Less than a year later, on December 22, Anthony Ramon Baez was throwing a football with his brothers "when two throws within minutes of each other hit two separate parked police patrol cars near the corner of Cameron Place and Jerome Avenue in the University Heights section of the Bronx. Neither the Police Department nor the family has suggested that the ball was thrown at the cars intentionally." According to the man's family, "two officers grabbed Mr. Baez around the neck and handcuffed him for no good reason." Police said he died of an asthma attack. "His family accused the police of choking him to death, and the Medical Examiner's office indicated that the cause of death was probably asphyxiation."

He was killed for the sake of playing street football.

Officer Francis Livoti was charged with criminally negligent homicide and acquitted. "Unbound by double jeopardy, federal prosecutors stepped in," Julian Kimble reports. "Livoti was eventually convicted by a Federal court in June 1998 for violating Baez's civil rights. He was sentenced to seven years in a federal prison."

That same year, the NYPD settled a lawsuit over the case for $3 million:

In a deposition of Mr. Livoti's former commander taken by the Baez family's lawyers, the supervisor, William Casey, testified that nine police brutality complaints had been lodged against Mr. Livoti before the 1994 death of Mr. Baez, yet senior police officials had rejected a recommendation by the commander that Mr. Livoti be transferred to a clerical job or a less stressful precinct. The testimony indicated that the transfer was rejected because Mr. Livoti was a police union delegate and was protected by connections high up in the chain of command. In addition to the department's handling of Mr. Livoti and the abuse complaints against him, the civil lawsuit highlighted the roles of other police officers who were on the scene when Mr. Livoti was accused of using the illegal chokehold.

Of course, most times that NYPD officers violate policy with dangerous chokeholds, no one dies. "From 2006-2010, the agency received over 200 chokehold complaints per year," Time says of the "banned" technique. "The Civilian Complaint Review Board released a report stating that between July 2013 and June 2014 it received 219 chokehold complaints, a number previously unseen since 2010." Thousands of NYPD chokeholds in an era of an outright ban!

That's the proper context for what happened in this video:

Notice that this isn't just one rogue officer breaking NYPD policy and using a banned technique (that was only ever appropriate when a cop's life was in danger, but was nevertheless used enough to generate hundreds of complaints per year). This is a group of police officers standing around as their colleague blatantly violates policy with a dangerous chokehold and doing nothing to stop him, even as Garner, who poses absolutely no danger to them, pleads that he can't breathe. Later, those officers went so far as to contribute to a dishonest incident report that didn't mention the chokehold even in a case when it ended in a homicide.