Criminal suspects should just surrender quietly and not resist arrest to avoid ugly clashes with cops, police commissioner Bill Bratton said Tuesday.
“What we’re seeing … over the last several months [is] a number of individuals just failing to understand that you must submit to an arrest, that you cannot resist it” Bratton said on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. “The place to argue your case is in court, not in the middle of the street.”
The top cop, appearing on the radio show to clear up “an awful lot of [public] confusion about … broken windows types of activity” in the wake of the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died while struggling with cops who wanted to bust him for selling loose cigarettes.
“In terms of actual quality of life types of offenses, those are in fact actual criminal acts witnessed by a police officer, or violations of city ordinanaces,” Bratton said. “If people would obey the law, then they would not be drawing the attention of the police.”
Bratton’s appearance came amid continued scrutiny over the broken windows policing and Garner’s death, whose death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner’s office in a preliminary report.
Garner, a 43-year-old husband and father of six with a lengthy criminal background, died after being placed into a chokehold by Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Tompkinsville on July 17.
The 350-pound Garner, who had a litany of potentially contributing medical conditions, was suspected of peddling loosies before the fatal encounter.
Video of the incident showed Garner physically resisting as he was placed in the hold, a move which is banned by the NYPD.
Pantaleo was forced to turn in his gun and badge, and has been placed on modified duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
Despite the controversy and local protests over Garner’s death, Bratton insisted that law-abiding residents of high-crime communities are clamoring for more cops on the street and increased enforcement of quality of life laws.
“We go where the concerns are expressed,” Bratton said. “If you take a look at where a lot of those [311 and 911] calls are coming from, they tend to be oftentimes in minority neighborhoods.”
“So it’s the community themselves, the law-abiding community, the people that want to be free of some of the disorder, some of the disturbances,” the commissioner said.