Le réalisateur est en discussions pour diriger “The Big Stone Grid”, un polar développé chez Sony.
Si l’on écoute ce qu’en dit Deadline, qui rapporte l’info, ça promet : Michael Mann pourrait être bombardé réalisateur de The Big Stone Grid, un thriller « dans la veine de Seven et Marathon Man » (rien de moins), dans lequel deux inspecteurs new-yorkais mettent au jour un terrifiant réseau d’extorsion. Le cinéaste devrait au passage profiter d’une probable réécriture du scénario de S. Craig Zahler (menée en collaboration avec ce dernier) pour ajouter sa touche – histoire, comme le suggère l’article, de relocaliser l’intrigue à Los Angeles, comme Heat ou Collateral ?
Encore un nouveau record pour “Intouchables” ! La comédie de Toledano et Nakache est le film le plus rentable de la décennie, devançant même le numéro 1 “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis”, selon le classement annuel de la revue Le Film Français.
Un taux de rentabilité de 602% pour Intouchables ! Voilà le résultat obtenu par Le Film Français dans son enquête annuelle sur “la rentabilité des films en salle”. C’est grâce à un budget d’environ 10 millions d’euros, et 19 millions de spectateurs, que la comédie française qui pulvérise actuellement tous les records a atteint ce résultat. Intouchables se paye le luxe, à nouveau, de dépasser Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis qui avait obtenu un taux de 565% l’année de sa sortie.
Derrière Intouchables, pour l’année 2011, on trouve La Guerre est déclarée, avec un taux de rentabilité de 150,2%. Suivi de Polisse de Maïwenn,avec une rentabilité de 112,29% (budget de 6,4 M euros) devançant Rien à déclarer de Dany Boon (102,4%). Quatre films dépassent donc un taux de rentabilité de 100% (contre trois en 2010) – et même cinq avec Les Femmes du 6e étage de Philippe Le Guay à 99,75%. The Artist est 10e de ce classement avec un taux de 54,85% (pour un budget initial de 10,5 M euros). Signalons que le film de Michel Hazanavicius vient de passer aujourd’hui la barre des deux millions d’entrées.
A l’opposé, Or Noir de Jean-Jacques Annaud est le film le moins rentable de l’année : 38,5 millions d’euros et une rentabilité de 1,73%. “Son devis correspondait à l’ambition internationale du film mais il n’a été que très peu vendu hors des frontières“, souligne Le Film Français. Suivent Or Noir, Voyez comme ils dansent de Claude Miller (10,45 M euros; 1,47%) et Les Aventures de Philibert, capitaine puceau de Sylvain Fusée (12,49 M euros; 1,47%), et L’ Ordre et la morale de Mathieu Kassovitz (11,80M euros; 3,44%).
Globally, cities need to invest $1.8 trillion a year to become carbon-neutral | Philippe Desmazes/AFP via Getty Images
Decarbonizing cities to meet EU goals is a question of money
Urban areas are huge CO2 emitters, and that won’t change without a lot of cash.
This article is the product of a POLITICO Working Group.
WARSAW — Cities generate about 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, so any effort to become carbon-neutral fails without their involvement. But the costs of going green are immense.
Think of the EU’s Green Deal program to become climate-neutral by 2050 as a pyramid. Up on top, the bloc’s leaders have made the mid-century target the core of the new European Commission’s program. That aim has to be approved by national governments (something that’s being worked on). Then those goals get transmitted further down the chain to end up at municipal governments.
The transmission belt that begins with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ends with local officials like Justyna Glusman, Warsaw’s coordinator for sustainable development and greenery, who has to figure out how to revamp her city with very limited financial resources.
“Cities face all kinds of challenges. They are seen as opportunities but they are also seen as those who have to take the responsibility for driving climate neutrality,” said Katarzyna Szumielewicz, program manager at the Commission’s Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy, speaking at a recent POLITICO working group on how cities can reduce their carbon footprint.
Globally, cities need to invest $1.8 trillion a year to become carbon-neutral, according to a report by the Coalition for Urban Transitions, an NGO. It calculates that the investment would generate annual returns worth $2.8 trillion in 2030, and $7 trillion in 2050 based on cost savings alone.
A local problem
Those big numbers gain granular meaning at the level of individual cities. The EU wants new buildings to reach nearly zero energy performance by the beginning of 2021 and to decarbonize all of Europe’s buildings by 2050.
The Polish capital, a city of 1.7 million in a greater metropolitan region of about 3 million, faces a huge job in reaching the bloc’s green goals.
It has the Continent’s largest centralized urban heating network, but it is coal-fired so will have to be changed in order to conform to carbon neutrality. About a fifth of the city’s houses have their own heating systems, many of them antiquated coal-fired furnaces that create smog and emit carbon dioxide — but many of those house owners don’t have the money to upgrade to cleaner gas, let alone to zero-emission systems like photovoltaics or heat pumps.
“Most of the buildings in Poland are single family buildings and people have no money to invest,” Alicja Kuczera, CEO of the Polish Green Building Council, said at the working group.
Warsaw isn’t as old as many other European cities because it was flattened during World War II. But it was largely rebuilt in the decades following that conflict when the main push was to house people, and modern energy-efficiency standards were unknown.
That means existing buildings need to be insulated and modernized.
The city has about 300,000 buildings. “If we want to retrofit just a part of them it is a huge cost,” said Glusman. She estimated that upgrading a fifth of the city’s residential building stock would cost €700 million; the city’s three-year budget for such tasks is €70 million.
“We know it is not enough,” she said.
Warsaw’s issues are faced by cities across the Continent. About two-thirds of Europe’s building stock dates to before 1980, which means it doesn’t meet modern energy standards and has to be upgraded.
It’s not just buildings. In order to become carbon-neutral, everything from waste systems to water and transport also has to be rethought. Although Warsaw is Poland’s wealthiest city, it lags Western Europe in many of these areas. The Polish capital has only 43 charge points for electric cars while Berlin has 573 and Paris has 815 — and both the French and German governments have made pledges to dramatically speed up their deployment.
That is setting off a race for cash. National governments are fighting among themselves to get as large a slice as possible from the EU’s next seven-year budget. Below them, regional governments and city administrations are also calling for more money.
“Cities are the largest emitters so if the EU wants to address the issue it needs to address cities directly and not through national governments,” Glusman said.
Money worries
In Poland, local governments face severe funding challenges. The country’s laws set debt limits for cities, making it difficult for them to borrow large sums needed for expensive carbon-reduction projects.
While Warsaw is large and relatively rich, smaller cities and towns face difficulty in approaching debt markets because their projects are too small, said Piotr Dmuchowski, head of regional institutional sales for HSBC.
“If a mayor of a smaller town wants to buy 10 electric buses, that’s too small as the eurobond minimum is €500 million,” he said. He advocates for the government to make it easier for Polish cities to club together to jointly finance such projects, something that’s already happening in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and France, among other EU countries.
Polish municipal budgets also face a political problem. The country’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party is at odds with many municipal governments, which are in the hands of liberal opposition parties. Sweeping reforms to the education system and to social benefits have put extra strains on local budgets that have to bear those costs.
Glusman said that those policy changes have cost Warsaw about 1 billion złoty (€230 million). Calling on Brussels to send cash to cities, she said: “The policy of the EU will be crucial to the success of these programs,” she said.
The EU’s Green Deal calls for €1 trillion in investments — money that is to come from the bloc’s budget, the European Investment Bank, governments, private lenders and investors.
“For Europe to transition to a climate-neutral economy, we need both political commitment and massive investments,” Valdis Dombrovskis, the Commission vice president in charge of the budget, said earlier this year.
In a sign of that new effort, the EIB in January struck a €1 billion financing deal with the city of Vienna, largely related to energy-efficiency measures in municipal housing. It was the bank’s first such agreement with a large European city.
“Over the next 10 years, we plan to kickstart climate action projects worth €1 trillion,” Andrew McDowell, the EIB’s vice president responsible for energy policy, said in January.
That spigot of cash is going to have to be directed across the Continent for cities to really reduce their carbon footprint.
“In the end it’s all about the money. Without the money it will be extremely difficult,” said Piotr Czopek, director of renewable and distributed energy at Poland’s ministry of state assets.
This article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
Belgians are facing the worst health emergency of modern times but politicians still can’t agree to form a permanent government to deal with it.
Across the country, there are now over 1,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and the authorities have closed down schools, bars and restaurants.
This raises particular problems in a country that has struggled to agree on a government since elections in May 2019, and one where the deficit is threatening to balloon out of control. The caretaker government under Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès — a French-speaking liberal — has no majority in parliament, which weakens its credibility and prevents it from throwing everything at the crisis.
The biggest political parties of both sides of the linguistically divided country, from the Flemish-speaking North and the French-speaking South, started negotiating last week over a possible future government, but failed to come up with a long-term fix.
Bart De Wever, party president of the Flemish nationalists, the biggest party in Belgium, confirmed on Saturday that he aimed for “a government for one year, with the only goal of fighting the corona crisis and its economic consequences.”
But talks broke down over the weekend because of a lack of trust between the Flemish nationalists and the French-speaking socialists. Parties also didn’t agree on who should take the lead of this new government.
On Sunday night, political leaders settled on a typical Belgian compromise.
Ten parties, including the three in government, will back a plan to give emergency powers to the caretaker government. That enables Wilmès’ team to take the necessary measures without having to look for support in parliament first. However, the emergency powers are limited to handling the coronavirus crisis, the negotiators stressed.
In Flanders, politicians regretted that not even a pandemic could create a normally functioning government.
“If such a crisis is not enough to force politicians to form a government, then what is? The storm doesn’t get more perfect than this,” said Carl Devos, a professor in political science at the University of Ghent. “The current move only displays the distrust between the different parties.”
Devos also questioned the ability of the minority government to tackle the crisis. “They can provide crisis management. But it’s not clear whether they can tackle the socioeconomic and budgetary consequences. Do they have the democratic legitimacy to draft a new budget or decide on the economic recovery after this crisis?”
Open up the wallets
Belgium’s problem handling the coronavirus crisis is not just political. On the economic side, things don’t look that good either.
The new Belgian set-up immediately facilitated new measures. The Belgian parliament agreed to provide an additional budget of €1 billion to tackle the consequences of coronavirus. The extra money should help both the health sector as well as companies and employees who suffer from the economic impact.
Other European countries are also opening up their purse strings, especially since the European Commission is waiving debt limits and state-aid prohibitions. EU Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, who oversees economic policy, said officials needed to prioritize the emergency response over fiscal stimulus.
German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said last week: “We have the financial strength to deal with this crisis. There is enough money and we will use it.”
But that’s not the case in Belgium, as the budget was already sliding off the rails.
This year’s deficit mounted to 2.77 percent of gross domestic product or €13.5 billion. Those numbers are based on an economic growth of 1.4 percent and don’t take into account the (potentially devastating) economic impact of coronavirus. A Commission official told reporters on Friday that it’s very likely the growth for the EU “will fall below zero this year, and potentially even considerably below zero.”
And yet, Belgium doesn’t have a choice, said Johan Van Overtveldt, the former Belgian finance minister who now chairs the European Parliament’s budget committee.
The economist built his career on fiscal orthodoxy but he acknowledged that these were extraordinary times. “The budgetary considerations are not our first priority at this point,” Van Overtveldt said. “This has the potential to trigger an economic crisis that is beyond that of 2008. The financial crisis triggered uncertainty and fear which led to a crisis in demand. Now, we’re facing a crisis in supply at the same time, as companies need more credit to finance their activities and see their international supply chains disrupted. The combination of a crisis in demand and supply is particularly dangerous.”
Just like Pierre Wunsch, the chief of the National Bank of Belgium, did earlier, he encouraged the government to stimulate the economy to prevent an economic plunge.
“It should be the absolute priority for any European finance minister at this point,” Van Overtveldt said, while at the same time acknowledging that Belgium is not in the ideal situation to launch a form of economic bazooka to counter that downward spiral. “Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands are obviously in a much more comfortable position.”
Sir Alex Ferguson has hailed the work of the NHS as Manchester United announced they have teamed up with both the NHS and local charities during the coronavirus crisis.
The Premier League is suspended until the end of May with the UK in lockdown, and players from all 20 clubs have come together to donate £4million to help frontline NHS staff.
United announced on Thursday they would be giving gifts to 3,500 NHS staff and suggesting Old Trafford as a possible location for a temporary blood donation centre.
Ferguson himself is well aware of the hard work and dedication of NHS staff, having suffered a brain haemorrhage two years ago.
“I’m delighted we are now recognising the importance of our NHS – as I experienced two years ago after they saved my life,” Sir Alex told United’s official website.
“The response to this pandemic has been magnificent and has made me proud of the way the club and the British people have rallied round to help. Well Done.”
Current United boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer echoed the views of his old manager.
The Norwegian said: “The NHS staff and the volunteers fighting the virus are putting themselves at risk to keep everybody safe and doing a truly amazing job.
“They deserve thanks and praise from everybody for their work and their efforts every single day.”
United have also put a fleet of 16 vehicles on standby to support NHS courier operations in Manchester, as well as donating medical equipment.
Jurgen Klopp has been advised to snub a potential deal for Borussia Dortmund’s Jadon Sancho in favour of signing a cheaper alternative in Valencia’s Ferran Torres.
The Valencia star has established himself as one of the most promising youngsters in European football, scoring four goals and adding four assists this season before the campaign was suspended.
His impressive form has seen a number of top clubs display an interest with Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Atletico Madrid, Ajax, Juventus and Borussia Dortmund all linked with a move for the 20-year-old.
FEATURE: Five academy rejects clubs would (and wouldn’t) take back
Torres’ current contract expires at the end of next season, and he is said to be reluctant to sign a new deal – meaning that Valencia may choose to sell him in the summer rather than letting him go for free next year, as reported in the Daily Mirror.
And Spanish football expert Domagoj Kostanjsak claims Klopp would be able to sign him for much less than his £87.5million release clause.
“Torres is one of the brightest players in La Liga – and even in Europe as well,” he told the Blood Red podcast.
“He’s a highly technical winger with pace and he dribbles well. He likes to run and he beats his marker easily most of the time.
“He’s good with both feet and that makes him deadly: he can go inside and shoot or outside and put crosses into the box.
“He’s pretty much the whole package except for his finishing, which still needs a bit of work. But he’s really young, so I would say the sky is the limit.”
Torres could prove to be a more cost-effective option as back-up for Liverpool’s wingers, with Sancho expected to cost in excess of £100m.
Kostanjsak added: “I would say he is like Sancho or even like Vinicius Junior at Real Madrid. [His next move] depends on the playing time he would get at those clubs.
“Jurgen Klopp loves prolific wingers and Torres is one of those. He’s fast, he’s good on the ball, and I don’t think there is a team out there who wouldn’t want him if they could get him.
“I would say that he is way ahead of his age, though, both mentally and sheer ability-wise. His decision making is on point and he has already played on the biggest stages regularly, so he is ready for a step up, but he needs game time.
“Rotting on the bench is going to do him no good.”
Kostanjsak concluded: “If Torres doesn’t sign a new contract and he is adamant about leaving, I think that €60 million would be about right, but €100 million, that’s a bit much even for a gem like him.
“It will be really difficult for Valencia to keep him, but to me, at this moment, it seems like a matter of time – he will become too big for the club.”
The F365 Show is on hiatus until the football returns. Subscribe now ready for its glorious comeback. In the meantime, listen to the latest episode of Planet Football’s 2000s podcast, The Broken Metatarsal.
Former Manchester United defender Wes Brown thinks James Maddison, Jack Grealish and Jadon Sancho would make “perfect” additions at Old Trafford in the next transfer window.
All three have been linked with a move to Man Utd in the summer with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer looking for young, attacking players with potential.
Sancho was understood to have ‘unofficially confirmed’ a move to Man Utd late last month but today brings news that he would prefer a transfer to La Liga.
FEATURE: Five academy rejects clubs would (and wouldn’t) take back
Meanwhile, Aston Villa captain Grealish recently said he was “deeply embarrassed” after he “stupidly agreed” to go to a friend’s house during the coronavirus lockdown.
That gaffe could have cost him a move to Man Utd with a report in the Daily Star claiming that United could turn to Leicester City’s Maddison instead.
However, Brown reckons the club could sign any of the trio and he would be very happy with his former club’s business.
“I would have all three! Any one of those three would be great,” Brown told MUTV.
“Jadon Sancho would probably be No. 1. But James Maddison looks fit and ready and determined and would also be a great asset for the club.
“Jack Grealish is an individual that gets things done, takes control of the game and has his own style. Any one of those three would be perfect I think.
“If that was to happen and Ole could tinker with it a little bit and see where they all fit in it that midfield, I think we’d be a force to be reckoned with.”
The F365 Show is on hiatus until the football returns. Subscribe now ready for its glorious comeback. In the meantime, listen to the latest episode of Planet Football’s 2000s podcast, The Broken Metatarsal.
Manchester United target Jadon Sancho would prefer a move to La Liga with Real Madrid or Barcelona, according to reports.
The Borussia Dortmund winger – who was advised by Marco Reus yesterday to spurn Man Utd’s advances – has been heavily linked with a move to the Premier League with Chelsea also said to be interested.
Sancho has contributed 30 goals and 38 assists in 78 appearances for Dortmund in the last two seasons, leading to the current high level of interest.
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The Manchester City academy graduate is thought to want to join a club competing in the Champions League, which could prove to be a problem for the Red Devils.
And now The Times has claimed that ‘those advising him say the preferred destination is La Liga’ despite childhood friends apparently saying he ‘will return to the Premier League’.
Sancho wants to win the Ballon d’Or and ‘he would stand a greater chance by playing for either Real Madrid or Barcelona’ than Man Utd.
The report added: ‘The same recommendation was recently given to Sancho’s father by lifelong family friends.’
The F365 Show is on hiatus until the football returns. Subscribe now ready for its glorious comeback. In the meantime, listen to the latest episode of Planet Football’s 2000s podcast, The Broken Metatarsal.
An enormous asteroid that’s bigger than the Empire State Building will fly by Earth next week. There’s no need to bunker down and prepare yourself for a nuclear explosion-like jolt. Scientists say there’s little chance it will hit our planet.
NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies says the enormous space rock, which measures up to 1,870 feet in diameter, is expected to make its closest approach to Earth at 3:23 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, on Saturday, Aug. 10.
Classified as 2006 QQ23, the asteroid is about 1,870 feet in diameter, dwarfing the asteroid about 187 to 427 feet in diameter that whizzed by July 25, coming within 45,000 miles of Earth.
Astronomers missed that surprise visitor, named Asteroid 2019 OK.
Michael Brown, a Melbourne, Australia-based observational astronomer who is an associate professor at Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, told The Washington Post the space rock “came out of nowhere” and made an “uncomfortably close” approach.
“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” Brown said, noting, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
Asteroid 2019 OK’s approach came just a few days after a car-sized asteroid blew up in the atmosphere over the Caribbean Sea south of Puerto Rico, causing a spectacular fireball. About 13 to 16 feet in diameter, the meteor had been discovered only a couple of hours before it hit.
Asteroids Pose A Genuine Risk
The risk large asteroids pose to Earth is genuine. Astronomers at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies closely track them. Collisions that have happened in the past had the same impact as a nuclear explosion.
In 1908, the Tunguska meteor explosion in Russia flattened about 770 square miles of forest. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor that broke up over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, shattered glass and injured about 1,200 people. It was detected from monitoring stations as far away as Antarctica, and some scientists said it was so bright that it outshone the sun.
Fortunately, Asteroid 2006 QQ23 is expected to stay safely away when it buzzes Earth on Aug. 10. Hurtling through space at speeds of around 10,400 mph, it will come within about 4.6 million miles of Earth. A collision with Earth by an asteroid this large would lcause colossal damage, triggering tsunamis if it hit the ocean or even global climatic changes that could prevail for years.
Scientists are aware of about 20,000 Near-Earth Objects, most of them asteroids, and make about 30 new discoveries each week. But NASA estimates that about two-thirds of space rocks in our solar system that are larger than 460 feet in diameter haven’t yet been discovered.
‘Gentle Nudge Rather Than Vicious Kick’
As with many things, the best defense is a good offense. In 1998, Congress directed NASA to establish a program to detect, track and project future close approaches to Earth of space rocks and other Near-Earth Objects.
NASA says asteroid impacts are the only potentially preventable natural disaster. The space agency and its partners are studying several different approaches to deflecting a hazardous asteroid, the most advanced of which is called the Double-Asteroid Redirection Test, slated to launch in 2021.
In the test, a smart car-sized spacecraft will slam into its target at a speed of about 13,000 mph. Among the things scientists hope the test will show is how much the orbit of asteroids can be changed.
If scientists are able to find a hazardous asteroid a decade or more before a potential impact, there likely would be time to launch a deflection mission to shift its orbit and avoid a collision with Earth.
Brown, the Melbourne astronomer, wrote in The Conversation the strategy would give the asteroid a “gentle nudge rather than a vicious kick.”
Destroying the asteroid isn’t a good option, he wrote, because it could create multiple destructive asteroids. But the more scientists know, the better the chances are to “avoid annihilation,” Brown wrote.
“With just a day or week’s notice, we would be in real trouble, but with more notice there are options,” he wrote.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is currently visiting the asteroid Bennu, and Japan’s Hayabusa2 is monitoring the asteroid Ryugu on discovery missions. The video below explains more about that.
NEW YORK — An NYPD judge has recommended that Officer Daniel Pantaleo be fired from the police force for his role in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.
Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado issued the verdict Friday in the internal disciplinary case against Pantaleo, who put his arm around Garner’s neck in July 2014, according to news reports.
The NYPD suspended Pantaleo Friday in response to the decision, said Phil Walzak, the Police Department’s top spokesperson. The officer has avoided criminal charges for his role in Garner’s death, which helped fuel the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement that adopted his last words: “I can’t breathe.”
Maldonado’s decision is a non-binding recommendation to Police Commissioner James O’Neill, who will ultimately decide whether to fire Pantaleo. Police-reform activists and elected officials urged the commissioner to uphold the verdict and give Garner’s family justice five years after his death.
“Five years is too long. Commisisoner O’Neill, do your job,” Garner’s daughter, Emerald Garner, told reporters Friday.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board, the police oversight agency that prosecuted Pantaleo, affirmed Maldonado’s decision in a statement echoing the demands for O’Neill to oust the cop. Pantaleo could also resign from the NYPD before the commissioner makes a decision.
“Today’s decision confirms what the Civilian Complaint Review Board always has maintained: Officer Daniel Pantaleo committed misconduct on July 17, 2014, and his actions caused the death of Eric Garner,” CCRB Chair Fred Davie said.
O’Neill will receive Maldonado’s full report after the CCRB and Pantaleo’s defense team have a chance to comment on her recommendations, Walzak said, adding that the Police Department would not speak further about the case until the commissioner makes his decision.
“All of New York City understandably seeks closure to this difficult chapter in our City’s history,” Walzak said in a statement. “Premature statements or judgments before the process is complete however cannot and will not be made.”
Protesters shouting “Fire Pantaleo!” wedged their way into City Hall’s west wing Friday as Mayor Bill de Blasio addressed the major developments in a case that has bedeviled his city for five years.
The Democratic mayor said he has not read Maldonado’s recommendations nor spoken with O’Neill about them. But he said her decision marked an important step in a “fair and impartial process” for holding Pantaleo accountable.
“Today, for the first time in these long five years, the system of justice is working,” de Blasio said at a news conference where he spoke for fewer than 15 mintues.
The decision came as the NYPD reportedly braced for protests over the weekend in case Maldonado’s ruling sided with Pantaleo. He was accused of recklessly using a banned chokehold and restricting Garner’s breathing.
Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But the head of his police union blasted the judge’s recommendation as “pure political insanity.”
“If it is allowed to stand, it will paralyze the NYPD for years to come,” said Patrick Lynch, the president of the New York City Police Benevolent Association. “This judge ignored the evidence and trampled P.O. Pantaleo’s due process rights in order to deliver the result that grandstanding politicians and protesters demanded.”
Pantaleo was seen on video with his arm against Garner’s neck as cops tried to arrest him for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on July 17, 2014. Garner repeatedly shouted “I can’t breathe” as he was on the ground, a phrase that became an iconic rallying cry for anti-police-brutality protesters.
The NYPD’s disciplinary process was the last possible venue for Pantaleo to face accountability for Garner’s death. A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict him on state charges in 2014, and it took almost exactly five years for the U.S. Department of Justice to say it would not pursue a federal case against the cop.
The NYPD has said it will also pursue a disciplinary case against Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, who was a supervising officer on the scene. But police-reform activists have demanded the firings of every cop involved in Garner’s killing.
The case has haunted de Blasio, who was in the first year of his tenure when Garner died. Protesters targeted the mayor with shouts of “Fire Pantaleo!” during Wednesday’s second presidential debate in Detroit.
“De Blasio consistently attempts to talk a good game when it comes to police accountability, yet time and time again (his) actions speak much louder than his lies: the years of delays, lies, and protecting abusive officers have amounted to nothing less that torture for Eric Garner’s mother and family,” Loyda Colon, the co-director of the Justice Committee activist group, said in a statement.
De Blasio noted that the NYPD in his tenure has trained cops on de-escalating conflict and implicit biases while simultaneously driving down arrests and crime.
The mayor laid blame on the state and federal authorities — particularly the Justice Department — who did not criminally prosecute Pantaleo. He said he “absolutely” regrets adhering for so long to the department’s request that the city hold off on the disciplinary proceedings.
“I cannot find any parallel to what happened here and it’s an unacceptable reality,” he said. “I did not think it possible, honestly.”