It was a simple traffic stop, a minor offence. Seconds after stopping his car for a traffic stop, 32 years after the Rodney King beating, Tyre Nichols was dragged out of his car amid vulgarity-laced barked commands and immediately escalating police violence. He lay splayed on the ground asking what he did wrong as a blue-uniformed squad descended upon him, handcuffing him, hook-punching him, kicking him in the head as he politely –and surprisingly serenely- tried to calm down the frenzied police.
But he was kicked and punched harder, and pepper-sprayed. When he ran from the pepper spray, he was taken down again, and then relentlessly and mercilessly pummeled, kicked and beaten with batons.
Video shows what appears as gratuitous violence upon a man who was no longer resisting. He was dragged, propped up and punched again. When paramedics were called, it would be 22 minutes after arriving that they provided any assistance to the man. He would eventually die from the injuries he sustained.
Americans cheer loudly at the ending words of their national anthem played before sports events. "O’er the Land of the Free, and the home of the brave..."
There was little freedom for Nichols driving his car in the streets of Memphis, Tennessee January 7. An aggressive police unit called SCORPION, tasked with proactive policing, claimed he was driving erratically and stopped him. Then the above scenario played out. Between five and nine officers are seen on video in a merciless, sustained assault and on the subdued Nichols. Three days later, arguably the only brave man in the assault and gang-beating arrest that night, the 29-year-old Black man driving his car in the Land of the Free, was dead.
It was a simple traffic stop.
The police officers belonged to a united called Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods. SCORPION for short, an unfortunate metaphor for a predatory arachnid generally considered dangerous because its sting can cause severe pain swelling, and even death. In this case, it serves to describe community policing taken to the wrong extreme.
The problem for America is that these were not rogue cops. They were the power of the state on that Memphis street, the culmination of institutionalized culture, racial prejudice, training, and practices designed to protect police and tune-up suspects so they would be unlikely to want to run askew of the law. They were also the challenge of overcoming bad ideas and methods built into past training.
In a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 fears, American policing has shifted to a warrior-like culture and mindset often highly confrontational with people in the communities they serve. Americans as a nation accepted the remoulding of their once cherished constitutional rights in exchange for a perceived increase in safety and security. Large sectors of the political right now see constitutional rights as impediments to public safety.
The traditional image of the local beat cop serving as the community's protector has in much of America been supplanted by that of the urban warrior, armed with cutting-edge gear and armour and who uses violence to establish order.
In a 2017 campaign speech then presidential candidate Donald Trump told police not to worry about injuring suspects during an arrest. "When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don’t hit their head, and they just killed somebody — don’t hit their head," Trump told the cheering crowd. "I said, you can take the hand away, okay?" The words elicited laughter, but the message was clear.
"Knock the crap out of him," Trump told a crowd on how to treat a heckling suspect at another rally. "I’ll pay the legal bills, Okay?"
But those paying the consequences are people in the streets of America who, rightfully or not, come into the crosshairs of the police. Yet what we see in the Nichols tapes is the product of training and culture.
In the ‘70s and ‘80s and increasingly in the psychological aftermath of 9/11 until 2012, police officers had their initial training in a militaristic "boot camp" style that emphasized fear and strict behaviour as a means of maintaining order. Officers yelled and reprimanded new recruits during the "tune-up" training for failing to perform difficult, sometimes impossible, drills with overbearing threats. Rookies were expected to salute and maintain silence. Minor rule infractions were penalised with more yelling and intimidation.
That "tune-up" of officers translated to how those officers eventually treat the public and Black and coloured suspects in particular – a culture of “tuning up” a suspect through overpowering commands and physical intimidation, which then morphed into actual violence. The tunning up of the suspects became a good beating so they would be less likely to repeat their behaviour. The most outrageous on-the-field manifestations, the George Floyd and Tyre Nichols arrests.
Condemnation of the harsh and infringing on a person's rights may entail utilizing physical force or intimidation techniques to control or subdue a suspect yielded movements like the ineptly named Defund the Police efforts, which produced a political backlash, resulting in election results favouring candidates who wrapped themselves in the flag and support for the police and creating a momentum of perceived permission for police aggressiveness.
But, in response to law enforcement organizations, police altered training policy to stop requiring recruits to salute and keep silent when they came across staff members, with the goal of translating this into policing practices so that as officers, they must strike up a conversation, make eye contact, show respect, and refer to the public with titles like "sir" or "ma'am." In other words, de-escalate from the start. None of which happened on that Memphis street on January 7.
It is significant to note that de-escalation strategies and treating suspects with respect and decency have been stressed by some police departments and in training courses. The use of excessive force or abusive techniques is expressly forbidden in most jurisdictions and may subject offending officers to disciplinary action or criminal charges as in the case of the five now-former Memphis officers, fired and charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, two charges of aggravated kidnapping, two charges of official misconduct and one charge of official oppression, which can lead to 15 to 60 years in prison in Tennessee.
None of that, however, has managed to refocus the role of law enforcement as guardians and not warriors, especially in Black communities, said Nichols family attorney Ben Crump.
"As much as those 5 officers killed Tyre Nichols, it was the police culture in America that killed Tyre Nichols," said the famed civil rights lawyer, Crump.
"It’s so hard to watch these officers continue to brutalize this young man to the point of him dying,” Crump told San Francisco’s KRON4 television station. "We don’t see our white brothers and sisters who are unarmed face this type of excessive force. Where are those videos?...We see videos repeatedly of Black people, especially unarmed Black men, killed by the police, and those videos are everywhere."
The aggravating issue, then when you consider that the officers involved are Black as was Nichols, is institutionalized racism, which perpetuates the use of excessive force and police brutality against Black individuals, regardless of the race of the officer involved.
According to research, Black people in America are more likely than persons of other races to experience police brutality and are thus disproportionately affected by it. This, critics say, is a result of the systematic prejudice and discrimination present in American society, and the criminal justice system, which has an impact on all facets of policing.
"The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism," said CNN political commentator Van Jones in an opinion piece. "One of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects. Society’s message that Black people are inferior, unworthy and dangerous is pervasive," said Jones. "Over many decades, numerous experiments have shown that these ideas can infiltrate Black minds as well as White."
"We have to talk about this institutionalised police culture that has this unwritten law, you can engage in excessive use of force against Black and brown people," said Crump in a separate television interview.
"It was a traffic stop, for God’s sake. A simple traffic stop," said Crump in a press conference. "Simple things like having car trouble.. Simple encounters with police, and they end up dead." He noted this does not happen with white people.
While it was the five officers were responsible for Nichols' death, it was the systemic racism and toxic police culture in America that ultimately caused his tragic loss, argued Crump.
"Policy means nothing if you have a culture that is rotten," he said. "You can make all the policy in the world, but culture does not respect policy. We have to make sure that the culture not only respects the policy, but the culture respects the community."
Structural racism in policing has an impact on how police brutality is confronted and dealt with, according to Jones, who argued that a deeply institutionalized system of injustice and the cycle of violence against Black people is pervasive in its cultural racism when Black cops act with more disdain and violence against Blacks than they would dare against their white counterparts.
The Memphis Police Department has disbanded the SCORPION unit, a symbolic move that will fall as short as all other measures after previous incidents in America.
The militarized institution of police compounded with the racial bias in American society and institutions amounts to a warrior culture that confronts those charged with defending and protecting society against members of the Black and brown communities with recurring repression and tragic results.
“Our court systems have said that they value White life more than any other life... the reason why we keep seeing it happen to Black and brown people is because it is the culture in this society that we can marginalise and trample upon the constitutional rights of Black and brown people," said Crump.
The sound of Nichols’s voice calling for his mother as he was being beaten, tasered, and kicked in a police tune-up that would lead to his death, happening a mere 80 feet from her home, is the latest powerful catalyst for a vigorous discussion about the militarization of police and the need reforms at the structural, institutional, and cultural levels in American law enforcement.
In this context, "Justice for Tyre," is justice for the Black community and it begins with discussions about the militarisation and warrior culture of police, structural racism, civil rights, and the role of the police in society.
