Eric Garner's Mom Not Convinced By NYPD's Discipline Pledge

NEW YORK, NY — Eric Garner's mother isn't buying the NYPD's pledge to finally go after the cops responsible for her son's death four years later.

In a Monday letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, the NYPD said it would proceed with its own discipline of the cops involved in Garner's death if federal prosecutors don't bring criminal charges by Aug. 31.

But Gwen Carr said that's not enough of a commitment to finally get some justice for her son's 2014 death, which became a watershed moment for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The NYPD should't wait to move to discipline Daniel Pantaleo — the cop who put Garner in a banned chokehold that was caught on video — and others culpable for prematurely ending Garner's life on Staten Island, she said.

"I’m tired of the de Blasio administration's delays and playing politics with the murder of my son, and yesterday’s NYPD letter is just another example," Carr said in a statement Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of Garner's death.

A group of police subdued Garner on July 17, 2014 as they tried to arrest him, suspecting he was selling untaxed cigarettes. The 43-year-old father repeatedly said "I can't breathe" after Pantaleo wrapped his arm around his neck.

The Department of Justice took up a civil rights investigation into Garner's death in December 2014 after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo.

But the probe has dragged on since. Federal civil rights prosecutors have recommended charges against Pantaleo, but top justice officials are hesitant to bring a case that could prove tough to win, The New York Times reported in April.

At the DOJ's behest, the NYPD has put off disciplinary action in the case to avoid interfering with the federal investigation, according to the Police Department's Monday letter.

But more delays "can no longer be justified" given "the extraordinary passage of time since the incident without a final decision," Lawrence Byrne, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for legal matters, wrote to a DOJ official.

"Understandably, members of the public in general and the Garner family in particular have grown impatient with the fact that the NYPD has not proceeded with our disciplinary proceedings and they have difficulty comprehending a decision to defer to a federal criminal investigation that seems to have no end in sight," Byrne wrote.

The Police Department will move forward to discipline the involved cops "on or shortly after" Sept. 1 if federal prosecutors don't announce criminal charges in the case by the end of August, the letter says.

That process involves an internal trial that could lead to a range of penalties, including firing. The Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent police oversight agency, has substantiated misconduct and recommended charges in Pantaleo's case.

A Department of Justice spokesman, though, reportedly said DOJ officials told Byrne this spring that the NYPD could move forward with its own disciplinary process.

Carr said that response exposes the Police Department's explanation for delaying accountability for Garner's death as "a political excuse."

"The fact is that four years after my son was murdered on video that the whole world saw, the de Blasio administration has failed to hold any of those multiple officers accountable and they have collectively gone on to make hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, dollars in taxpayer-funded salaries," Carr said in her statement.

Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the NYPD's approach in a Monday interview on NY1. The DOJ did not want disciplinary proceedings to move forward as its investigation continued, the mayor said, adding he was not previously aware of any shift in the federal officials' stance.

"I don’t know why the Justice Department didn’t make a decision up or down a long time ago," de Blasio said. "I think when you look at other very prominent cases, the decision-making in the Justice Department and in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, whichever one it was, it was much quicker than this."

(Lead image: Gwen Carr, Eric Garner's mother, speaks at a news conference outside City Hall on Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of Garner's death. Photo courtesy of Communities United for Police Reform)