The next time Mayor de Blasio jets off to Keokuk, Iowa or Orangeburg, South Carolina, or wherever he goes to try to sell people on the crazy notion that he can be President of the United States, there should be a large screen with video of Eric Garner telling voters that he can’t breathe.
Because as much as de Blasio wants to bond with the black community and share in the family’s outrage over the Justice Department’s decision, announced Tuesday, to let a police officer get away with a videotaped homicide, the horrible, senseless, unnecessary death of Eric Garner happened on his watch.
And as much as he thinks he is presidential material, the fact remains that de Blasio is still the mayor of a city that continues to employ a cop who jumped on a man’s back and choked him to death because he thought the man was illegally selling cigarettes.
And mince all the words you want over whether or not Officer Daniel Pantaleo actually used a banned chokehold to take Garner down that day on a Staten Island street five years ago on July 17, 2014.