NEW YORK, December 4 (Sputnik) - Protesters in New York City vowed on Thursday to continue rallying against heavy-handed and allegedly racist policing after a grand jury decided not to charge a white policeman who choked to death an African-American street peddler Eric Garner earlier this year.
Who is going to obtain a better training for US police officers so that they could do a better job? Many communities are broke. #EricGarner
— Miodrag Soric (@miodragsoric) December 4, 2014
"The movement to end police murder with impunity is not asking for solutions. It is demanding them, and the president's body camera proposal does not even begin to answer the call," Shahid Buttar, director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a civil liberties group, said.
"We will continue to see seemingly spontaneous mass demonstrations all across the country going forward, because the evasion of justice by the murderers of Eric Garner proves what Americans of color have long known: police can get away with anything," Buttar added.
Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader, also called for discussions on police violence to follow a march in Washington on December 13, following talks on Thursday morning in New York with some 20 community leaders and activists.
Photos: Protesters around the U.S. demonstrate in #EricGarner death http://t.co/tiM4Xh8sa0 pic.twitter.com/FyTr1WNzbe
— Al Jazeera America (@ajam) December 4, 2014
"The federal government must do in the 21st century what they did in the mid-20th century — federal intervention had to come into the South to protect people's civil rights and voting rights," Al Sharpton said. "Federal intervention must come now."
The 43-year-old Garner, who was asthmatic and suffered from a heart disease, died from suffocation after being put in a chokehold by a white police officer Daniel Pantaleo this July. A cell-phone video of the arrest went viral on the Internet.
The US saw another wave of race-related unrest just last week over a grand jury decision not to indict another white police officer, Darren Wilson, who shot dead an unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown in August in Ferguson, Missouri.
