A well constructed and compelling argument in defense of Eric Garner and other victims killed by police officers. I’m aware of misconduct and abusive behavior by the author in other publications, but there is none of that here. You get Eric’s story and a glimpse at some of the political decisions that lead to these fatal encounters. Eric’s daughter, Erica died at the age of 27 at the end of December last year. I hope this book helps her quest for justice.A part of the problems is lies, damned lies, and statistics. To appear hard-working, if not efficient, NYPD worked to a quota. The number of stops, the number or summonses and the number of arrests. Police unions negotiate, “Twenty-and-one is what the union is backing up.” To meet the numbers, standards of “reasonable suspicion” were relaxed. The omnipresent lie about drugs visible on the center console of the suspects’ vehicle is a running joke. NYPD officer, Pedro Serrano tells stories that he and his fellow rookies exchanged. A policy known as Stop-and-Frisk was in use. Whole neighborhoods were pre-suspected. The form that officers use to document the reason for stops included checkboxes for inappropriate attire, furtive movement, and suspicious bulge. Law officers randomly stop and strip search people on the sidewalk. They had a term for it: “socially raping.” He, also, tells of bureaucratic imperatives designed to generate huge numbers of stops, searches, and seizures. While I would rather believe that he over-embellished his claims, the numbers produced by the NYPD following as part of the settlement to a 1999 lawsuit support them. In 2002, before the deal, the NYPD had stopped 97,296 people. In 2003, that number jumped to 160,851. By 2004, it was 313,523. Then, by 2007, the city was stopping almost half a million people every year. In each of these years, blacks and Latinos made up well over 80 percent of the stops, despite being less than 50 percent of the population. In a subsequent 2008 lawsuit, Floyd v. The city of New York, the city, ceased denying racial profiling and argued, that the numbers their policies had produced, proved black and brown people were more likely to be criminals. Officer Serrano’s tapes of his boss, deputy inspector of the Fortieth Precinct, Christopher McCormack, were played for Judge Shira Scheindlin. McCormack not only told Serrano that “male blacks, fourteen to twenty, twenty-one” were “the right people” to stop, but that people who didn’t fit this description, even if they might technically be breaking the law, were the wrong people. Scheindlin concluded that the double standard was used to conceal a program of mass profiling. This a key passage of her ruling:The NYPD maintains two different policies related to racial profiling in the practice of stop and frisk: a written policy that prohibits racial profiling and requires reasonable suspicion for a stop—and another, unwritten policy that encourages officers to focus their reasonable-suspicion-based stops on “the right people, the right time, the right location.As Taibbi points out, those crime-ridden neighborhoods are crimes themselves. They were artificially created by criminal real estate practices. Resulting from predatory lenders clearing neighborhoods of longtime residents, driving down property values with scare tactics, buying the devalued property, reselling the neglected and run down properties at higher faked appraisal price ($17,000 for $15,000 home) to buyers with sub-prime shaky credit and low earnings, and dumping the loan to a secondary market. Rinse and repeat, each time the property is foreclosed upon. It’s comparable to practices that made a substantive contribution to the 2008 crash. There was no direct bribery element in 2008, but everything else was more or less exactly the same: wholesale falsification of financial records, the aggressive effort to get people with poor credit histories into homes, falsified employment data inflated appraisals, etc.In every hand that the people living there play, the deck is stacked against them. I don’t believe that Brooklyn is unique in this regard. All these stops, seizures, summonses, warrants, beatings, chokings, shootings, and killings have a generous distribution. If there’s no video, the case “devolved into a battle of spin.” As if being less than perfect, invalidates your right to due process.That 1999 lawsuit, Daniels v City of New York, was the result of the death of another unarmed black man, a Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo. He was shot forty-one times times by four plainclothes officers of NYPD's specialized squad Street Crime Unit (SCU) when he reached for his wallet.The shooting death of Carnell Russ on 31 May 1971 in Star City Arkansas is especially stunning. His fatal mistake was asking for a receipt after paying a fine in the courthouse in front of two other officers.Victor White III died in the back seat of a Louisiana police cruiser, 3 March 2014. His hands were cuffed behind his back. The Louisiana State Police say he shot himself in the back. Iberia Parish coroner’s report says the bullet entered his right chest and exited his left armpit without the stippling a close-range shot may produce. He had abrasions on his face. “Dr. Carl Ditch ruled that White shot himself, and declared his death a suicide.” (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investig...)Dejuan Guillory shot four times while lying face down on the ground with hands behind his back, 6 July 2017. He and his girlfriend, Sequence Brown were out riding his four-wheeler. Ms. Brown was arrested and charged with attempted murder after she jumped on the officer, bit him and tried to grab his gun. (https://www.theroot.com/dejuan-guillo...)The list keeps growing. I’ve noticed that fatal police shootings generate less uproar lately, maybe we’re inured.