NEW YORK — Demonstrators marched through the streets on Tuesday to demand justice for a man who died in police custody.

“It ends today,” the crowd of Eric Garner’s relatives, friends and elected officials chanted as they walked from a Staten Island park across from where police confronted him last Thursday to the precinct where the officers involved were stationed.

There, Garner’s relatives climbed a stairway near the entrance and lit candles in his memory while the rest of the crowd, about 100 people in all, remained on the sidewalk behind police barricades.

An amateur video of Garner’s arrest, on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, shows an officer putting him in an apparent chokehold after he refuses to be handcuffed. The tactic is banned by the NYPD but has been the subject of more than 1,000 complaints to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board over the last five years.

Garner’s sister, Ellisha Flagg, said that the chokehold likely exacerbated the effects of the 6-foot-3, 350-pound Garner’s asthma. “The little bit of breath he had, they took it from him,” Flagg said.

In the video, Garner yells repeatedly, “I can’t breathe!”

Police Commissioner William Bratton said the department would retrain its officers on the use of force but that he still believed in the “broken windows” theory of policing.

Critics say the theory – that low-grade lawlessness can invite greater disorder – can needlessly fuel tensions in minority communities.

Such enforcement “leads to confrontations like this,” City Councilwoman Inez Barron said about Garner’s death.

Bratton vowed to stick with the program, saying the NYPD next will target illegal vendors who rent bikes in Central Park.

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