Five former Memphis officers plead not guilty

The five former officers accused of killing Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man pulled over during a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee, last month, filed into a courtroom on Friday and pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and other charges.

Police body-worn cameras as well as surveillance footage captured the officers punching, kicking and striking Nichols with a baton repeatedly for about 3 minutes — an attack that the city's police chief, Cerelyn Davis, has described as “a classic example of officers with a wolf pack mentality.”

But in the weeks since the attack, some activists and community leaders have said that blaming only the “mentality” of the officers involved is a way to keep the blame — and focus — from moving up the chain of command.

“They've attempted to provide surface and superficial, maybe even symbolic explanations,” said Earle J. Fisher, an activist and pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church, who noted that the five men charged all held the rank of police officer.

Not one was a supervisor, which has drawn attention to a systemic weakness within the Memphis Police Department. For years, police officers have patrolled the streets with less supervisory oversight than their counterparts in other large cities, in part because of recruitment and retention problems, according to reports on police staffing levels.

In big-city police departments across the country, it is often typical for there to be one front-line supervisor, typically a sergeant, for every six or seven police officers. But in Memphis, the ratio is about one supervisor for every 10 officers, Davis told the City Council last week.

“None of our units have a sufficient amount of supervisors,” she said.

The five officers charged — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith — all of them Black, had been part of a specialized street crime unit called Scorpion, which was formed in late 2021 with a mandate to help bring down rising crime rates.