Last month 18 year-old Elvin Vargas shouted profanities at the police in Roslindale. In the process of subduing an agitated Vargas to arrest him for disorderly conduct, Officer Ted Rivera of the Boston Police Department placed his hands around the man’s neck. How do we know this? Not from a police body camera — the use of which the BPD resists — but because a bystander recorded the incident and posted the clip on YouTube. The video is disturbing, offering a window into the longstanding friction between police and many civilians in this country, especially people of color.
Two things are particularly noteworthy about the incident. First, it highlights yet again the importance of transparency in documenting police-civilian encounters. Prior to the digital age, would we even know much about this altercation? Probably not. Now, we have the capacity to learn about these interactions almost immediately through video and its distribution on social media. If not for the fortuity of the bystander’s presence, and that person’s wherewithal to record the exchange, our understanding would likely rely on accounts from various witnesses with disparate recollections and agendas. Instead, the film becomes visual evidence subject to interpretation in both a court of law and the court of public opinion. These are some reasons, among many, why it is crucial for the BPD to implement a body-camera program and for the Commonwealth to permit citizens to record police activity.
Second, why did Officer Rivera wrap his hands around Vargas’s neck for approximately ten seconds and should we, as a city, tolerate this method of restraint? Boston Police Commissioner William Evans defended the officer in the press, insisting there was “no real choking going on there.” A BPD spokesperson further indicated that, while the use of hands in this manner is not part of department protocol, officers are instructed to deploy “the least amount of force necessary to overcome the resistance. There’s no policy on ways to do it.”
Perhaps there should be an explicit police policy against the application of pressure to a person’s throat regardless of whether this behavior is labeled a “chokehold,” a loaded term with an ignominious history. The risk of severe injury is all too real. Take the much-chronicled death of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York City police officer in July 2014. That event was captured on camera — and Garner’s haunting cries of “I can’t breathe” have reverberated in the public consciousness ever since.
Garner’s death occurred against the backdrop of well-established opposition to similar restraint tactics within the highest echelons of New York City law enforcement. For more than twenty years, the New York Police Department has banned chokeholds, broadly defining this behavior as “any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.” This policy has not stopped the use of this technique or, at least, claims of its persistence; a study by the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board reported 219 chokehold grievances citywide in the year preceding Garner’s death. But the policy has sent an important message — in training the police, in educating the public, and in providing a benchmark to evaluate excessive force allegations.
The Boston Police Department has not ignored problems with officers exerting force to a civilian’s throat as a means of restraint. After a police tribunal concluded that Officer David Williams had used an improper chokehold in the 2009 arrest of a man in the North End and subsequently lied about it, the department brass fired the officer, although an arbitrator later overturned that decision. The BPD’s own rules and procedures urge officers to “refrain from utilizing restraint techniques that include squeezing the trachea, windpipe or throat area to stop a subject from ingesting any controlled substance.” This is an admirable prohibition even if it is only confined to the context of preventing a drug suspect from swallowing contraband, a situation where imposing pressure on a suspect’s neck is particularly dangerous. What the BPD guidelines lack is a more comprehensive and formal condemnation of these methods in all types of civilian encounters.
A police officer’s application of force to a suspect’s throat may not be illegal. Yet that does not make it an appropriate way to restrain a suspect, even an aggressive and obnoxious one. It is insufficient to refuse to train officers in techniques resembling chokeholds. Rather, the BPD should revamp its use-of-force policy to bar officers from putting pressure on a suspect’s throat area in order to restrain that person. This would help address concerns about civilian safety and allow Bostonians, collectively, to breathe more easily.
