Eric Garner’s death at the hands of police and the protests that followed became a pivotal test for a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who committed to police reform at the department he oversaw.

“In the last 10 years, we have seen a tremendous amount of effort put forth by the NYPD to try and go back to their roots of community oriented policing,” Jillian Snider, an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College, told NY1.

What You Need To Know

  • Eric Garner was killed by police 10 years ago as he was being arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island

  • His death spurred calls for police reform and galvanized the Black Lives Matter protests

  • Ten years later, the department has implemented new training, but other changes took a long time to enact

Snider was an NYPD officer at the time of Garner’s death and is now policy director of criminal justice and civil liberties at the R Street Institute.

She noted the creation of the Neighborhood Coordination Officer program, as well as fair and impartial bias training and de-escalation training for officers.

“I think de-escalation is a really good tool, because when I went through the police academy, we learned about it to an extent, but it was called verbal judo. We didn’t even use the real term de-escalation. Now we are being trained to deal with people on a level to bring it back down so that force does not need to be applied,” Snider said.

Other responses to Garner’s death took considerable time.

It wasn’t until 2019 that the officer who placed Garner in a chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo, was fired. This followed a departmental trial that had been delayed for years as city officials said they were waiting to see if the justice department would take action of its own, which it did not. A Staten Island grand jury also declined to indict Pantaleo in Garner’s death.

“In this case, the unintended consequence of Mr. Garner’s death must have a consequence of its own, therefore I agree with the deputy commissioner of trials legal findings and recommendations: it is clear that Daniel Pantaleo can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer,” then-Police Commissioner James O’Neill said in 2019.

Only one other member of the department was disciplined. Sergeant Kizzy Adonis faced departmental charges of failure to supervise and agreed to a settlement, which she did not admit to guilt and forfeited 20 vacation days.

The disciplinary action against both officers led to an outcry from police unions and threats of a work slowdown. 

“Knowing that an officer never goes out there looking for trouble, it was really upsetting. And I think morale suffered because of it,” Snider said.

But for police reform advocates and Garner’s family, in many ways, it was too little, too late.

“You may have lost your job, but I lost a son,” Gwen Carr, Garner’s mother, said in 2019.

Soon after Garner’s death, advocates called for a law banning police chokeholds, already prohibited by NYPD policy.

But that was also slow to arrive being passed at the state and city level in 2020, after protests for police reform once again erupted in response to the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.