be a threat based on what we ve seen in the video. again, we don t have all of the information the grand jury had. based on what we see in the video, do you think a police officer could have legitimately felt themselves under threat there? well, the reality is that we know how this ends. the cops never know how it ends. that hangs over all of this. watching a video, obviously, the cops don t have that luxury. as one of the guests indicated there, the predictability or unpredictability of these events is startling at times. i do think that beyond the legal conversation, which the legal reality is the police are going to have broad leeway. it s the police profession now that has to step up and impose on its officers a higher standard, a higher set of duties, as they do in many cases of deadly force. there needs to be an ethos and belief structure in the police business that preservation of life is really a paramount reason why you re out there.
not the case that an officer may use all means necessary to prevent the escape of a suspect. the case is called tennessee versus garner. it s been around for about 40 years. i think your guests have talked about it quite a bit in the context of ferguson. i don t think this looks to me like prevention of an escape either. and i doubt thafgs offered as a legal justification for what happened here. again, you know, this is going to be small consolation, i think, but the very least you can say is this was an obvious deviation from the standard of care that s expected of new york city police officers under their own policy and under new york tort law. and i think certainly this evidence would be sufficient for a section 1983 lawsuit. other than that say what you mean by that. i m surprised by the lack of indictment. it s a civil rights lawsuit. it s a civil suit you can file for wrongful death when a law
he had with trayvon martin. we had a public trial. and you can t decide it we had one. the grand jury, i don t think it should have gone to the grand jury. we just had the owner of the store. we have this videotape of the people robbing and looting the store. and we have video of another story like one tonight. this guy is was in business 25 years and probably not going to open up again. when michael brown s stepfather said burn this bleep down, isn t that inciting riot? first answer is no. there is nothing suggesting that statement caused anything that happened that day z our hearts go out to store owner that s
clay, one of the things that s been said in terms of what we can expect from a public response to this nonindictment decision in contrast to ferguson, what s been said is that new york city is different. people feel like they have more outlets. police officers are better trained in terms of crowd control. do you think that s true? well, i really can t speak to them personally. i mean, i live here and seems pretty good, but then i m not the kind of person that police officers tend to tend to go after. and i can only speak, you know, what i see in news reports and anecdotally but it does call into question situations like this and tragedies like this, how different is new york from other places? i ve spoken to some police officers who feel that there are already cameras everywhere, not just the city cameras, the state cameras that might be around, but everybody has a phone with a video camera on it. we would not be talking about this eric garner situation if a
controversial incidents happen and repeatedly they are not indicted? well, on the one hand they know that s the case in general across the nation, police deadly force cases you don t see a lot of indictments. the other thing is, i think they feel isolated. everyone is prejudging us as a whole before we even got the transcripts or even knew what was going to happen with the indictment in the ferguson case. so, now it s kind of coming out about what the true evidence is, what the real evidence was. and i think they feel somewhat in some ways better about the view of the public of them. because they really feel like, wait, we ll get attacked based on no information. there was no evidence about that case, truly evidentiary basis for the decision, until we started seeing these transcripts, which i think is very important to have those released there and also here in this case. you re absolutely right, of course, it s extraordinarily rare for a grand jury to indict a police officer. th