Ray of Infamy

New York City:

A New York City police officer accused in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man will face an NYPD disciplinary trial next May – nearly five years after the man’s pleas of “I can’t breathe” became a rallying cry against police brutality, an administrative judge said Thursday.

That would be Daniel Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner, in case you’ve lost track of all the police violence.

And what is “an NYPD disciplinary trial,” you might ask? Apparently it’s a proceeding that will weigh all the available evidence as to whether the move Pantaleo killed Garner with was compliant or non-compliant with NYPD policy:

If convicted, the 33-year-old Pantaleo could face punishment ranging from the loss of vacation days to firing from the department.

Christ on a bicycle. He could be fired from the department. The horror. How will he endure all that time sitting around collecting a pension (and he would get a pension) until he’s hired by another, lower-profile police department (and he would be hired by another department)?

And how would this (or an even lesser penalty) make Eric Garner not dead or his family and friends whole again? Not that throwing Pantaleo in a cell for a thousand years would make Garner any less dead, either, but the NYPD is barely even pretending to pursue its own brand of punitive “justice.”