, NYC councilman Rory Lancman last month filed a bill "that makes it illegal to use a chokehold that 'limits or cuts off the flow of air by compressing the windpipe, or the flow of blood.' The legislation would make such a chokehold a misdemeanor crime punishable by imprisonment of up to a year, a fine up to $2,500, or both."
The HuffPo story helpfully pointed out that NYPD "currently" has a "departmental policy that prohibits chokeholds, but this legislation would go further by imposing legal penalties" -- and rendering the tactic illegal, which it now isn't, regardless of how often Sharpton and his ilk claim otherwise.
While it quickly became conventional wisdom that police used a chokehold in attempting to arrest Garner, this is hardly beyond dispute. Former New York City detective Bo Dietl, in a New York Post op-ed last August, made a persuasive argument that Garner was restrained with a headlock, not a chokehold.
Dietl's column began with a well-deserved jab at Sharpton, who has "never had to put himself in harm's way to protect our streets against crime, as police officers do every day. He's in no way qualified to stand on his soapbox and dictate procedures."
Dietl, on the other hand, "spent decades in law enforcement" before becoming a security consultant, author and Fox News personality. (Stephen Baldwin portrayed him in "One Tough Cop"). While he was with the NYPD, Dietl writes, "I was responsible for over 1,400 felony arrests -- any of which could've required the use of deadly physical force." His work as a decoy cop resulted in hundreds of muggings, 30 of which sent him to the hospital.
Here's Dietl's take on what happened with Garner --
The officers who approached Garner were responding to community complaints about his ongoing activities. When he grew uncooperative and resisted arrest, they followed protocol on taking him into custody.
Officers are required to be as quick as possible in getting a perpetrator into custody so that he has no chance to injure the officer, innocent bystanders or himself.
Garner was 6-foot-3 and 350 pounds. Using a headlock to bring down a man of that size was appropriate.
Headlocks are used in thousands of arrests each year, especially of individuals not cooperating with police. I used the maneuver in dozens of arrests.
And it was a headlock, not a chokehold. To be a chokehold, there must be constant pressure on a person's neck, compressing his windpipe or cutting off the flow of blood to the carotid artery, rendering him unconscious.
Watch the video: It's obvious that the arresting officer put his arm around Garner's neck to bring him to the ground -- but once Garner was on the ground, he was still conscious and able to say he couldn't breathe.
Dietl further points out that medical workers responding to the scene did not administer oxygen to Garner, ascertain that he was asthmatic or use an inhaler to help him breathe -- all of which surely contributed to his death.
Sharpton also claimed that Garner was "clearly" not resisting arrest -- but if that were true, only a single cop would have been needed to take him into custody, not a half-dozen, and the page views of any video showing this might hit double-digits on YouTube. In reality, this was a textbook example of resisting arrest -- and Garner's defiant boast that "it ends today" proved terribly prophetic.
