So the offense is avoidance of government revenues?
Comparing Eric Garner's case to Cliven Bundy illustrates the stark difference in how police treat black and white men for similar crimes (avoiding taxes and fees).
Consider their stories: a black man with a criminal record going back 30 years - and a white man with a criminal record going back 30 years. Both were approached by authorities for crimes that they've been convicted of in the past. The black man, unarmed, is taken by physical, hands-on force that proves to be lethal. The white man, armed, organizes a resistance militia where firearms are directed at federal agents by American citizens - and the government backs down.
I'm not arguing that the police shouldn't be out patrolling the streets and enforcing our laws. No, but they should be enforcing the law in a balanced manner to both communities, and there's (at least) two ways in which the enforcement is imbalanced: 1) an absence of caution is present in the government's handling of black people; and 2) extreme instances of white crime - and white collar crime specifically - are allowed to persist with a measure of legitimacy.
The "legitimacy," as I call it, is evident in the public adulation that Cliven Bundy was given in the media before he started spouting racist nonsense on TV. It's also seen in the corporate executives that are seldom held to account for massive fraud against their customers and the government - while they often depart from scandals of fraud with millions in parachute dollars. Meanwhile, in the murders-by-authority of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, (et al), there's a presumption of guilt for a crime that has happened (in the case of Martin) and presumptions of guilt for crimes that have not yet happened (fear of escalation is what led to the killings of Brown and Garner).
Another small difference: the white man owes $1.2 million dollars to the government. Eric Garner may have owed the government a pittance (I don't know), but if he'd owed anything of significance it would've been part of the story. No, our dynamic system of law, justice, and finance has been written by men who influence the outcome in their own favor, and the system's proportionate response to Bundy (and other men of privilege) has clearly been inadequate. Meanwhile, we see recurring instances of excessive force used against blacks for relatively minor infractions of law. Which is more appalling: police violence against blacks, or the legal system's inability to successfully enforce the law for men like Cliven Bundy?
Legal exceptions and accommodations are frequently made to avoid offending grumpy, established conservatives. Just consider the Constitution: all of the slavery rules were accommodations to the South to draw them into the Union. So was the creation of the Senate, which allows for 2 representatives per State, regardless of the population; that was at the insistence of Southern states whose populations were small compared to the industrious North. The same kind of intimidation is being used today to deter the IRS from enforcing rules on political spending by 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In contrast, there are no simply no legitimate means by which black men are able to intimidate social institutions.
Looked at in comparison, the stories of these two men can be seen as representative of the government's relationships to white men and black men in particular, but I'll go further and say that it's bigger than that. There are so many major "niche" issues - like the environment, national debt, healthcare, etc - that contemplating solutions to each is intimidating, let alone all. It's simpler than picking issues though, because exploitation is what all of these issues have in common. The solution is for America to stop being an exploitative society. We exploit natural resources, we exploit the future for the present in the case of debt, and the upper class exploits the advantages of capital hegemony to dominate the lower classes.
From a glance at our public communications, federal government, and international relations, we don't seem close recognizing this at the moment - but we might be closer than you think. "Be the change you want to see."