Eric Garner’s ‘I can’t breathe’ continues to echo across NYC and the world 10 years after his death

Eric Garner’s dying declaration, “I can’t breathe,” was repeated 11 times on a Staten Island sidewalk. His utterances were muffled by an NYPD officer’s chokehold around his neck.

But the words, immortalized in an onlooker’s cell phone video, continue to echo across New York City and the globe as the 10-year anniversary of his killing approaches.

Chants of “I can’t breathe” still sound in protests against police violence and racial injustice around the world – just as they did that summer a decade ago. The words have graced presidents’ lips, the backs of athletes’ jerseys, and even show up on stage. A Lincoln Center event Friday remembering Garner features a 75-person choir, in a “project that gathers us together as co-conspirators – to breathe and keep breathing any way we can.”

Despite those continuing reverberations, some Black scholars, police reformers and civil rights activists are disappointed there hasn’t been more progress. They count Garner’s death — among a string of police killings of unarmed Black men that came in quick succession – as a catalyst for the reform movement that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, a cause they see as stalled.

They point to some helpful shifts in public thinking about policing and procedures, including the proliferation of body-worn cameras to record interactions between officers and the public. But systemic change in how communities of color are policed, the experts argue, has been elusive. Instead, in recent years especially, they note the success of a conservative backlash that has undermined police reform efforts nationwide. And they point to lost ground beyond policing, including new limits on the teaching of Black history and systemic racism in the classroom.

“There is not one iota of doubt in my mind that the movement for police accountability in this country that was inspired by the deaths of Eric Garner and so many others has been an accelerant, a direct catalyst for the national backlash against racial justice in this country,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem.

Even still, the movement Garner’s death helped spur also marked a shift in how Black people injured or killed by police were portrayed, said Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

“It is no longer sort of an established national narrative that this Black human must have done something wrong or was about to do something wrong so that it’s fine that the police used excessive force,” Warren said.

Public perceptions regarding police officers had noticeably changed, he said, to the extent that society no longer granted them “a blank check.”

“That is a page that we have turned,” Warren said. “People are not going back.”

The death of Eric Garner

The 43-year-old Garner, a resident of Staten Island, died on July 17, 2014. His fatal encounter with police was caught on a bystander’s cellphone video and shared online. The video showed Garner being confronted on the sidewalk by officers in Staten Island on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes – “loosies.”

When a visibly agitated Garner put his arms up in protest, police officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold from behind – long enough for Garner to be heard repeating the words “I can’t breathe” 11 times. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital. The incident was followed weeks later by the killing of an unarmed Michael Brown by officers in Ferguson, Missouri.

The back-to-back events, coming two years after the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, prompted a nationwide protest movement, new laws on police restraints, and led to the immortalization of Garner’s final words, a phrase uttered by scores of other Black men and women in fatal encounters with police since Garner’s death, according to a New York Times tally.

Garner’s death sparked condemnation from across a wide spectrum of society – from Notre Dame women’s basketball team members, who wore shirts with “I Can’t Breathe” emblazoned on them, to both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. There were more than 50 protests in the United States alone following Garner’s death. The demonstrations fueled the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, which went international after George Floyd’s death in 2020.

“At the very moment of it, I think what was most shocking” of Garner’s death was that it was the “first time that you hear someone really asking you to not kill them,” said Tricia Rose, the Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the director of The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Yul-san Liem, a representative of the Justice Committee, a grassroots group that fights police violence, and spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform, said she traveled from her home in Jackson Heights, Queens, to Staten Island soon after Garner’s death, and met Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, at a candlelight vigil.

“I remember her being poised,” Liem said. “She wanted things to be happening. She wanted people to help get the story out there.”

Mychal Denzel Smith, the author of “Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education,” noted the “cascade of the killings of unarmed Black men” that soon followed Garner’s death. This included 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed Nov. 22, 2014; Walter Scott, killed April 4, 2015; and Philando Castile, killed July 6, 2016, all shot by police officers, and each gaining national attention.

“That moment did feel so ripe with possibility,” Smith said.

Muhammad said as the national outrage built around both Garner and Brown’s deaths, it became clear that countless young Americans were being newly politicized around issues of race and policing.

“This was an Emmett Till moment for their generation,” Muhammad said.

Elena Cohen, a New York attorney who specializes in criminal defense and civil rights representation for protesters, said the outcry over Garner’s killing marked a turning point. Post-Garner, she said she witnessed a political shift in who was committed to opposing police violence.

“I do think that the response to the police murder of Eric Garner was where you start seeing it not be a leftist thing or a fringe thing, but I think a majority understanding of what’s going on,” said Cohen, who served as the president of the National Lawyers Guild.

Changes in policing

In the wake of Floyd’s death in 2020, governments across the country passed laws largely prohibiting police officers from placing suspects in chokeholds. That included a law passed in New York City, which the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld last year, noting it was inspired by Garner’s death as well.

One of the most visible changes in policing since Garner’s death was the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras. The NYPD instituted its body-worn camera program in April 2017. The NYPD notes on its website that 1,300 officers were wearing body cameras by the end of that year and that 24,000 “Officers, Detectives, Sergeants and Lieutenants” regularly assigned to patrol duties now wear them, making the program “the largest in the United States.”

However, some studies have shown that despite their widespread use, body-worn cameras have not impacted the nature of policing in any major way.

A study published in 2022 by the National Institute of Justice noted that 80% of large police departments had adopted body-worn cameras by 2016, two years after Garner’s death, but after reviewing 70 studies, stated that “the larger body of research on body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects” in charging police conduct.

Similarly, a 2022 paper in the Law Journal for Social Justice said “body cameras have produced a negligible effect on officer behavior. There has been no evidence of reduced racial disparities and little increase in officer discipline or police prosecutions because of the cameras, even though these were reasons for mandating them.”

But today, there are even more “eyes” recording interaction between police and the public, with the proliferation of cell phone cameras. “Technology is becoming part of the story regarding how marginalized populations in the U.S. and across the world are recording injustice and thereby, gaining personal empowerment,” the Brookings Institute’s Nichol Turner Lee, senior fellow of governance studies, wrote after the deaths of Garner and Floyd.

Pushing for special prosecutors

After Garner’s killing, police reform groups and Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, along with other family members of others who died at the hands of police, pressured then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor in the event of police-related civilian deaths.

The public campaign included an op-ed in the Daily News that was co-written by Carr and Constance Malcolm, the mother of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed Bronx teenager who was shot dead by police officers in 2012. The op-ed was critical of Cuomo, arguing that the governor had “begun to backtrack” on his commitments to families.

The next day, Cuomo signed an executive order granting the state attorney general the power – for one year – to investigate civilian deaths at the hands of police.

“It was a huge achievement,” Liem said, “and it would not have happened without the leadership of Mrs. Carr and all of the other families that were working on the campaign.”

Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “Cop in the Hood” and an upcoming book about the drop in crime in New York City during the 1990s, said the public response to the killing of Floyd was “hugely significant, probably the most significant event related to policing in my lifetime.”

However, said Moskos, a former police officer in Baltimore, policy changes in recent years had largely been “counterproductive” and had been driven by a “larger anti–policing narrative” that portrayed officers as “agents of racial oppression.” He said officers had worryingly become less proactive, stymied by fear that a confrontation with a suspicious person on the street “could turn into a fight and could become a viral video.”

“It’s hard to point to any quantifiable measure that has really improved because of the social movements of the past decade,” he said.

Nonetheless, Moskos said he welcomed the increase in body-worn cameras – “transparency is good because the alternative is opacity and a cover up, perhaps.” He added, “One positive change is there is more accountability.”

“Ten years ago it was extremely rare for a cop to be criminally charged even when such charges were justified,” Moskos said. “So I think that’s part of the accountability.”

Still, the data indicates that little has changed in that area.

Philip Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, has tracked the number of state and local police officers charged each year with manslaughter or murder for on-duty shootings. He began collecting data in 2005, when three officers were charged. That figure dipped to just one in 2011, hitting six in 2014, the year of Garner’s death, then rising to 18 the following year. Since then the figure has generally hovered between 10 and 20 in any given year, except for 2017, when seven officers were charged.

“The numbers are fairly static,” Stinson said in an email, “and when we do see increases in any year it is typically due to multiple officers being charged in the same incident (so the number of victims in these cases resulting in criminal charges hasn’t really changed in any statistically significant way over the past decade).”

Pantaleo, the officer who placed Garner in a fatal chokehold, was not indicted by a grand jury, but was fired by the NYPD in 2019, five years after the killing. The City settled a suit from Garner’s family with a $5.9 million payout.

Neither the NYPD nor Mayor Eric Adams’ office responded to requests for comment about Garner’s death.

Feeling hopeless, and helpless

Muhammad and others interviewed for this article said their hopes for change had dimmed in recent years.

“The centrality of policing to the very nature of Black freedom in this country was on trial during the height of the protests inspired by Garner and others,” Muhammad said. “And the court of public opinion largely ruled in favor of more policing.”

He expressed hope that “better data” would help create change at the local level, allowing communities and reformers to “hold specific police agencies accountable,” but he said that would take time. “I don’t anticipate sea changes in the near future.”

The repercussions have extended beyond policing, said Muhammad. He points to the push in recent years against critical race theory – the academic study of systemic racism’s role in society – and the proliferation of book bans targeting Black history and struggle. The American Library Association noted that 4,240 books had been targeted for censorship in 2023, a 65% increase over the previous year and “the highest levels ever documented” by the nonprofit organization.

By the time of the national protests in 2020, Warren said the cascade of viral videos showing police killings of Black men had taken a personal toll on him.

“It really put me into a depression where I just literally could not watch another Black human be brutalized that way,” he said. “Each one of these incidents was chipping away at my soul.”

He took a monthslong sabbatical from the Center for Constitutional Rights and spent his time playing music at home, and even recorded an EP, under the moniker of Saint Woke. He no longer watches videos that show the killing of Black people, arguing that they serve as “mass public consumption of Black pain and black suffering.”

“What they’re signifying is essentially a reiteration of the social order that every Black human in America knows,” he said.

Liem, of the Justice Committee and Communities United for Police Reform, was resolute.

“Our people have been fighting for change and winning sometimes and losing sometimes and having to apply lessons learned and pick ourselves up and stay in the fight for much, much longer than 10 years,” she said.

One of the lessons of the past decade, she said, was to “follow the leadership of those who are most impacted and those who are the closest to the pain.” By this, she meant the family members of Eric Garner and other victims of police violence, who she said pushed for change “not as a hobby but because it’s a necessity.”

“They’re going to fight because they have to,” said Liem, “and so we all need to fight because they’re fighting.”

For his part, Smith said he had become disillusioned by the events of recent years, which have seen “so few instances” of punishment for officers caught on video killing Black people.

“What hope are you to be left with?” he asked. “What does your rage even mean in the face of that?”

At the time of Garner’s death, Smith was 27. He’s now 37 and said he was less tapped into the movement.

“As I’m getting into middle age now, losing that sense of hope, it leaves me a little disconnected in some ways,” Smith said.

At the same time, he had become a new parent and said that he was increasingly focused on raising his daughter with his partner at their home in Brooklyn, on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens.

He said her birth early last year had made him aware of not only the risks that she would face as she grew older, but of the extent to which he’d fight to maintain her sense of “adventure and excitement and discovery.”

“I have a 1-year-old Black daughter that I have to raise in this world,” he said. “This fight cannot end.”