When Erica Garner-Snipes got the phone call last July telling her that her father had died, she was on a train from Queens to Staten Island. It was her aunt who rang and the only information she could give Garner-Snipes was that her father had “stopped breathing”.  “I didn’t know what that meant,” Garner-Snipes says now. “I know he has asthma,” she adds, slipping unthinkingly into the present tense, “so is he in hospital?”  Then the train went through a tunnel and she lost the connection. She was crying and confused. The other people in the carriage had overheard her side of the conversation and started, spontaneously, to pray.  “They prayed for me right there and then,” she says. “They said everything was going to be OK.”  Despite this small gesture of solidarity in the heart of a sprawling city, it wasn’t OK. By the time Garner-Snipes reached her grandmother’s house in Staten Island, the story of her father’s death was already making headlines on the TV news.  His name was Eric Garner. He had been arrested on the street earlier that day after a police officer had accused him of selling untaxed cigarettes. The NYPD officer, Daniel Pantaleo, pulled Garner to the ground after Garner resisted arrest. Pantaleo put him in an apparent chokehold and pushed his head to the pavement. Four other policemen moved in to give assistance.  Garner, 43, had a history of asthma. He was overweight at 25 stone (160kg), 6ft 3in (1.9m) and suffered from heart problems. Lying on the pavement, with Pantaleo pressed against him, he was clearly struggling. “I can’t breathe,” he said, over and over again – 11 times in all. He lost consciousness. It took seven minutes for the ambulance to arrive. The whole incident was captured on a smartphone video camera by Garner’s friend, Ramsey Orta. Soon, the footage was being played on all the major television networks.  The first time Garner-Snipes saw the video of her father’s death she found it “terrible, traumatising”. “I just remember staring at the TV and saying ‘Get off of him! Please move!’ I was screaming at the TV as if I was there.”  Over the next few months, further details emerged. The chokehold allegedly performed by Pantaleo was prohibited by the NYPD. Despite Garner losing consciousness, none of the police officers present had attempted to perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.  When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics did not administer any emergency medical aid. Garner was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, one hour later.  In August, the New York City medical examiner’s office ruled that Garner’s death was a consequence of “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police”.  In September, a grand jury was called to hear evidence. A 23-person panel made up of 14 whites and nine non-whites was charged with deciding whether to indict Pantaleo. The officer, who had issued a public apology to the Garner family and who had been placed on desk duty pending the outcome, gave a two-hour account of what he believed had happened. After two months, the grand jury chose not to indict him. Their deliberations took place behind closed doors. No transcripts or minutes have been released.  For the Garner family, the decision seemed extraordinary. Eric Garner had been unarmed. He had a history of run-ins with the police, but these were mostly for minor infractions, and those who knew him described him as non-violent and friendly. He was, according to Orta, “the neighbourhood dad”. His wife, Esaw, called him “a gentle giant”. And there was, after all, the incontrovertible fact of the video.  “All I can see on that video is my Dad just trying to live for his kids, just fighting for us,” says Garner-Snipes. “You can hear his voice get muffled and high-pitched. It sounds like he was scared. Really scared. He wasn’t fighting the police. He was fighting to breathe.”  The decision on her father’s case came just 10 days after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, found there was not enough evidence to indict a white police officer for shooting dead an unarmed black teenager called Michael Brown. The two events, coming so close together, sparked a wave of protests across America. In an attempt to stem the unrest, the US Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation into Garner’s death.  “All lives must be valued,” said the US attorney general, Eric Holder, at the time.  But over the six months that have passed since Garner-Snipes lost her father, there has been a growing sense that black lives matter less than white; that the police in the US are prone to making swift, prejudicial assumptions based on the colour of someone’s skin; and that, if and when they do, no one will hold them to account.  “This is lawless behaviour by those empowered to enforce the law,” says civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. “It’s very pervasive. In so many communities, there are a disproportionate amount of white police officers who rule over black citizens and who use their authority in abusive ways.  “The president speaks boldly and fluently about terrorism abroad. Well, this is terrorism at home: when unarmed, innocent people are killed, that’s terrorism.”  Could Barack Obama do more?  “Honestly, we need the president, the attorney general and every level of government [to do more] to stop so many of these killers walking free,” says Jackson.  Garner-Snipes, for one, says she wasn’t surprised when the grand jury decided not to indict. “I was heartbroken about the decision in Ferguson, but when my father’s case came down, it’s almost like I was expecting it.”  When I ask her whom she holds responsible for her father’s death, she says it’s not about blame: “It’s more like: you know what you did, so it’s time for you to come out and tell the truth.”  She says she resents the fact that the paramedics didn’t intervene earlier, that she places ultimate responsibility at the feet of Pantaleo but that it goes far deeper too. The police in Staten Island, she believes, “have a mindset of racism. That’s not to say every cop on Staten Island is racist but, you know, it’s made up of mostly white officers.”  Despite the election of America’s first black president in 2009, race remains a potent issue in New York. In 2013, only one in every 10 people stopped and searched by police in New York was white.  In Ferguson, where Brown was shot, 86% of those stopped in cars are black and all but three of the town’s police force are white. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black Americans account for nearly one million of the 2.3 million prison population.  “I think they [the police] have that racist mentality: that black people are a threat, a danger,” Garner-Snipes says. “Where did it all come from? Why? What was the reason for bothering my father? Because they was bored?”  She talks about the interconnected institutions that might share this mentality – the hospitals, the fire stations, the courts and local government – and how that might filter down to create a climate of unthinking prejudice. In the UK, the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the subsequent Macpherson report led to the coining of the term “institutional racism”. In America, as yet, there has been no such reckoning.  “I believe in justice. I believe it’s going to take a long time but it’s gonna come,” Garner-Snipes insists. Her family, she says, is pursuing a $75m lawsuit against New York City and campaigning to have the grand jury minutes made public.  “Change is gonna come,” she says. “Because it’s not just black people being killed, being brutalised. It might be people from a trailer park or poor white people that they [the police] will mess with, rather than messing with a man in a suit.”  Jackson agrees that the death of Eric Garner was a tipping point. The US is, he says, in the grip of “a mammoth backlash”. “There’s an Eric Garner or a Michael Brown or a Trayvon Martin [the 17-year-old African-American who was fatally shot by a white neighbourhood-watch volunteer in Florida in 2012] in every town,” he says. “Everyone has experience of this but this time it went viral and that’s the difference.  “The criminal justice system has collapsed on us. Blacks get more time for less crime than whites. Blacks are profiled and stopped more times and more unnecessarily than whites are. The boys are being criminalised.”  Garner-Snipes, too, has experienced racism. Last year, when she was working at Dunkin’ Donuts in a predominantly non-black area of Queens, she was verbally abused by customers. One teenage boy called her “slave”. Others used the N-word. Another woman refused to deal with her, insisting instead on being served by a white member of staff.  There is no anger when Garner-Snipes recounts all of this. Her voice is resigned, her shoulders slumped. At 24, her face is young but her eyes are tired and seem to belong to a much older woman. A crooked half-smile plays around her lips as she speaks.  The smile sits a little oddly with the gravity of what she is saying, but then it strikes me that this is an expression of someone who copes with injustice on a daily basis. It is an expression that conveys a lifetime of limited hope. It is an expression that says: well, of course I didn’t expect anything better. That’s just the way things are, you know?  Erica lives on the 16th floor of a looming highrise in the Brooklyn projects with her husband, Hester, and their five-year-old daughter, Alyssa. Their apartment looks out over the distant Manhattan horizon but the curtains are drawn and the light inside is muted, the air thick with days-old cigarette smoke. A sofa with ripped upholstery is laden with clothes and discarded children’s toys and remnants of festive decorations. A “Dora the Explorer” stationery set jostles for space with a white plastic Christmas tree, crammed sideways into a box on the floor.  The surfaces around us are scattered with bottles of prescription medication. An old cathode ray tube television has a child’s sticker stuck on the centre of the screen. There is a clock on the wall decorated with pictures of birds but the hands do not move, stuck for ever at nine o’clock.  In the corner of the room, almost out of sight, hangs a black-and-white photo of a striking woman in Victorian dress. This, Garner-Snipes explains, is her great-grandmother: the daughter of a slave and a reminder of how far they’ve come.  Growing up in Brooklyn, the Garners never had much in the way of material wealth. Garner-Snipes’s parents met in September 1988 on a telephone dating line.  Esaw had two children from a previous relationship whom Eric raised as his own. The couple went on to have four more children. Erica, named after her father, is the eldest. It was a hand-to-mouth existence.  “He had jobs here and there,” Garner-Snipes says, lighting a half-smoked cigarette. “He couldn’t keep them because of his health.” His asthma meant “he couldn’t be around dust”.  For a while, her father held a temporary job with the city parks department but, for the most part, he was an active presence in his children’s lives. Garner-Snipes says she was closer to him than to her mother, because he was around so much. It was her father who would routinely do the school run.  “I used to fight with my sister over who was going to sit in the front of the car,” Garner-Snipes says, smiling. “And he would go: ‘Well, you ride in the front in the morning and she ride in the front after school’.”  At home, he would insist on the children doing their homework before putting on their “street clothes” to go out and play in the park.  “He was always playing with us, these little games. He always played the big, bad monster, chasing the kids throughout the house. He helped us with our homework a lot. Maths and science – he was good at that. He loved boxing, football, basketball. He was like a regular guy. And a good dad.”  When Garner-Snipes had her daughter, her father was a devoted grandparent. “She was the apple of his eye. Anything she wanted, she got. And it was over the top, you know? When she was about two, three months old he bought me a stroller and a $700 crib. That’s what type of person he was. If he buy you something, that’s yours. He don’t want nothing back.”  Alyssa turned five last July. At the time Garner died, the family had been planning a birthday party for her. Does she understand what has happened?  “Yeah. Surprisingly, yeah. She’s handling it very well,” Garner-Snipes replies. Alyssa, she says, has been with her to several protest marches “and she sings some of the chants. She’ll say ‘Eric Garner is my grandpa’. She knows how big it is. She’s seen it on TV. They show that video again and again and she’ll see it’s him and hear his voice but she’ll turn her back when that part [the arrest] is happening. She’ll ignore it.  “Sometimes she sees I’m a little sad and she says: ‘What’s the matter Mommy, are you thinking about Pop-pop?’ – that’s what she called him.” Erica pauses, takes a drag on her cigarette. A tattoo of a tiger, drawn in fluid lines, twists all the way up the inside of her right arm. She got it when Alyssa was born and her daughter’s name is inked in black just above her wrist.  “I get more hugs now than before. She’s my everything.”  Later that afternoon, across the river from Garner-Snipes’s Brooklyn apartment, hundreds are gathering in Manhattan’s Union Square to join a four-mile march down Lexington Avenue. It is Martin Luther King Day and the plan is to end up at the UN building, where there will be speeches.  As the march starts, Garner-Snipes is at the head of the protesters, wrapped up in a brown padded coat against the cold, with a megaphone in one hand, leading the chants.  “I can’t breathe!” she shouts, repeating her father’s last words over and over again.  In the midst of this group of people, her presence grows perceptibly. Her voice is stronger. She is more animated and energised than she had been at her apartment. She stands straighter.  She says protesting has given her a focus and that the people she marches with are “my support group”. She sees a future for herself as a civil rights campaigner and has grown accustomed to speaking in public, to giving soundbite quotes to the press. A few days ago, she was invited to have lunch with the business magnate and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.  “We ate vegan chicken,” she says, astonished. “Vegan!”  The crowds respond to her confidence, counting out each chanted repetition until she reaches 11 – the number of times her father said those same words as he struggled for oxygen on the Staten Island pavement. It takes the best part of a minute.  Bill McCarthy, a 40-year-old educator from Brooklyn, has come along to show his support. He says he believes New York is a city that unites rather than divides in times of crisis, just as it did in the aftermath of 9/11. “I think the change is starting to happen,” he says, “but there is a lack of training in the police in terms of understanding about diversity.”  All around him, there are banners bearing the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and posters listing the names of unarmed black civilians who have been killed by police: not just Eric Garner and Michael Brown, but also Akai Gurley, who was fatally shot in a Brooklyn stairwell by a rookie police officer in November and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy brandishing a replica gun who was shot dead in the same month by police in Cleveland, Ohio.  “It’s getting out of control,” says Shantell Hamilton, a 30-year-old health coach from New York. She is wearing ripped jeans and has a bandana tied around her face, covering her mouth and nose. Next to her stand three men in baseball caps and hoodies, each of whom has his face obscured in the same way. One is shrouded in a black sweatshirt with the words “Cop Patrol” picked out in red on the back.  “Hell yeah, I’m angry!” Hamilton says, pushing down her bandana to speak to me. “Very angry. It’s not fair. It’s not right. I thought discrimination ended a long time ago. It hasn’t. It starts from the government, the congress, the senate – they are to blame because they’re letting it happen. The police, yes, they have a big part to play. I think it comes from being not properly trained and a little fear – instead of using the tactics they’ve been taught, they shoot.”  There is also a feeling that so-called “broken windows” policing – the initiative introduced by NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton in the 1990s – has had its part to play. The theory was that cracking down on petty crimes would discourage miscreants from committing bigger ones. Its critics now suggest that the policy has led to over-criminalisation.  According to Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University in New Jersey, 70% of American adults have committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned – usually unwittingly. More crimes on the statute books equates to more armed police enforcing more laws, even when those laws deal with something as seemingly trivial as selling untaxed cigarettes. That, in turn, leads to overcrowded prisons. America, which has around 5% of the world’s population, contains 25% of the world’s prisoners. In 2012, one in every 108 adults was behind bars.  The Baptist minister and civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who has been working closely with the Garner family, put it this way earlier this month: “You cannot have broken-windows policing if you have broken training, broken accountability and police that claim ‘I have the right to bring you down’ and then later say ‘It’s resisting’ even when the videotape says it’s not.”  In New York, tensions between the police and the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, run high. De Blasio has admitted he has warned his mixed-race son, Dante, “to take special care” in any encounters with police. Some officers have now taken to turning their backs on the mayor at public events.  The situation was further inflamed by the fatal shooting of two on-duty officers on 20 December by a 28-year-old man, who claimed online he had done it as retribution for the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of the police. The gunman later killed himself.  Trust between black America and the police appears to be at an all-time low: a poll conducted by the Washington Post last month found that only one in 10 African-Americans believes they are treated in the same way as white citizens by police and the courts.  “Of course it’s harder being black than white in America,” says Garner-Snipes. “Because white people have this privilege. They were born with this privilege. They were born higher than us.”  She worries about her two younger brothers – one is 20 and 6ft 6in, the other is 15 and 6ft 4in and they both look older than they are because of their size.  “I don’t want them to be targeted by the cops,” she says. “I am angry but that’s not going to solve anything. I’d rather be angry on a march and channel it with all those people and project it in my voice. Because now people are looking to me so I have to keep pressing on for my father and end the cycle of violence. You can’t fight violence with violence. You’ll either get killed or go to jail.”  As Eric Garner’s oldest child, she says she was expected to take responsibility for her younger siblings growing up and she feels that keenly still: “It was always: ‘You’re the oldest, lead by example.’”  What does she think her father would say to her now if he could?  “That he’s proud of me,” she says, looking at her trainers. “That he knew I could do it.”  In the months since his death, Eric Garner has become a symbol of a greater injustice, a figurehead for a bigger movement and a trigger-point for a national debate about race and policing in America. But we shouldn’t forget that he was also a man, with a family and a daughter he was proud of and a five-year-old grandchild who was the apple of his eye. A grandchild who now turns her back to the television screen every time that video is played and she hears her Pop-pop saying “I can’t breathe” 11 times over.
Eric Garner’s daughter talks of the day her father died, her role in the civil rights movement and how the loss has affected Eric’s granddaughter