Peter King, shown actually caring about Hurricane Sandy victims sometime last year.
If he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died from this. The police had no reason to know that he was in serious condition.
I know people were saying that he said 11 times or seven times, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Well, the fact is, if you can’t breathe, you can’t talk.
—Rep. Peter King (R-NY), on the death of Eric Garner
In case you have been living under a rock this week, a grand jury in New York City borough of Staten Island declined to return an indictment this week against a police officer who put a chokehold on a man who was allegedly committing the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. This chokehold resulted in the man's death. The man's name was Eric Garner, and the chokehold and subsequent application of pressure to his head and neck by the same officer directly led to Garner's death.
There is full video of the incident. None of the facts are in dispute. The officer in question had three colleagues with him. Garner was unarmed. Unlike the case in Ferguson where officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown with no indictment, there is no way that Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City police officer in question, could have claimed that he felt his life was in danger. The chokehold he used was banned as a tactic by the NYPD. Even worse, Garner complained no fewer than 11 times that he was unable to breathe because of Pantaleo's actions. And yet no indictment was returned against the officer who committed an unequivocal homicide.
Even Bill O'Reilly, who is not known as the most compassionate individual on this planet, felt that the killing of Garner was unjustified, expressed pity, and wished that Pantaleo had exercised some modicum of restraint. Such capacity, however, is beyond the capacity of Peter King, who blamed Garner's death on his own health issues, rather than any action taken by Pantaleo.
More below the fold.
It's hard to know precisely what King is getting at. Perhaps he thinks that people who are in less than perfect physical condition should do everything they possibly can to avoid a situation where they might be placed in illegal chokeholds and basically strangled to death by police officers who will never be held accountable. Or perhaps King thinks that cops should have a right to strangle whomever they damn well please, and contingent with that is the right to assume that anyone they do strangle is in the physical condition to handle being strangled. And perhaps King assumes that anyone who allows themselves to be in less than ideal health when an officer decides to use illegal strangulation tactics on them has nobody to blame but themselves for not being tough enough to handle the stochastic choking to which law enforcement may subject them at any given moment.
It would seem, given these circumstances, that Rep. King would want to do everything in his power to make sure that the general public could do everything they can to keep themselves as healthy as possible to successfully endure the unavoidable natural disaster of being randomly choked to death by a police officer. Let's take Garner as an example. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the New York Times reported that Garner suffered from a variety of medical conditions that made his life so difficult that he had to quit his job:
It is unclear if the chokehold contributed to the death on Thursday afternoon of Mr. Garner, who was at least 6 feet 3 inches tall and who, friends said, had several health issues: diabetes, sleep apnea, and asthma so severe that he had to quit his job as a horticulturist for the city’s parks department. He wheezed when he talked and could not walk a block without resting, they said.
Surely, given King's quest to have every American able-bodied enough to withstand being throttled at random intervals by law enforcement, he would look at a man like Garner—seemingly unemployed and with potentially debilitating chronic conditions to manage—and figure out what could be done to get him healthy enough to have survived the encounter he had with Pantaleo. Amazingly, there is something already in existing law that could help with King's endeavor: it's call the Affordable Care Act. It provides the ability for people with low incomes and people who are already sick to be able to get health insurance, go see a doctor, and maybe get well enough to survive sudden periods of officer-induced oxygen deprivation.
It's a law with so many wonderful benefits for those about to be protected and served through asphyxiation. It's a wonder, then, that King has voted to often to kill it, like he did here and here and here and here and here and here and here, just to list a few out of many.
The other possibility is that Peter King is a miserably sociopathic social Darwinist who likes to watch people die. It's odd: for someone so opposed to the supposed death panels of Obamacare, he sure doesn't mind seeing the NYPD serve as executioners for people he deems too sick to live.