Communities mark 1 year since Eric Garner death

Friday is the one year anniversary of Eric Garner’s death in police custody after an apparent chokehold.

(CNN) – Eric Garner’s family is marking the first anniversary of his death.

“The purest thing I could do was release a dove in his honour”, said Ms Miller, according to the New York Post.

The officer was not charged in the death that emboldened a protest movement against police excessive force in Black communities across the nation, and Garner’s last words became a mantra for the movement.

A grand jury decided not to indict officer Pantaleo and the Justice Department opened a federal civil rights inquiry into the incident in December.

A record-breaking settlement of $5.9 million from the city of New York to the widow of a man who died after resisting arrest last June had police union bosses flabbergasted – calling the payout “obscene”.

The speaker also cited the City Council’s efforts to enact criminal justice reform and its ongoing push to decriminalize low-level offenses, including jumping subway turnstiles, public urination, being in a park after hours and selling loose cigarettes, the crime for which Garner was being arrested.

“The victory will come when we get justice”, Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said Tuesday. As the officers attempted to arrest him, Officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in an illegal chokehold, which was captured on witness video. “We’ve been asking them for a whole year because … we didn’t receive justice from the grand jury, even though my son said he couldn’t breathe eleven times”, she said. Instead, five of them tackled Garner to the ground while he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe 11 times.

Shawn Parker, 31, of Brooklyn, gave protesters a passing glance as he entered the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in lower Manhattan. Garner lost consciousness and was pronounced dead later at a hospital.

A spokesman for Richmond University Medical Center would not comment on the response by workers one year ago, but told CNN a settlement – the terms of which are confidential – was reached earlier this week with the Garner family.

“Eric was anybody’s best friend”, Miller said. Rather, cities pay for them through their general coffers or their city insurance plan. He argues the settlement is too generous considering that Garner’s poor health may have contributed to his death.

Chokeholds are outlawed by New York police.

Organized by Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network, busloads will leave from his Harlem headquarters following the weekly rally there to raise a voice for justice and call attention to deaths that were allegedly caused by law officials and needlessly added to grief and a widening rift between the community and police.