Here's an Associated Press article patiently explaining that police officers need to be able to kill people during arrests and that all these "noisy protests" have made some police officers very sad because why can't people understand that not killing people during routine arrests
is just crazy talk.
Eric Garner was overweight and in poor health. He was a nuisance to shop owners who complained about him selling untaxed cigarettes on the street. When police came to arrest him, he resisted. And if he could repeatedly say, "I can't breathe," it means he could breathe.
Rank-and-file New York City police officers and their supporters have been making such arguments even before a grand jury decided against charges in Garner's death, saying the possibility that he contributed to his own demise has been drowned out in the furor over race and law enforcement.
"Contributed to his own demise" is really the only phrase needed there. The rest of the article is just repetition.
I don't have nearly enough patience to take this monstrosity of journalism on, but FAIR does so here you go. Read that instead.
[T]here's no one but police and their supporters quoted in the article, so there's no one to point out the moral pathology of suggesting that killing a "nuisance" is somehow less than blameworthy.
Or that death is a suitable punishment for resisting arrest. Or that a victim's poor health reduces a killer's culpability, as though we excuse a robber who fatally brains an elderly woman because it's not his fault her skull was so fragile.
Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don't need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don't need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.
You don't get any of those points in the article, because AP didn't feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don't matter.
I will say that the "if you can talk, you can breathe" talking point is an instant invalidator of the speaker, and something that continually makes me need to stifle the personal urge to punch the speaker in the throat. Yes, yes—the victim in such a scenario is attempting to convey that while they can indeed
currently breathe, they are not necessarily confident that they will be able to keep said breathing up much longer. I suppose the more proper expression would to say something like "Hello, persons surrounding me, I am getting fuzzy-headed due to lack of oxygen and my vision is blurring and I feel like I am going to pass out, I require immediate assistance because I cannot go on describing these various symptoms much longer."
Instead the person—say, an asthma or stranglehold victim—shortens it to something like a gasping three-word "I can't breathe" and expects/hopes the people surrounding him will comprehend what he or she meant by that, naturally assuming he or she is not surrounded by complete fucking idiots.
Follow below the fold for more.
I promise you that if you duct tape a trash bag over your head very, very tightly, you will be saying "I can't breathe," and people will be able to hear it reasonably clearly right up until the time you pass out and die. You will not say the longwinded version, because you cannot fucking breathe and you will not want to be wasting precious air-gasps on thinks like modifiers and prepositions and if-you-pleases. If anything, you will want to save that last gasp of oxygen for punching nearby pedants in the throat for arguing semantics with you.
All of that brings us to Rep. Peter King, who seems to have been hauled out as America's current spokesman-of-the-moment for the nation's firmament of stupid people.
If you've ever seen anyone locked up, anyone resisting arrest, they're always saying, "You're breaking my arm, you're killing me, you're breaking my neck." So if the cops had eased up or let him go at that stage, the whole struggle would have started in again.
Yes, no doubt every two-bit hood tells you they "can't breathe" when you're choking them, how are
we supposed to know that wrapping your arms around a person's neck until they pass out might lead to that person dying? It's not as if the police have been specifically instructed not to do that because it can and does kill—oh,
right. But Peter King is the chief proponent of the "if you can say you can't breathe, you're lying because you still can" theory of why it's all right to choke people, and he has been entirely undeterred by the sight of the man dead on the ground minutes after saying that.
So you see, that fellow could breathe, he just died afterwards in order to spite the officers and make them look bad. We'd rather plaster up stories like that than have the common rabble contemplate whether or not our methods of policing in America may have—shudder—a flaw or two, here and there. So we've got members of the House explaining to us that the lying dead guy was breathing fine right up until the part where he was dead. What a lovely bow we've put on that funeral wreath.