July 17,2015, New York – Today, on the one-year anniversary of the police killing of Eric Garner, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued the following statement:

One year after Eric Garner was killed by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the Garner family is still seeking justice.  In that time, several other families have had to take up their own anguished search for accountability, as Black people continue to die at the hands of police and, as in the case of Sandra Bland, under mysterious circumstances while in police custody.  At the same time, we have seen the explosive growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, indictments in a small number of killings by police, the groundbreaking creation of a special prosecutor to investigate killings by police in New York, the removal of the Confederate flag from both a statehouse and store shelves, and a national conversation about the myriad ways in which Black lives are treated as though they do not matter.  It is the beginning of a true reckoning with our country’s entrenched history of racism and white supremacy.  This mix of outrage and hope, tragedy and triumph is at the back of a movement that will outlast that history. Racism runs deep, but the drive for justice runs deeper.