I Can't Breathe Read online

  For Pedro, the new regime just put an official government stamp on neighborhood rules that he’d understood since his earliest childhood days. The streets may seem free and public, but they don’t belong to you. You walk down them at someone else’s pleasure, with someone else’s permission.

  “That’s what’s so crazy about it. It was the same thing in a lot of ways.”

  —

  By the early 2000s, Serrano was out of school and looking for a career direction. As a younger man, he’d gone to LaGuardia Community College, had worked at the Hunts Point meat market, had loaded trucks and done some bookkeeping. None of these jobs excited him. Eventually he got a gig working in a Bally’s gym in the Bronx.

  There were a lot of cops and corrections officers at the gym, and Pedro started thinking about joining one or the other service. Obviously his prior experience with the police growing up in the Bronx was a serious issue for him—his memories didn’t exactly predispose him to police work. But one of the gymgoers, a female corrections officer, urged him to join the police. She insisted that the best reason was that the institution needed to be reformed from within.

  “There are plenty of minority officers in corrections,” she said. “But the police department is highly racist. They need more good minority cops. You could change it from the inside.”

  So Serrano joined the NYPD at age thirty-four, just before the cutoff date of thirty-five. He went to the academy and built up a circle of friends, most of them other minority cops.

  In school, the NYPD trainers were very explicit. Not only was racial profiling not allowed, but doing it, they said, might cost you your job.

  Serrano was impressed. He believed the rap. When he and his friends graduated, they were all itching to get started. They all stayed in touch, anxious to hear what one another’s experiences on the street were like.

  Serrano’s first assignment was a foot patrol in the Bronx, a little south of his old neighborhood. His job seemed a little dull at first, but pretty soon he was getting texts and calls from his fellow rookies all over the city, with fantastic stories.

  “I’m standing on 149th Street and Third Avenue, and my friend calls me,” Serrano recalls. “He says, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m standing on a corner for eight hours. What are you doing?’

  “He says, ‘I’m in a van. You wouldn’t believe what’s happening. We’re jumping out and tossing people at random. No rhyme or reason. We just go into their pockets. We’re looking for drugs, and weapons, and arrests.’ ”

  Serrano’s friend started telling him about how the cops in his precinct—this was the Fifty-second, up in the northwest Bronx, a tough neighborhood that included “hot spots” like Bedford Park—were not just stopping people at random but strip-searching them. They had a term for it: “socially raping.” Sometimes they’d yank a guy’s pants down in the precinct, but other times they’d do it in the open air, right on the sidewalk.

  “He’s like, ‘We’re strip-searching people on the street!’

  “And I’m like, ‘Listen, man, what are you talking about?’

  “He says, ‘I’m telling you, I’ve seen a guy’s penis, I’ve seen his ass, you can’t believe what’s going on here.’ ”

  Even worse, after they’d search a guy, the cops in this unit would make the detainee thank the officers for not arresting him.

  “It was intimidation,” Serrano says. “It’s like, ‘You see me coming, you drop your pants. And when we’re done, say thank you.’ ”

  In certain precincts, Serrano learned, young academy recruits were being pressed by older lieutenants and sergeants to execute these mass searches. Then, if the recruits botched the searches—broke rules, violated rights—the elders would fix it for them.

  “If a guy screwed up, they made it right,” Serrano says. “He’d say, ‘Oh, I found this gun in a trunk.’ And they’d say, ‘You’re not supposed to search the trunk. But don’t worry about it, kid. You found it in the backseat. And you saw the tip of the gun on the passenger side. It was right near you, remember? Okay, write it down. Now you’re okay, guy.’ ”

  Serrano pauses as he tells the story now. “It turns into that, you understand? You pull the guy over, you socially rape the guy. Then you search his trunk, then you find a gun and get a collar.”

  It got worse. In his first few years on the force, Serrano saw a mania for statistics that corrupted the entire mission of the police department.

  There was an emphasis on generating arrests and summonses—what cops called “activity”—that turned the police department into a kind of industrial production scheme. As a textile company produces shirts, pants, and socks, the NYPD produced stops, arrests, and tickets (and with luck, but far less often, guns), mainly using young black and Latino males as the raw materials.

  The police were also supposed to be deterring crime—preventing it from happening in the first place. The problem was that police were also in charge of reporting crime—that is, keeping account of the problem they were supposed to be eliminating.

  These bureaucratic imperatives, Serrano saw, pushed the NYPD toward a pair of dovetailing data-massaging schemes.

  The first was to generate stops, searches, and seizures in huge numbers. This was designed to show concrete effort in the fight against crime.

  The second imperative was to suppress as many reports of felonies as possible. This was to show the result of all of that effort.

  Serrano remembers that any attempt to write up a felony often got immediate attention from a supervisor. He tells a story of responding to a call in which a woman claimed her house had been burglarized. She insisted that her adolescent daughter left a window open before going to school and someone had come in through the window, stolen all of the liquor out of her liquor cabinet, and gone back out through the window.

  “It’s a burglary,” says Serrano. “A felony. A bullshit felony, but a felony. And I tried to write it up that way. But my supervisor came on scene immediately and told me, ‘Don’t write it up. The daughter took it.’

  “I’m like, ‘Boss, she was in school, she couldn’t have.’

  “ ‘The daughter did it and that’s that.’ ”

  With this kind of pressure, a street cop like Serrano was now in an increasingly ridiculous position. On the one hand, he or she was discouraged from reporting real crime in the community, which had the effect of letting people know that police weren’t interested in committing resources to their actual needs.

  On the other hand, cops were pushed into the position of producing huge numbers of useless and antagonizing stops and summonses for the bosses.

  So they couldn’t do their jobs, but they couldn’t leave people alone, either.

  Serrano would ask his bosses, “We know who the drug dealers are, why don’t we just surveil them until we can make a clean arrest?”

  The answer he’d get was, “That takes too long. Faster just to toss them.”

  The only snag in the deal was that tossing random people is illegal if you don’t have probable cause. For cops to generate searches fast enough to make the numbers work, they essentially had to prejustify every stop. You couldn’t possibly wait for the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” each time.

  The problem was solved through every bureaucracy’s secret power: paperwork. The form that police used to make records of their stops, called a UF-250, evolved over time to make generating a bogus reason for a stop and/or a search as simple as possible. In the 2000s, police checked boxes on a form indicating their reasons for “250” stops. These included:

  • Inappropriate attire

  • Furtive movement

  • Actions indicative of engaging in violent crimes

  • Suspicious bulge

  Thus if you were standing in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time of day, wrong day of the week, wrong season in the year, or you made a “furtive movement” or wore “inappropriate attire,” you could be stopped.

 
When experts studied these forms, they found that the legally meaningless term “furtive movement” was listed as a reason for a stop in about half of all cases.

  It was clear to anyone looking honestly at the numbers that police had been encouraged to lie on official forms millions of times. Even worse than this mass deception was the psychological reflex this process ingrained in police. In order to justify all of these stops, police had to be trained to see the young men they were tossing as deserving what they got, before they even did anything. They were taught to presuspect entire neighborhoods. It was a factory-style Minority Report.

  Serrano describes riding around in cars with white cops, listening to them talk about the kids in the projects like they weren’t even human, totally oblivious to the fact that Serrano himself had been one of those kids.

  “Look at these fuckin’ animals,” they’d say. “Look at these savages.”

  Now when police rolled up to groups of teenagers hanging out on the street, Serrano saw that his fellow officers were already in confrontation mode before they even got on scene.

  “They’d say, ‘What the fuck are you doing here? Get the fuck out of here,’ ” he remembers.

  “Now you’re messing with [the kids’] pride,” Serrano explains. “And in every group of three or four kids, there’s always one that’s a little unstable. Inevitably, that kid says something. Now it’s an arrest: disorderly conduct, obstructing government administration, blocking pedestrian traffic, whatever. If there’s a struggle, now it’s assaulting a police officer.”

  He pauses.

  “But the point is, you created the situation. You could have handled it differently, if all you wanted was to get them to move off the corner. You could say, ‘Look, man, I’ve got a job to do, and you’re scaring some people. If you take it somewhere else, everything’s cool.’ ”

  By the late 2000s and early 2010s, Serrano and multiple other (mostly minority) officers were fed up with the numbers game. They created a kind of secret union within the police union to discuss it. They had no choice: the actual police union was no help.

  As Serrano soon learned, police unions not only didn’t protest the numbers regime, they actually bargained with the NYPD over the number of illegal stops their members would have to make each year.

  This came out, among other things, via a secret recording made by a Dominican officer named Adhyl Polanco. In a roll call meeting at the Forty-first Precinct, a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association rep addresses the troops and explains what the union has been negotiating with the department.

  “I spoke to the CO for about an hour and a half on the activity, twenty-and-one,” the PBA rep says. “Twenty-and-one is what the union is backing up.”

  “Twenty-and-one” meant twenty summonses and one arrest. Polanco had captured, on tape, proof of a quota system that the department and its union were complicit in building.

  Just like Serrano, Polanco had been put in the position of writing up innocent people. In one incident, he was forced to cuff a thirteen-year-old Mexican boy, with his superiors telling him they’d figure out the charge later. He even recounted being ordered to summons a guy for having no dog license when Polanco couldn’t even see a dog.

  Inspired by Polanco, Serrano decided to tape his own bosses. He had clashed with a deputy inspector of the Fortieth Precinct named Christopher McCormack, a man nicknamed Red Rage for his propensity for full-throated screaming sessions. On one of the tapes, he asked McCormack to explain what he was supposed to do with regard to his 250s.

  “This is about stopping the right people, the right place, the right location,” McCormack seethed.

  He told Serrano that in the Mott Haven neighborhood, where “we have the most problems,” his goal should be to stop young black men.

  “The problem was what?” McCormack said. “Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, I have no problem telling you this, male blacks, fourteen to twenty, twenty-one. I said this at roll call.”

  —

  Serrano didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d procured one of the main pieces of evidence in the lawsuit that would ultimately put an end to the Stop-and-Frisk program he’d been around since childhood.

  The line about “stopping the right people” also perfectly summarized an increasingly ugly argument that America was having with itself about race.

  Open racism for the most part had vanished from mainstream debate since the civil rights era, replaced with a series of arguments by proxy. Recalcitrant white America complained about things like “cultures of dependency,” “free stuff,” and “income redistribution,” but the most passionate complaints were always about crime.

  Fifty years after Selma, few Americans outside of extremist neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront.org were willing to make the blunt eugenic argument that nonwhite people were somehow predisposed to commit crimes.

  What was offered up in more mainstream circles was a slight semantic twist on the same take: minority neighborhoods are “where the crime is,” and any program designed to stop potential criminals should target blacks and Hispanics as the “right people” to stop.

  A version of this argument quietly took over the leadership of the NYPD during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Later, through the bizarre spectacle of New York billionaire Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it would bleed into national presidential politics. Trump would seize the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency itself by promising to build a “big, beautiful wall” to keep out rape-happy Mexicans, a lunatic ploy that defied actual crime rates and that would never have worked had millions of people not believed in the inherent criminality of other races.

  Like Trump’s wall, New York’s new policing regime was also a form of border enforcement. It was about keeping “the right people” off the streets, not through physical walls but through constant, demoralizing, physically invasive harassment.

  The argument that raged in the city then, and nationwide later on, went like this: Was this racism or simply effective law enforcement?

  While conservatives and liberals sorted that out, minorities of all descriptions who lived in big cities were caught up in the question of who “the right people” were to keep off the streets. Were they hardened criminals, the “one” in the twenty-and-one quota who would actually be arrested? Or were they complete noncriminals, the other twenty who were just the wrong kind of people on the wrong corner at the wrong time? Or were they people like Eric Garner, who in his later years began to fall somewhere in between?

  FOUR JOHN

  By 2007, Eric Garner was home from jail and living in Staten Island, where his wife had moved while he was inside. His family was in shambles. Most of his children were in some version of state care, having been removed because of various problems in the home.

  Still, committed to keeping his agreement with his family, Eric was trying to fly straight. Through a state program called Back to Work, he’d gotten a job with the Parks Department in Staten Island, picking up trash from median strips and parks.

  But the job only paid about $68 every two weeks, and before long, Garner began to slip. One day in September of that year, he got arrested for dealing one last time, but it was a very different kind of arrest.

  Garner didn’t like to write. His mother used to pick on him for his handwriting, calling it a “chicken scratch.” Nonetheless, from a jail cell in Rikers Island on September 12, 2007, where he was awaiting trial, yet again, Garner in painstaking scrawl described his last arrest for crack dealing, telling a story very similar to the one Pedro Serrano told about police field searches:

  On September 1, 2007, at Approx 7:30 p.m. on the corner of Castalton Ave & Heberton Ave Officer William Owens and his team stopped me for reasons of there own. I was ordered to place my hands on the black SUV in which they were riding in. I compliyed with no problem. Officer William Owens then patted me down by ways of going through my pockets and socks and not finding anything illegal on my person. Officer William
Owens then places me IN handcuffs and then performs an cavity search ON me by ways of “Digging his finggers in my rectum in the middle of the street” Officer William Owens also unzips my shorts and feels under my testicals in the middle of the street, all the while there are people passing back and forth.

  I told Officer William Owens to stop and if he wanted to do a strip search I was willing to go to the police station because I had nothing to hide, my request was ignored. I then told Officer William Owens that I was fileing charges for him violating my civil rights, I was then hit with drug charges and told by Officer William Owens that “I don’t deserve my city job because I’m a convicted felon on parole.” (I work for the New York City Park Department)

  Under “Injuries,” Garner wrote the following:

  The injuries I received were to my manhood in which Officer William Owens violated by ways of digging his fingers in my rectum and pulling my penis out in public so he can feel my testicals for his own personal pleasure. Officer William Owens violated my civil rights.

  The suit went nowhere and Garner lost his criminal case. Originally accused of selling crack again, Garner had the charge knocked down to possession. He got a year.

  Eric Garner did not do well in jail. While other men found ways to cope, for Garner confinement of any kind was pure suffering. In his miserable state, his conversations with Esaw, who had never been terribly sympathetic about his stints in jail, deteriorated significantly. She called him a crybaby and refused to visit.

  “You don’t visit me, I’m going to kill myself,” he told her by phone.

  “Don’t kill yourself because of me,” she said sharply. “Kill yourself because you want to be dead.”

  Garner had no reply to that.

  “I refused to send him my money. I refused to send him any packages. I just refused,” Esaw explains. “I used to tell him, ‘If you needed all this stuff, you should have stayed your ass out of jail!’ ”

  —

  When Eric came home a year later, he was severely depressed.