Case of Tyre Nichols is shamefully familiar
Too many of the details around the beating death of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police brim with the senselessness of wrongs that can’t ever be made right.
Nichols was headed home for dinner when he was stopped for an alleged traffic violation.
The tall, yet slight 29-year-old was a photographer and skater who had moved to Memphis during the pandemic to live with his parents.
He had just started a job with Fedex. He was Black.
Some of the police involved in the fatal beating were driving unmarked cars. One was a new vehicle that had no dashboard camera, which is why Nichols’ reckless driving — the reason police claim he was stopped — remains unproven.
Some of the officers weren’t wearing police uniforms. In police body camera footage, they looked markedly bigger than Nichols. They are Black, too, as is the Memphis police chief.
The five officers, since fired and arrested, were part of a now-disbanded unit called SCORPION, for Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, which targeted high-crime areas. A sixth Memphis officer was suspended Monday.
Some news reports said they weren’t in such an area when Nichols was pulled over and physically yanked out of his car. Nichols ran, was pursued, detained, pepper sprayed and beaten with fists, boots and batons.
Police can be overheard saying Nichols was “on something.”
A New York Times video analysis of the incident is damning. It concluded officers gave Nichols contradictory, sometimes unachievable orders. In a span of about 13 minutes, he got at least 71 verbal commands.
The analysis said even when Nichols complied, officers continued to beat him.
“They shouted at him to show his hands while they were holding them. They told him to get on the ground when he was on the ground.”
They “had control of his body” but ordered him to move.
Three days after a traffic stop that shouldn’t have even involved direct contact with police, Nichols died in a hospital.
They could have mailed him a ticket and issued a fine.
But this is the United States of America, where long-needed police reform is viewed as antipolice and pro-crime. That has gotten us nowhere and here.
No matter what more is uncovered about the case, it has spurred a description of his beating as “heinous, reckless and inhumane.”
And those were just the words of Memphis Police Director Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis.
Without body cameras and a surveillance street camera to capture their actions, officers who now face trials might still be on the force, successfully justifying their actions.
They can be heard saying Nichols tried to grab their guns, though that can’t be seen on video.
They face charges of seconddegree murder and aggravated kidnapping, among other crimes.
The case exposed a warped internal police culture of toxic masculinity.
It was rage against a young man who maintained his innocence.
“You guys are really doing a lot right now,” Nichols can be heard saying early in the encounter.
Some observers have suggested the case may be an example of “contempt of cop,” incidents in which police perceive disrespect or disobedience from a civilian and physically attack them.
Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said their actions don’t “constitute legitimate police work or a traffic stop gone wrong,” but a criminal assault under the pretext of law.
Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. said the Nichols case isn’t unrelated to racism, even though the victim, officers and chief are all Black.
He credited Black Lives Matter activists for correctly assessing the problem for the last decade.
It “isn’t that individual officers hate Black people or other minorities,” he wrote, but that officers have been trained to see “everyday citizens as either threats to the officers’ safety or disruptions to an orderly society.”
That’s what keeps getting us here, back to this awful, familiar place where police savagely beat a Black man while he cries out for his mother.