A review by bleary
I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi
5.0
A brilliant, brutal, essential book for life in 2017. It's the story of Eric Garner, a cigarette bootlegger who was choked to death in public by NYPD in 2014, but Taibbi's scope is much broader than that. It's structured like an episode of Law & Order, with the first part looking at the crime and the second dealing with the legal aftermath.
Part one is a biography of Eric Garner and a study of the community around him. Staten Island is effectively segregated with a police force that sometimes seems like an occupying army, and the people of colour in the south part of the island pretty much expect to spend some time inside. Garner, who married and became a stepdad young, tried his hand dealing crack but sucked at it, and eventually turned to selling cigarettes illegally imported from Virgina.
The mundane nature of police violence in south Staten Island is numbing. It's a place where you can be hauled from your car and beaten, or subjected to a full strip search in the middle of the street, or have the money in your pocket taken as evidence and then mysteriously lost on its way to the station. Garner decided he had enough one day and stood up to an officer who accused him of cigarettes when he clearly hadn't been (he had just broken up a fight). Wrong place, wrong time, wrong cop, and an hour later, Eric Garner was dead.
The case was a global sensation and then forgotten when the next atrocity occurred, but that doesn't mean it was over. In fact, the second part of this book is incomplete as so many threads are still awaiting their conclusion: the cop who killed Garner is still on police payroll, and the files from the bizarre grand jury are still sealed.
This second part mostly focuses on Erica, Garner's daughter who continues to push for justice. It reads like a tragic, gruesome version of [b:The Bonfire of the Vanities|2666|The Bonfire of the Vanities|Tom Wolfe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389856895s/2666.jpg|1080201], with the upper tiers of New York life all trying to manipulate this case to their political advantage and forgetting about the dead black body at the heart of it.
For Taibbi, the cause of death goes beyond corruption in New York. "Eric Garner was killed by history," he says, having examined the nature of 21st century segregation. Cops are not necessarily racist or brutal, he reckons, but they are employed by a system that works to keep whites and non-whites separated, and assumes that anyone who isn't white is inherently lawless.
There's no point in blaming the cops. It's America that's rotten. And it has elected a president that is determined to keep it that way.
Part one is a biography of Eric Garner and a study of the community around him. Staten Island is effectively segregated with a police force that sometimes seems like an occupying army, and the people of colour in the south part of the island pretty much expect to spend some time inside. Garner, who married and became a stepdad young, tried his hand dealing crack but sucked at it, and eventually turned to selling cigarettes illegally imported from Virgina.
The mundane nature of police violence in south Staten Island is numbing. It's a place where you can be hauled from your car and beaten, or subjected to a full strip search in the middle of the street, or have the money in your pocket taken as evidence and then mysteriously lost on its way to the station. Garner decided he had enough one day and stood up to an officer who accused him of cigarettes when he clearly hadn't been (he had just broken up a fight). Wrong place, wrong time, wrong cop, and an hour later, Eric Garner was dead.
The case was a global sensation and then forgotten when the next atrocity occurred, but that doesn't mean it was over. In fact, the second part of this book is incomplete as so many threads are still awaiting their conclusion: the cop who killed Garner is still on police payroll, and the files from the bizarre grand jury are still sealed.
This second part mostly focuses on Erica, Garner's daughter who continues to push for justice. It reads like a tragic, gruesome version of [b:The Bonfire of the Vanities|2666|The Bonfire of the Vanities|Tom Wolfe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389856895s/2666.jpg|1080201], with the upper tiers of New York life all trying to manipulate this case to their political advantage and forgetting about the dead black body at the heart of it.
For Taibbi, the cause of death goes beyond corruption in New York. "Eric Garner was killed by history," he says, having examined the nature of 21st century segregation. Cops are not necessarily racist or brutal, he reckons, but they are employed by a system that works to keep whites and non-whites separated, and assumes that anyone who isn't white is inherently lawless.
There's no point in blaming the cops. It's America that's rotten. And it has elected a president that is determined to keep it that way.