https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias
The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.
Minutes before the hearing was scheduled to begin, Al Sharpton escorted Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, to the witness table, surrounded by a mob of photographers. Garner had tragically died of a heart attack after New York Police Department officers tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes in July 2014; Garner resisted arrest, and one of the officers used a chokehold to take him down. Garner’s repeated last words—“I can’t breathe”—became an international rallying cry against police brutality. Carr gave impassioned testimony denouncing the lack of consequences for the police “murder” of her son: after five years of federal and local investigation, the officer who used the fatal chokehold was fired, but no prosecutions or other actions in the case have taken place. Carr left the witness table after her remarks to sit in the spectator section, but she remained a frequent reference point for the Democratic argument that the police devalue minority lives.