HOW MEMPHIS POLICE FIRST DESCRIBED WHAT HAPPENED TO NICHOLS

The first time Memphis police described what happened between their officers and Tyre Nichols — the 29year-old who died of his injuries after being beaten by police — they wrote that “a confrontation occurred” following a traffic stop. Nichols fled on foot, and then “another confrontation occurred.”

“Afterward, the suspect complained of having a shortness of breath,” reads the statement posted on the Memphis Police Department’s Twitter account the morning after Nichols was beaten on Jan. 7. “The suspect was transported to St. Francis Hospital in critical condition.”

Video footage released Friday, an hour’s worth of clips from body-worn and mounted cameras showing police pepper-spraying, punching and kicking Nichols, underscores the disparity between what police first reported and what actually happened.

Across the country, police sometimes use passive language that can paint a very different picture from what cameras later show. Initial news releases are often based on police officers’ self-reporting, and were it not for the ubiquity of cameras in modern times, the discrepancies between those filings and the reality of a police interaction may never come to light.

“If you read that report, you would not think that Tyre is dead because of excessive force. It’s written in a way to be positive toward those law enforcement agents,” Van Turner, the president of the Memphis NAACP said of the initial news release. “The report is disingenuous. It’s fabricated.”

Rather than simply complaining of shortness of breath, Nichols, the video showed, could barely sit up after the beating. Officers propped him up against a police car, where he repeatedly slumped over. He can be heard groaning but is not heard forming any words.

He twists and writhes against the police car, at times falling over on his side, as he waits 22 minutes for an ambulance.

Nichols died three days later. His case sparked national outrage, and investigations by the FBI and Justice Department.

It echoes other cases, including that of George Floyd, in which initial police reports painted a sanitized picture of a violent or fatal interaction. At the same time, the police investigation that came after that report moved so swiftly that experts have pointed to it as an unusually capable response to officer brutality.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis herself questioned that first report, later telling CNN she received an incident report at 4 a.m., hours after the beatings, thought it was a “strange summary of what occurred on a traffic stop,” and went to the office to investigate.

The Memphis Police Department did not respond to questions from The Washington Post on Saturday.

“In this particular case, it seems very different from very active coverups that I’ve seen in other instances,” said Rajiv Sethi, a professor at Barnard College who studies police use of lethal force. “The initial statement was very quickly reversed.”

Still, the first narrative often sticks, said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project. The initial framing of an inaccurate narrative by police is a tactic often seen after brutality by officers, she said; though parts of Memphis’ response were fast and transparent, she said she would not look to it “as a model.”

“Even though we’ve seen the videos now, if you’re going through [a certain] segment of Twitter, you’re still seeing some people saying this and this were true or he shouldn’t have ran,” she said. “There’s things that came out of that initial presentation of the facts that are going to stick with people.”