MAYOR DE BLASIO HOLDS MEDIA AVAILABILITY
Mayor Bill de Blasio: There’s been a lot of pain in this city over the last five years and there’s been a lot of fear. The pain was because we watched an innocent man die and the fear was because people worried that there would be no justice, that the inequities that have plagued us for generations would simply continue unchecked. But today, for the first time in these long five years, the system of justice is working. For the Garner family – and I’ve spent time with them and I’ve heard the pain that they have felt – it’s been a very long five years, with no sense of closure, no sense of justice. Until today, the Garner family has been failed by this entire process. And think about what they have gone through – they watched him die, just as we all did. They felt that pain, and then they were told over and over again by the District Attorney, by the Department of Justice that the government would do its job – and they waited, and they waited, and they waited, and nothing happened. And as all this stretched on, it reinforced a suspicion – and it’s one felt by millions – that justice doesn’t exist for people who look like Eric Garner.
Today, we finally saw a step toward justice and accountability. We saw a process that was actually fair and impartial. And I hope that this will now bring the Garner family a sense of closure and the beginning of some peace. But full justice means that there can never be another tragedy like the one that befell Eric Garner. Full justice is when we never have another death. That is all of our responsibility, and it requires us to change everything.
For the last five years, our mission has been to fundamentally change the nature of policing in New York City. After the death of Eric Garner, everything was reevaluated. The entire police force was retrained – 36,000 officers retrained to deescalate conflict, to understand the implicit bias that we all carry with us, to ensure it would not interfere with their duty. The approach to the community is entirely different today – and we had to weed out the distance and the separation that was the norm of the past, and, through neighborhood policing, actually create a dynamic where our officers and community members got to know each other as human beings, where people felt they were on the same side, working toward a common goal.
And we had to change the approach on the ground. Last year, there were 150,000 fewer arrests than five years earlier because there were too many times when people were being arrested unnecessarily and too many conflicts that came from it. And this NYPD proved that fewer and fewer people could be arrested and the City could become safer. Safety and fairness must walk hand-in-hand. And I hoped that today begins the process of restoring some faith and in helping people believe that there actually is accountability and fairness.
We have a lot more work to do. We’ll be at this a long time, but we all have a sense of common mission – there can never be another tragedy like this. This city, this nation should never be put through this agony. We should never lose another innocent man or woman. We should never have people’s faith undermined. It’s in our power to do something better and to do something different. That is the course we set five years ago and that’s the course we will stay on.
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