Reality: I am sicken by these police shootings of innocent black people. Just today I was at work reading the headlines on my phone during my lunch break at work: A Black Security Guard Was Killed By Police As He Tried To Stop A Shootingwhere witnesses say a cop shot Jemel Roberson as he held down a suspect in a shooting at the bar. A black security guard was shot dead by a police officer as he held down a suspect in a shooting at the bar where he worked.

Jemel Roberson, 26, was working early Sunday at Manny’s Blue Room - a bar in the predominantly black Chicago suburb of Robbins, Illinois - when a patron who was part of a drunken group that had been kicked out returned with a gun at 4 a.m. and opened fire, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Several people were shot.

Roberson, who was armed at the time, grabbed one of the men, held him down and waited for police, according to witnesses.

“He had somebody on the ground with his knee in back, with his gun in his back like, ‘Don’t move,’” Adam Harris told WGN-TV.

But witnesses said Roberson became the victim as soon as police arrived. A responding officer with the Midlothian Police Department immediately shot Roberson, who later died at a hospital.

I must have let out an expletive rather loudly since another saleman at CleanItSupplies, a large online store that sells janitorial, restaurant and office supplies where we both work, stopped and asked if I were OK. I explained my reaction to this senseless killing. I pointed out how according to the article everybody was screaming out, ‘Security!’ He was a security guard ... and the cops, all they saw a black man with a gun, and basically killed him. We then reflected back to 2014 when Eric Garner died from a chokehold from a cop. I'm telling you, this scenario just keeps on getting repeated over and over again. And our current president with his racists rants is just adding fuel to the fire.

My mood lightened up later this afternoon when I closed on several large orders for wholesale Kleenex paper towels and tissues. One was for a large hotel chain. I will be speaking with the same representative tomorrow regarding an order they want to place for cleaning supplies along with trash bags. I am excited that they are interested in our green cleaning projects. I have noticed the eco friendly product purchasing trend moving upward for a number of my accounts. And I would really like to see the trend in police on black killings to move downward. However, I'm rather pessimistic at this point.

RIP Eric Garner, but for the rest of us, we need to keep fighting for justice and accountability.

Eric Garner, "A Father & Grandfather"

By TIFFANY THOMAS / Aug 9 2015 / www.bustle.com

"I said 'love you' and he said, 'Right back at you,' and then he drove off and that was the last thing he said to me." — Esaw Garner, his widow

Eric Garner was a father of six and a grandfather. In 2014, he died after being held in a chokehold by NYPD officers; the medical examiner declared his death a homicide. Soon after, social justice activists launched peaceful protests and national attention that helped boost the #BlackLivesMatter movement into the spotlight. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo on criminal charges. Pantaleo said it was never his intention to harm anyone.

Still, little is known about Garner before the video of his death was made public.

According to a New York Times report, Garner was a former Park's Department horticulturist, but a worsening asthma condition meant that Garner was unable to continue that work. And according to the Times, at the time of his death, Garner had become a new father again at the age of 43 — his youngest child was just three months old.

In the years following Garner's death, his daughter Erica Garner has become an outspoken advocate for others who have died at the hands of police officers. And the family has launched the Garner Way Foundation to help call attention to cases of police brutality.

Eric Garner’s family hasn’t seen a cent of the crowdfunded $120,000

H/T ThinkProgress | Photo via Shawn Carrie / dailydot.com

Eric Garner’s family has received no money from at least 19 different crowdfunding campaigns set up in the wake of his death, DNAInfo reported today. 

The campaigns have raised a combined total of at least $120,000, with one particularly successful effort gaining $75,000.

Garner was killed by a New York police officer last year. Video of his death went viral and sparked outrage that, along with the police shooting death of  18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., among others, led to sustained protests across the United States.

“I feel like people are trying to use my father’s name for their own gain,” Erica Garner told DNAInfo. “It’s unfortunately a sad situation.”

The family, who said they have no idea where the money is going, are currently looking into their legal options.

Crowdfunding sites Indiegogo and GoFundMe reportedly didn’t verify the identities of fundraisers or their connection to the Garner family.

Fundly, another crowdfunding site, is holding $75,000 until it can verify that the money is going to the Garner family as advertised.

A new GoFundMe campaign is aiming to raise $1 million for Garner’s widow, Esaw Snipes. The fundraisers, the Charlotte Activist Collective, claim to have been in contact with the Garner family, but the family says they’ve never heard of the effort.

Erica Garner, without any Internet intermediaries, now has two campaigns of her own and is attempting to raise money to pay $150,000 in bills for her and her daughter and $100,000 to produce an album focused on police brutality.

The legitimate Garner campaigns have raised about $3,000 as of publication.

Eric Garner’s Daughter Reflects On The Success Of #BlackLivesMatter

BLACK VOICES 08/10/2015

Erica Garner likens #BlackLivesMatter to the civil rights struggle of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

By Rahel Gebreyes / Huffingtonpost.com

The #BlackLivesMatter movement kicked into high gear in New York after Eric Garner, an unarmed 43-year-old man, was killed by police officer Daniel Pantaleo last year. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the movement and spawned a moving response.

Although a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, Garner’s daughter Erica Garner told HuffPost Live on Thursday that the movement has played an effective role in bringing attention to her father’s death.

“I believe Black Lives Matter really highlighted these issues and put it at the forefront. It’s showing that we’re organized and we’re serious about our business,” she said. “And it shows that a lot of women and young children have been involved. I believe that this is the modern-day civil rights movement.”

Reggie Harris, the political director of the Garner Way Foundation, also applauded the grassroots nature of the movement.

“The last thing that’s really encouraging is it’s not centralized power,” Harris told host Marc Lamont Hill. “What you saw with this [Samuel] DuBose incident that took place in Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Black Lives Matter [chapter] popped up. The Black Lives Matter movement is everywhere. They’re unafraid, and they’re not asking nicely anymore.”

To Honor Eric Garner’s Life, Reform the Police

Like so many other black men in the United States, Eric Garner has been denied justice even in death.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is considering, but is expected to reject, federal civil rights charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer whose use of a chokehold on Mr. Garner led to his death on a Staten Island street in 2014.

A state grand jury declined to indict Officer Pantaleo on homicide charges in 2014. Obama Justice Department officials sat on the case for nearly a year, as civil rights prosecutors in Washington feuded with federal prosecutors in New York who didn’t think the evidence was strong enough. The Justice Department asked the city to delay police disciplinary proceedings while it was considering the matter. The case landed on Mr. Rosenstein’s desk in recent weeks when civil rights prosecutors recommended bringing charges over the objections of the prosecutors in New York.

Hope for any justice probably lies in Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, James O’Neill, doing what should have been done years ago: firing Officer Pantaleo.

But the bigger question is why, given his record, Officer Pantaleo was on the street the day he wrapped his arm around Mr. Garner’s throat, and why New York police officers so often avoid real discipline for wrongdoing.

By the time Officer Pantaleo approached Mr. Garner outside a Staten Island beauty supply store because he thought he was selling untaxed loose cigarettes, the city’s independent Civilian Complaint Review Board had substantiated four allegations of abuse against him in two incidents since he joined the department in 2006, according to leaked disciplinary records published by ThinkProgress last year.

That record should have served as a red flag. As of May 1, just 8 percent of the city’s 36,000 police officers had ever had a single complaint against them substantiated by the review board. Just 550 officers — 2 percent of the force — had had two substantiated complaints. Officer Pantaleo was disciplined just once, lightly. After an abusive frisk in 2012, the Police Department docked him two days of vacation pay.

The Garner case is an example of a larger problem: Like his predecessors, Mr. de Blasio, who was elected promising to make policing fairer for black and Latino New Yorkers, has not done enough to hold the police accountable for misconduct and abuse.

There are signs of progress. Complaints against officers are down since Mr. de Blasio took office. So are police stops, though they had already begun a steep decline in 2013 under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after a federal judge struck down the city’s aggressive use of the tactic known as stop and frisk as unconstitutional.

But in many ways the mayor — stung in his first term when hundreds of police officers turned their backs on him at the funerals of two officers murdered because of the uniform they wore — has resisted attempts at reform.

Mr. de Blasio opposed legislation increasing oversight of police stops, eventually backing a more limited version amid the threat that City Council members would override his veto. He threatened to veto legislation that would have made the use of a chokehold by a police officer a crime.

Many of the racial disparities under Mr. Bloomberg that Mr. de Blasio rightfully denounced have persisted. Arrests for marijuana possession are down to about 17,000 a year, half of what they were under Mr. Bloomberg. But city data shows blacks and Latinos continue to make up an overwhelming majority of those arrested. Police Department officials have said their enforcement mirrors complaints, but they have yet to provide compelling data to back up the claim. Facing political pressure, Mr. de Blasio said on Tuesday that the police would overhaul their marijuana enforcement policy within 30 days.

A report from the Civilian Complaint Review Board in December found that the police commissioner was increasingly rejecting the board’s disciplinary recommendations. Police officials say many of the complaints substantiated by the board are for minor infractions.

The public will just have to take their word for that, since the city no longer discloses disciplinary records of police officers, citing a state civil rights law that the mayor and Commissioner O’Neill say that they oppose but that can be changed only by the State Legislature. Republican control of the Senate makes that unlikely.

In the almost four years since Mr. Garner’s death, black men and boys who have died unjustly at the hands of the police — Walter Scott in South Carolina, Philando Castile in Minnesota, Tamir Rice in Cleveland — have been memorialized, honoring the humanity that has been lost. But more needs to be done.

The officer who used a chokehold on Mr. Garner should be fired. But the mayor needs to make it clear that New York City will hold the rest of its 36,000 police officers accountable and will work to make that discipline public if they abuse their powers and violate the public trust.