How Do We Make Sense of Tyre Nichols?

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Until recently, it was very easy to understand police violence on unarmed African Americans. It's been widely seen as white-on-black violence because, much more often than not, the cops involved were white. A white cop killed Eric Garner. A white cop killed Michael Brown. A white cop killed Laquan McDonald. A white cop killed Walter Scott. A white cop killed Tamir Rice. A white cop killed Botham Jean. A white cop killed George Floyd. White cops killed Breonna Taylor. A white cop killed...

     Well, you get the idea.

     So, it's been very easy, not to mention convenient, to say the killing of unarmed black men at the hands of white cops is a very serious problem. And it most certainly is.

     But the January 7 fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis throws a monkey wrench in the works. All five of the now former officers who'd beaten Nichols to death are black. Republicans love to point to black-on-black crime, especially in Chicago, their favorite target, but the introduction of law enforcement throws the black on black calculus out of whack.

     Despite about an hour's worth of videotape being released by the Memphis PD, we still don't know everything, starting with what led the police to pull over Nichols in the first place. The official narrative is that the victim was driving on the wrong side of the street, even though no evidence exists to prove it. But this is a nation in which, in 2018, police killed over 1000 civilians in the US. Compare that to other industrialized nations- The figures tend to be low double and even single digits for the same year. Too many times we've seen routine traffic stops end with police calling in the meat wagon.

     But one must also make note of the swiftness which which these officers were removed from the force, then arrested then charged with second degree murder. The police chief, Cerelyn "CJ" Davis, has, admittedly, made an admirable effort to be transparent. We rarely, if ever see the swift wheels of justice turn this quickly against white cops. Instead, we see the usual circling of the wagons, the usual lies and rewritten reports and planted evidence when white cops are guilty of doing the same things.

    We saw the same swift action against Mohamed Mohamed Noor five and a half years ago after he stupidly shot Justine Damond in the chest, even though she was the one who called the police. 

    It was very easy, not to mention necessary, to see racial animus in the infamous case of Rodney King, the black motorist who was beaten within an inch of his life in Los Angeles 32 years ago. All the cops were white, none were convicted and their "exoneration" touched off riots in LA that killed dozens.

     So what set off these black cops to essentially lynch one of their own in full view of city sky cams they must have known were there? Again, we don't know what led them pull over Nichols but the very beginning of the first video shows an immediate escalation that led to them pulling him out of his car.

    Understandably, the man ran for his life because he felt it was being threatened and the police, naturally, took that as justification to beat and eventually kill him. They threw almost everything they had at him- Fists, feet, OC spray, tasers, aluminum batons. Then they walked around smoking cigarettes. Firefighters and paramedics indifferently rendered medical aid, if at all.

     It was a lynching, by a bunch of thugs, against one of their own. It was the kind of thing you'd expect of the Proud Boys.

    This murder resulted in the swift disbanding of the SCORPION Unit, of which all five of the cops were members. It had been credited with lowering crime in Memphis in the brief time it was around, 14 months. But critics also complained about cops jumping out of unmarked units and randomly assaulting people.

     As with Tyre Nichols, for instance.

   But disbanding the SCORPION unit is not going to take care of the problem and neither will training or retraining. This is a matter of attitude and police cadet intake. They're simply letting in the wrong people. Cops have shown time and again they don't need to be part of special units to visit violence on civilians and retraining doesn't change things such as attitudes toward civilians, especially when the animus is racial-based.

     But training at the academy phase has a lot to do with what we're given on the streets. Mohamed Mohamed Noor, Justine Damond's murderer, was fast-tracked in a program that put minority police cadets on streets sooner than white cadets. In Germany, a nation that saw only 11 police-involved civilian fatalities in 2018, it takes three years to be a fully-trained as police officer. In the USA, a person training for a barbering license often spends more time learning their craft than most cops in the US.

   That's because the United States is the only developed country in the world lacking national standards for hiring, training, supervising, and disciplining police across the 18,000 departments in the country. People trained to make split-second life or death decisions. The good guys with guns.

     I wish I had the answers to the epidemic of police violence in this country but I can tell you where to start looking.