As New Yorkers Protest Eric Garner Decision, NYPD Appears to Show Restraint

After a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the white police officer who placed 43-year-old African American Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold in July, protests erupted throughout New York City against what many consider a culture of unaccountability, brutality, and racism in the New York Police Department.

After the announcement on December 3 that the grand jury would not indict Pantaleo, New Yorkers took to the streets for a long night of angry -- but largely peaceful -- protests and marches. They were the latest in a string of demonstrations against police impunity that have been held almost daily since November 24, after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, announced that former police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, would not face charges for fatally shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American.

But despite 25 local arrests in the wake of the Ferguson announcement and more than 80 during the protests that followed the Staten Island grand-jury decision, some observers say they're noticing one striking fact about law enforcement at these events: The NYPD has become more tolerant and less physical with demonstrators under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton than it had been under previous mayoral administrations.

Johanna Miller, advocacy director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, says while "none of this is ever perfect, I think it's fair to say de Blasio's NYPD has come a long way."

Miller has been attending the protests over the last week and says she has observed the way police have responded to the thousands of activists flooding the city's streets. She says during the Garner protests on December 3, officers often diverted vehicular traffic so demonstrators could safely take a whole street. And during a protest the previous day when high schoolers across the city left their classes to protest the Ferguson decision, Miller was impressed with how officers cut back on their use of metal barricades. "Police were respectful of what a peaceful protest looks like," she says, adding that the officers seem to understand that sometimes even peaceful demonstrations can go "outside the lines."

C.S. Muncy for the Village Voice

While Miller has also criticized the force's heavy use of police vans and tactical-response vehicles, she says her team has seen "much less escalation on the part of police. We did observing at Occupy Wall Street, where people were getting arrested for standing on the street instead of the curb."

Since the Ferguson decision, activists have managed to disrupt traffic on three major bridges, in the Lincoln Tunnel, and on various busy Manhattan streets. Only 25 people out of more than 2,000 protesters were arrested during the first week; one additional person was given a court summons. After the Garner announcement December 3, protesters again occupied the Lincoln Tunnel, the Brooklyn and Queensboro bridges, and the West Side Highway. According to the NYPD, 83 people were arrested that day and in the early morning hours of December 4.

In comparison, during an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011, police serving under then-commissioner Ray Kelly and then-mayor Michael Bloomberg arrested more than 700 people for briefly occupying the roadway on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Around that time, police were also criticized for trying to quash uprisings by physically beating protesters and reporters with batons and dousing them with pepper spray.