Politics

De Blasio: Garner’s Death Not in Vain

Published

9 years ago

July 15, 2015

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pauses as he speaks during a memorial service for Eric Garner at the Mount Sinai United Christian Church in the Staten Island borough of New York Tuesday, July 14, 2015, just short of a year after Garner died while being taken into custody by New York City police officers. A $5.9 million settlement in Garner’s death, a black man who died after being placed in a white police officer’s chokehold, was reached with the city this week, days before the anniversary of his death. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

COLLEEN LONG, Associated Press
JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The death of an unarmed black man who was held in a police chokehold wasn’t in vain, and could help change the relationship between police officers and the communities they patrol, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a church service in honor of Eric Garner.

De Blasio spoke Tuesday night, the day after the city reached a $5.9 million settlement with Garner’s family over his July 2014 death. His family said they would continue pressing for federal civil rights charges.

“This is a new chapter in our relationship between the police and our communities,” de Blasio said. “That will make us a better people. That will make us a more just city. That will make us a safer city.”

De Blasio, who is white and is married to a black woman, spoke at the church the night of the grand jury decision not to indict the police officer. At that time, he connected personally to Garner’s death, speaking of how he talked to his biracial son about being careful in his dealings with police.

Those comments sparked outrage from police unions, who accused de Blasio of fostering an anti-police sentiment. When two officers were killed by a gunman in December, some officers turned their backs on the mayor at the funerals.

De Blasio made sure to be inclusive in his remarks on Tuesday.

“All lives matter,” he said, before explicitly saying that while it should be self-evident, it must be still said that “Black lives matter” and, after he praised the police, “Blue lives matter.”

The settlement came nearly a year after the 43-year-old Garner died, having repeatedly pleaded “I can’t breathe!” as Officer Daniel Pantaleo took him to the ground with an arm around his neck. Garner lost consciousness and was pronounced dead later at a hospital.

He had refused to be handcuffed after being stopped on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on a Staten Island street.

The encounter, caught on an onlooker’s video, triggered protests. Coupled with police killings of unarmed black men elsewhere in recent months, Garner’s death became a flashpoint in a national debate about relations between police and minority communities.

“‘I can’t breathe’ spurred the national movement,” and it won’t end “until we change how policing goes,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at a news conference Tuesday with Garner’s relatives.

“The victory will come when we get justice,” Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said Tuesday.

“Justice,” added one of Garner’s children, Emerald Snipes, “is when somebody is held accountable for what they do.”

The city medical examiner found the police chokehold contributed to Garner’s death. But Pantaleo’s lawyer said the officer had used a permissible takedown maneuver known as a seatbelt — not a chokehold, banned under New York Police Department policy.

A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo. The U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn are investigating whether there’s evidence to warrant charges that the officer deliberately violated Garner’s civil rights. Such cases are rare after grand jury inaction or acquittal at the state level.

Police Commissioner William Bratton declined to comment Tuesday on the Garner case. The settlement came before any lawsuit was filed, though the family had filed notice of its intention to sue. The city did not admit any liability.

___

Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Up Next

Obama to Visit Kilpatrick’s Prison in Oklahoma

Don't Miss

City of Richmond Finance Director Jim Goins Retires

Oakland Post

Click to comment

Bay Area

Map Reveals Measure X Fuel Reduction Progress Throughout Richmond

Passed by voters on Nov. 3, 2020, Measure X is a 0.5% tax on taxable purchases for general purposes, with the County Board of Supervisors determining how it will be used. The tax generates approximately $120 million annually in support of county services.

Published

5 hours ago

December 29, 2024

Oakland Post

Image courtesy of the City of Richmond.

By Kathy Chouteau, The Richmond Standard

A new interactive map spotlights the City of Richmond’s efforts to reduce fire hazards on City-owned parcels through the Measure X Fuel Reduction Program.

This Fuel Reduction Initiative is one-way Measure X funding is being applied, looking to improve community safety by “managing vegetation and mitigating fire risks across high-priority areas,” according to the City of Richmond.

On the map, community members can see parcels that have been completed, approved for treatment, or are currently under review, according to city sources. It added that the map also offers people a transparent view of the program’s progress.

Check out the map at https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/b17c829f94e249719f9191291a0bcae4/?org=cityofrichmond to see where various parcels in Richmond stand as part of the program funded by Measure X.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

Bay Area Soda Taxes Don’t Just Affect Sales: They Help Change People’s Minds

Published

6 hours ago

December 29, 2024

Oakland Post

In the years since voters in several Bay Area cities supported raising taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages like sodas, some juices and sports drinks, UC Berkeley researchers say the norms around those drinks have changed significantly. Photo by Emmanuel Edward/Unsplash.

UC Berkeley researchers found that taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, coupled with media attention, coincided with significant changes in social norms around sugary drinks.

By Jason Pohl
UC Berkeley News

It wasn’t that long ago when cigarettes and soda were go-to convenience store vices, glamorized in movies and marketed toward, well, everyone.

Then, lawmakers and voters raised taxes on cigarettes, and millions of dollars went into public education campaigns about smoking’s harms. Decades of news coverage chronicled how addictive and dangerous cigarettes were and the enormous steps companies took to hide the risks and hook more users.

The result: a radical shift in social norms that made it less acceptable to smoke and pushed cigarette use to historic lows, especially among minors.

New UC Berkeley research suggests sugar-sweetened beverages may be on a similar path.

The city of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation soda tax a decade ago, along with more recent Bay Area tax increases on sugar-sweetened drinks, have not only led to reduced sales. They are also associated with significant changes in social norms and attitudes about the healthfulness of sweet drinks, said Kristine A. Madsen, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and senior author of a paper published Nov. 25 in the journal BMC Public Health.

Over the span of just a few years, taxes coupled with significant media attention significantly affected the public’s overall perceptions of sugar-sweetened beverages, which include sodas, some juices, and sports drinks. Such a shift in the informal rules surrounding how people think and act could have major implications for public health efforts more broadly, Madsen said.

“Social norms are really powerful. The significant shift we saw in how people are thinking about sugary drinks demonstrates what else we could do,” Madsen said. “We could reimagine a healthier food system. It starts with people thinking, ‘Why drink so much soda?’ But what if we also said, ‘Why isn’t most of the food in our grocery stores food that makes us healthy?’”

Madsen and colleagues from UC San Francisco and UC Davis analyzed surveys from 9,128 people living in lower-income neighborhoods in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and Richmond. Using data from 2016 to 2019 and 2021, they studied year-to-year trends in people’s perception of sugar-sweetened beverages.

They wanted to understand how the four taxes in the Bay Area might have affected social norms surrounding sugary beverages — the unwritten and often unspoken rules that influence the food and drinks we buy, the clothes we wear and our habits at the dinner table.

Although social norms aren’t visible, they are incredibly powerful forces on our actions and behaviors; just ask anyone who has bought something after an influencer promoted it on TikTok or Instagram.

Researchers asked questions about how often people thought their neighbors drank sodas, sports drinks, and fruity beverages. Participants also rated how healthy several drinks were, which conveyed their own attitudes about the beverages.

The researchers found a 28% decline in the social acceptability of drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.

In Oakland, positive perceptions of peers’ consumption of sports drinks declined after the tax increase, relative to other cities. Similarly, in San Francisco, attitudes about the healthfulness of sugar-sweetened fruit drinks also declined.

In other words, people believed their neighbors weren’t drinking as many sugar-sweetened beverages, which affected their own interest in consuming soda, juices, and sports drinks.

“What it means when social norms change is that people say, ‘Gosh, I guess we don’t drink soda. That’s just not what we do. Not as much. Not all the time,’” Madsen said. “And that’s an amazing shift in mindsets.”

The research is the latest from UC Berkeley that examines how consumption patterns have changed in the decade since Berkeley implemented the nation’s first soda tax.

A 2016 study found a decrease in soda consumption and an increase in people turning to water. Research in 2019 documented a sharp decline in people turning to sugar-sweetened drinks. And earlier this year, Berkeley researchers documented that sugar-sweetened beverage purchases declined dramatically and steadily across five major American cities after taxes were put in place.

The penny-per-ounce tax on beverages, which is levied on distributors of sugary drinks — who ultimately pass that cost of doing business on to consumers — is an important means of communicating about health with the public, Madsen said.

Researchers tallied more than 700 media stories about the taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages during the study period. That level of messaging was likely a major force in driving public awareness and norms.

It’s also something Madsen said future public health interventions must consider. It was part of the progress made in cutting cigarette smoking and seems to be working with sugary drinks. And it’s those interventions that can lead to individual action.

“If we change our behaviors, the environment follows,” Madsen said. “While policy really matters and is incredibly important, we as individuals have to advocate for a healthier food system.”