One sentence that shows how terribly the NYPD treated Eric Garner

Millions of people know how the New York Police Department’s attempt to arrest Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, ended: with officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in a 15-second chokehold, and Garner on the ground calling, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” By the time Garner arrived at the hospital one hour later, he was pronounced dead.

But this sentence — from an in-depth New York Times article by Al Baker, J. David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller about Garner’s death, published Sunday — shows just how callous the NYPD’s response to “I can’t breathe!” was:

Sergeant Saminath reported Mr. Garner had difficulty breathing and called an ambulance, but he said Mr. Garner “did not appear to be in great distress,” the report said.

In fact, according to the Times, NYPD officers made two different requests for an ambulance while Garner was on the ground — but both of them were “categorized as ‘unknown,’ a low priority.” And even when medical personnel from Richmond University Medical Center responded, they didn’t give Garner oxygen.

The coroner found that the heart attack that killed Garner was partly due to the chokehold. But the Times report shows that even after Pantaleo released his hold on Garner, the NYPD didn’t treat him like his life mattered.

After the Garner video provoked outrage — and after the grand jury didn’t charge Pantaleo with any crimes in December — some defenders of the police, from Rep. Peter King (R-NY) to union officials, have blamed Garner’s poor health for his death. (Garner was obese and had asthma and hypertension.) If Garner had been healthy, they imply, the chokehold wouldn’t have provoked a fatal heart attack.

That’s probably true. The coroner’s report did list Garner’s obesity and asthma as contributing factors in his death, along with the chokehold. But while Pantaleo didn’t know about Garner’s asthma, he clearly knew he was obese. If Garner’s health made him especially vulnerable, NYPD officers should have been especially attentive to him to make sure that he’d just been subdued, not hurt or killed.

That’s not what happened at all.

According to the Times article, “current and former officers” speculated that the police at the scene might have ignored his pleas of “I can’t breathe” because they thought it was a “ruse to avoid arrest.” That’s speculation. But given how little medical attention the NYPD paid to Garner while he was on the ground, it makes some sense. And it couldn’t be further from how they should have reacted if Garner’s life truly mattered.

As Vox’s Lauren Williams has written, one of the many ways that implicit bias shapes views of black people is “superhumanization” — and in the words of Jesse Singal of The Science of Us, “the more (whites) think blacks are superhuman, the less they view black people as having a capacity to feel pain.”

Williams showed how Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson used these stereotypes to justify his shooting of Michael Brown: “I felt like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan,” Wilson told the grand jury.

And the response to Garner shows another way this bias can help kill. Neither the NYPD officers who called for an ambulance nor the medical responders acted as if Garner’s health was in jeopardy. They assumed that the chokehold could not result in his death.

The Times article doesn’t say for sure that Garner’s life could have been saved if the NYPD or medical response had been different. But it’s hard to imagine that if Garner’s life had really been seen to matter, the NYPD sergeant would have said Garner wasn’t in great distress.