Police beatings decades apart present disturbing and telling parallels
The details are different, but the sorrow is the same, and here we are again — anguished and angry and asking questions as a nation about the brutal Jan. 7 beating of Tyre Nichols by police after a traffic stop in Memphis, Tenn., was captured on video footage showing five officers torturing the 29-year-old Black man. Nichols died three days later.
The quick admission by Memphis officials that what had occurred was unacceptable — followed by the firing and charging of each of the five officers with second-degree murder, aggravated assault and aggravated kidnapping — prompted praise by some in the community who applauded swift action. That at least this time there would be no stealthy sweeping of police violence under the rug was seen as a sign of progress in how local government and law enforcement deal with such appalling incidents.
But both the specific details caught on video in the Memphis case and the larger questions about what the case says about enduring attitudes in law enforcement demolish the idea that progress happened here.
Yes, there was a prompt decision to hold the officers, who were all Black men, as accountable as possible. Would that have happened were it not for the fortuitous fact that the worst of Nichols’ beating was caught on a nearby security camera? If this footage didn’t exist, would authorities have dragged out release of body cam footage for six months, a year or even more, as they have in civilian death cases from San Diego to Los Angeles to Chicago to New York? Or would they never have released the footage at all because of spurious “officer privacy” claims or other obstacles created by state lawmakers hostile to police scrutiny?
The incident report initially filed in the case reflects responding officers’ confidence that body cam footage would never emerge — and that they would be allowed to frame events as they wished. Evidence backs up none of the report’s most serious claims — that Nichols committed an aggravated assault on an officer; that he violently resisted arrest; that he grabbed an officer’s gun. Instead, he pleaded for mercy and called for his mother. Not mentioned in the report: that officers kicked him in the face, took turns punching him and pounded him with a baton well after he was utterly defenseless. In an information vacuum, in a case in which authorities didn’t so quickly lose control of the narrative, this presentation of events could have stood up.
But what makes this chain of events even worse are the precise similarities they have with what happened March 3, 1991, in the San Fernando Valley.
After a chase, driver Rodney King, a 25-year-old Black man, was taken into custody by LAPD officers who reported that he suffered injuries of “a minor nature” in the process. Unbeknownst to the four officers who subdued King, a nearby resident was taping the incident from his apartment balcony with his new video camera — capturing how officers kept assaulting King long after he stopped offering resistance, fracturing his cheekbone, breaking his leg and crushing 11 bones at the base of his skull. Within days, the video triggered massive fallout. Eventually, it and other egregious cases helped clear the way for police reforms.
Problems persist. In the Nichols footage from 2023, as in the King footage from 1991, additional officers who responded to the scene acted as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. This happened even though authorities across the nation have instituted policies stating explicitly that officers must intervene when witnessing criminal conduct by fellow officers. Not one in Memphis did so.
There will no doubt be calls for new changes in coming days, starting with a fresh look at whether providing officers with “qualified immunity” for the consequences of their actions needs more limits. In this debate, the observation will be made that the great majority of officers do not abuse their power.
But it is not demonizing individuals with an extremely difficult job to observe that there remains a cadre of officers who see themselves as righteous defenders of order who are themselves beyond the law — and that too many of their fellow officers empower their abuse by tolerating it. Until this code of silence is somehow extinguished, Tyre Nichols won’t be the last innocent American killed by police.