New York’s highest court has upheld a New York City law that forbids police from using chokeholds or compressing a person’s diaphragm during an arrest.
that done. but i m not thinking it s going to take that long. i m not deterred by the three years it s taken to keep fighting. we re going to keep pushing, and i m hopeful even in this congress we can get something done. so senator scott, who s leading from the republican side, you on the democratic side, you agreed on banning chokeholds in almost every circumstance and setting federal standards for no-knock warrants. why couldn t you agree, and the senate agree, to just pass the things you could agree on rather than holding it up until you agree on everything? well, let s get a little more technical. we agreed that chokeholds should not be used. but then what s the penalty for that? we re a federal government, we can t tell local departments what to do. i said something that was in tim s original bill, which is, let s withhold grants from people that don t pass that legislation. but at the end of the day, we couldn t get agreement on whether to do it with a carrot or a stick. ar
is how you will report violations and compliance. and a monitor will come in for some period of time to make sure they make those changes in a meaningful way. these take a long time and marq s right they re resource intensive and the justice department can only do a handful of them a year, but they are a very effective way of improving those individual departments. until we agree in congress and across this country to improve police culture, this is the next best thing for improving departments one by one. shaq, what changes has the minneapolis police department already made in the wake of george floyd s death? you heard attorney general merrick garland make a nod to the changes that have already been implemented. you re talking about things like ban on chokeholds and neck restraints, talking about changing the use of force policies to emphasize de-escalation, you re talking about going through the actual training that police officers go through. one thing that we saw in the past i
government more teeth to be able to challenge bias and bigoted policing. as you know with the political gridlock in washington, d.c., and the united states congress, it s going to have to be innovative how the federal government tries to deal with these clear patterns and practices of how black and brown people are treated and denied their constitutional rights. i mean, just look at that report, wolf, when they said many times when black people said i can t breathe from chokeholds, they would often say, if you re talking, you can breathe. isn t that the very thing they said on the torture video that led to george floyd s death? very horrendous situation. benjamin crump, thank you for joining us. thank you.
that. but the law is also designed to avoid vigilante justice. so when an ordinary citizen engages in this kind of behavior, a chokehold, which police officers are prohibited from doing, we see the dangers that can arise. so certainly somebody has the ability to intervene there. but the question for a jury will be whether his conduct was reasonable or he crossed the line as to what was reasonable. perhaps restraining him but doing so in a chokehold is something that put his life in danger and may have crossed the line of what a jury believes to be reasonable. would you imagine, barbara, that his military training would come into play? it could. i think that that would be part of both the prosecution and the defense, about the dangers of chokeholds. one of the things that police officers, and i imagine military personnel are trained in is the danger of a chokehold because you cut off the air passage and so people are there s a risk of death there. he may use it as part of his