There is pepper spray, or course. There is also just writing him a ticket, as one would for a traffic offense. Selling single cigarettes is hardly the sort of thing anyone should be hauled off to jail for.
I agree with the giving of a citation, in a courtroom would have been a better venue for his protesting speech.
But this was after being arrested nine times on this particular offense, at some point he was going to be taken in.
If the officers had known he was prone to respiratory failure they might have refrained from piling onto him , but pepper spray in the nose might have been equally bad for causing a dangerous asthma attack.
Tazer might have caused the same problem, not by irritating his respiratory system , but by confusing his circulatory system.
As far as I know there isn't presently a police technique for arrest that is so stress free that it will never cause fatality in the frail.
I recall an old lady that was tackled by a New Orleans policeman because he didn't want her to have a pistol, her resistance was trivial but she was hospitalized .
What I have in mind is reducing the number of total times that the police arrest people.
The responsibility rests in the legislative bodies , things that are not dangerous for the public that members of the public do , should not be so illegal that they require dangerous means of arrest.
The State legislature of NY should hang their heads in shame and rescind the high tobacco tax.
Then every other law that is just not worth the risk and expense of arrest should be revisited and reduced in priority until the priority to arrest is appropriate to the risk to the public .
The idea being that only activities that are likely to injure the public should be worthy of the risk of harm that arrest represents.
If arrests for insignificant offenses are eliminated , there will be less wasted effort for the police and less risk for the public getting arrested , and less risk for the police as well.
This doesn't fix the problem that Michael Brown had , but it might reduce the kind of problem that Eric Garner had.
I have more , but this is a long post already.