and lou palumbo, it's good to see all of you and it's good to have you back here, lou.e so passionate about this last night. i'm i'm going to talk to you in a moment. but we're going start with mark. you have all seen the disturbing video we saw. susan candiotti played it out for us. do you think eric garner looks like a suspect who needs to be subdued? >> not in the way it was initially done. i have always said i would not want to be a cop on the streets of new york risking life. but cops are trained on a spectrum of force. they are allowed to respond to resistance with increasing force. but it has to be in response to the force. and mr. garner, while he did not want to be arrested had not raised to it a level where anything like a chokehold i think should have been used. the cops have to take control of the situation. but they have to do it in as calm a way as they can without accelerating it. >> you have won some previous cases against officer pantaleo. he is the officer in this case. tell me about the specifics of that case, and were you surprised when you saw the h

back with me now lou palumbo, jumaane williams and mark o'mara. did you finish your point we were talking about? >> there were two things that i wanted to say that we have to focus on one is the effectiveness of abusing stop, question, and frisk. if you look at the numbers, it wasn't effective. the second part is we have to decide as a society that the constitution means something and we don't want to live in a police state. if you want to violate those things, i'm sure all manner of crime will go down. but we can't just do it in one community, in the black and brown community. >> i can say one thing, don, very quickly. >> what about people who say you're doing it in the neighborhoods where there is crime? >> yes, except you don't do it on wall street. we don't stop people on wall street. >> there aren't shootings on wall street. >> but there is financial crimes that cause the shootings. we didn't do it in the italian neighborhood. >> i understand what you're saying, jumaane. that's apples and oranges. >> the violence happened in the italian commu

"cnn tonight" task force we're calling them, bernard kerik, former commissioner of the nypd and lou palumboorcement agent for the nassau county police department. good to see you. you heard my last conversation when we heard about eric garner. could that situation have been de-escalated, those officers handle it in the proper way? >> yeah, if he didn't resist arrest. that's the first and foremost thing. if he complied with the arrest, whether it was a cigarette, whether he took that pen. once the officer says you're under arrest, whether it was a mass murder, once he says you're under arrest, you have to comply with the arrest. if you don't do that, it's considered resisting, then the officers have to use the force necessary to effect the arrest. and i can tell you, don, watching the video, you can take all the guys in this room right now. if i don't want you to put handcuffs on me, you're going to have a really, really hard time. >> what the attorney said is that the department doesn't distinguish between passive resistance and active resistance. >> that's a very vague and ambiguous concep

here to debate that is errol louis, a cnn political commentator and lou palumbo, a retired law enforcementntlemen, thank you so much for being here. so we just showed this very disturbing video, and you see this low level street hustler as he has been described. he was selling individual cigarettes. that was his crime. >> they call them untaxed cigarettes. >> six police officers respond. he says something to the effect not you guys again. he says hey, hey, hey. he puts his hands up. and then you see what happens here. lou, why did it take six officers, and why does one appear to grab him from around the neck and put him in some form of a chokehold? >> well, the first thing i'm going to say is this gentleman was 6'3" and 350 pounds. and it's not uncommon to have multiple officers restrain you, because if three or four officers restrain you, they have to use les force, there is less risk of injury to the individual they're taking into custody and subsequently to themselves. the simple fact of the matter here is if this individual had simply complied with the arrest, which he was legally requ