The 350-pound man, about to be arrested on charges of illegally selling cigarettes, was arguing with the police. When an officer tried to handcuff him, the man pulled free. The officer immediately threw his arm around the man’s neck and pulled him to the ground, holding him in what appears, in a video, to be a chokehold. The man can be heard saying “I can’t breathe” over and over again as other officers swarm about.
Now, the death of the man, Eric Garner, 43, soon after the confrontation on Thursday on Staten Island, is being investigated by the police and prosecutors. At the center of the inquiry is the officer’s use of a chokehold — a dangerous maneuver that was banned by the New York Police Department more than 20 years ago but that the department cannot seem to be rid of.
“As defined in the department’s patrol guide, this would appear to have been a chokehold,” the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said at a news conference in City Hall on Friday afternoon.
He referred to police rules that forbid chokeholds and define them as including “any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.”
The Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city agency that investigates allegations of police abuse, logged 233 allegations involving chokeholds in 2013, making up 4.4 percent of the excessive-force complaints it received. Although only a tiny fraction of the chokehold complaints that the agency receives are ever substantiated, the number of complaints has generally been rising.
A decade ago, when the review board was receiving a comparable number of force complaints, chokehold allegations were less frequent. They made up 2.3 percent of the excessive-force complaints in 2003, and no more than 2.7 percent in 2004.
“My throat was on his forearm,” one man who was arrested in Queens testified in April in an internal police disciplinary proceeding, describing how he “could barely breathe” after an officer allegedly placed him in a chokehold.
It is unclear if the chokehold contributed to the death on Thursday afternoon of Mr. Garner, who was at least 6 feet 3 inches tall and who, friends said, had several health issues: diabetes, sleep apnea, and asthma so severe that he had to quit his job as a horticulturist for the city’s parks department. He wheezed when he talked and could not walk a block without resting, they said.
Nonetheless, the use of a chokehold in subduing a large but unarmed man during a low-level arrest raises for Mr. Bratton the same questions about police training and tactics that he faced 20 years ago, in his first stint as New York City’s police commissioner.
In 1994, the year after the Police Department banned chokeholds, a man named Anthony Baez died in the Bronx after a police officer put him in a chokehold during a dispute over a touch football game.
At City Hall on Friday, Mr. Bratton said he did not believe that the use of chokeholds by police officers in New York City was a widespread problem, saying this was his “first exposure” to the issue since returning as police commissioner in January.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, standing next to Mr. Bratton, said, “Like so many New Yorkers I was very troubled by the video,” referring to a bystander’s recording of the incident, which was posted on the website of The New York Daily News. The two police officers who initially confronted Mr. Garner have been temporarily taken off patrol duty. The police declined to name the officers but said one of them had been on the force for eight years and the other for four years.
Late Friday, the mayor’s office announced that Mr. de Blasio was postponing his family’s departure on a planned vacation to Italy from Friday evening until Saturday. The postponement was to allow Mr. de Blasio to spend more time making calls to elected officials, community leaders and members of the clergy, and talking to the police, about Mr. Garner’s death, the mayor’s press secretary, Phil Walzak, said.
The encounter between Mr. Garner and plainclothes officers, from the 120th Precinct, began after the officers accused Mr. Garner of illegally selling cigarettes, an accusation he was familiar with. He had been arrested more than 30 times, often accused of selling loose cigarettes bought outside the state, a common hustle designed to avoid state and city tobacco taxes. In March and again in May, he was arrested on charges of illegally selling cigarettes on the sidewalk.
For years, Mr. Garner chafed at the scrutiny by the police, which he considered harassment. In 2007, he filed a handwritten complaint in federal court accusing a police officer of conducting a cavity search of him on the street, “digging his fingers in my rectum in the middle of the street” while people passed by.
More recently, Mr. Garner told lawyers at Legal Aid that he intended to take all the cases against him to trial. “He was adamant he wouldn’t plead guilty to anything,” said Christopher Pisciotta, the lawyer in charge of the Staten Island office of Legal Aid.
Despite all the scrutiny from the police, most days Mr. Garner, a father of six, would stand on Bay Street, in the Tompkinsville neighborhood, his ankles visibly swollen, hawking loose Lucky cigarettes for 50 cents each.
On Thursday, when officers confronted him nearby and accused him of selling tobacco to a man in a red shirt, Mr. Garner reacted with exasperation, suggesting he was not going to cooperate. “I’m tired of it,” he said. “This stops today.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Mr. Garner tells an officer. “Every time you see me, you want to harass me, you want to stop me.”
At one point he has his hands on his hips; at other points he is gesturing energetically. “Please just leave me alone,” he says. In the video, Mr. Garner can be seen crawling forward on the ground as an officer hangs on with his arm around Mr. Garner’s neck. Other officers surround Mr. Garner.
Soon, the officer releases his grip around Mr. Garner’s neck and, kneeling, presses Mr. Garner’s head into the sidewalk.
Mr. Garner was pronounced dead a short time later at Richmond University Medical Center.
Mr. Pisciotta, the Legal Aid lawyer who knew Mr. Garner as a frequent client, said he was struck by how quickly the officers resorted to putting “him into a chokehold,” perhaps in reaction to Mr. Garner’s formidable size.
Mr. Pisciotta said that Mr. Garner, however imposing his appearance, was “a gentle giant,” who was known for breaking up fights.
“To me it looks like they saw a mountain of a man and they decided to take him down using immediate and significant force,” Mr. Pisciotta said.
On Friday, a woman at Mr. Garner’s home, who identified herself as a cousin named Stephanie, said: “The family is very, very sad. We’re in shock. Why did they have to grab him like that?”