DAILY BEAST COLUMN: …Eric Garner died because he was tired of being a number.
And he was a number because he was a street hustler in an era when police bosses had taken to using the number of arrests and summonses to measure the performance of cops they did not trust to rely on their own discretion.
“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me,” Garner can be heard on the video taken of his encounter with two plainclothes cops on Bay Street in Staten Island. “It stops today.” … (more)
