Police Commissioner Bill Bratton sent New Yorkers an important message Tuesday in the wake of Eric Garner’s death, allegedly by police chokehold: There is no constitutional right to resist arrest.
“What we’ve seen in the past few months is a number of individuals failing to understand that you must submit to arrest, you cannot resist,” Bratton said in an interview on Brian Lehrer’s radio show. “The place to argue your case is in the court, not in the street.”
It’s a critical point, and one Bratton’s made before. We just wish he wasn’t the only public official sending that message.
The simple fact, painful as it may be for some to acknowledge, is that Eric Garner would be alive today if he’d cooperated when cops tried to arrest him for illegally selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.
Instead, he argued with police, refused to put his hands behind his back, accused them of harassing him and vowed, “It ends today.”
As Bratton said from the outset, “My officers are not going to walk away” when someone resists arrest. He also notes that cops aren’t in the harassment business.
Enforcement of “quality of life” crimes, like selling loose cigarettes, is prompted by calls from community merchants and local officials, who “definitely want more police in their neighborhoods.”
The fastest way to defuse a confrontation like the one that ended in Garner’s death is not to resist arrest.
And if folks like Mayor de Blasio and assorted community leaders (who seem bent on besmirching cops) truly want to prevent tragedies like Garner’s, they’ll repeat that lesson publicly and often.
Suspects have every right to fight charges against them. What they don’t have is a right to fight the cops.