There are a number of issues one can write about in the Eric Garner non-case, but one that I hope gets a bit more attention than in the Michael Brown non-case is that Grand Juries are now being used in a way that deprives family members (and others who care) of not only a sense of justice, but a sense that justice has been attempted. If what we saw in Ferguson and Staten Island is to be viewed as "justice," then everyone who killed another person under suspicious circumstances should be given the exact same treatment. Instead, we are seeing something we might as well make up a classification for, my tentative idea being "Special Police Non-Justice."
Much more below...
What might be worse is that at least psychologically, this new S P N-J system is inferior to what often occurred in the "Deep South" during the Civil Rights era, because there were some actual criminal trials that took place! In the Garner case we have someone killed with neck compression injuries, an officer who is the only one who could have caused it caught on video apparently doing just that, and a suspect killed who was possibly committing the most minor of crimes imaginable. Of course, selling or smoking cigarettes is not illegal in New York City - it's more a matter of regulation, and that's what led to Garner's death !
At this point, I don't think I want to read this "Special" Grand Jury's transcripts. I'll either see district attorneys "tanking" their case, as was true in the Ferguson GJ's transcripts, or else it will be a situation where the jurors wouldn't haven''t indicted any officer, no matter what. One can argue racial bias, etc., but at this point we are looking at a system that is so broken that it's nearly laughable, but what's worse, unlike during the Civil Rights era, is that there doesn't seem to be any way to change things for the better, because it's a situation where some people are given tremendous power and as we see, almost no responsibility to act in a way that respects human life on the most basic level one can imagine.
Anyway, my main point in writing this post is that in these kinds of situations, we are an apartheid nation, we have a Jim Crow system, we are not doing the Founding Fathers proud. Most of you have probably heard the phrase, Imperial Presidency, and whether or not that was largely accurate, it certainly seems to be true now that if there isn't even a trial in these kinds of cases, we are living in an age of "Imperial Police Departments." The use of military equipment in order to prevent people from exercising their Constitutional right to protest (or journalists to cover stories) is yet another facet of this phenomenon.
The old chant was, "no justice, no peace," but now, with police, one doesn't even get to see the "fig leaf" of a minor charge brought against someone for this kind of unnecessary death, which for many if not most of us, wouldn't be justice in any case. At least now we all know about the statistics (something like 1 in 11,000 chance of a GJ not getting an indictment). It indeed seems possible to indict a ham sandwich, unless of course that sandwich has a police badge pinned to it. All the proverbial fig leaves are now gone, and it's quite an ugly sight.