A community feels tragically betrayed

SAN DIEGO — We live in strange times, and I often turn to an old and trusted friend to guide me through.

The popular television show advises that those who need a lawyer had “Better Call Saul.”

As I struggled to make sense of the tragedy in Memphis — where Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, died just days after being mercilessly beaten by five Black police officers following a traffic stop — what I needed was a truth-teller. So I knew I had better call Tavis.

A friend for nearly 30 years, Tavis Smiley dishes it straight.

And my former radio partner — who owns KBLA-1580 AM, a progressive Black radio station in Los Angeles, where he hosts a daily show — and I have a lot to dish about.

The five Memphis officers were fired and have been charged with second-degree murder. Others have also been disciplined. They include a white officer who was suspended after using a Taser on Nichols, though he didn’t join in the beating.

This is a gut-wrenching moment for African Americans. That is clear from the grief-stricken words of Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells.

Bodycam video released by the Memphis Police Department shows Nichols crying out “Mom! Mom!” during the beating, the final portion of which took place only about 100 yards from his mother’s home.

“I hate the fact that it was five Black men that actually did this to another Black man,” Wells said on MSNBC. She added that the officers “shamed their own families” and “brought disgrace to themselves.”

Indeed they did. But the five Black officers also did something else through their horrific actions: They dragged the entire Black community into an uncomfortable conversation about what all this means.

I wanted to know more about that conversation. That’s why I called Tavis, who hears from Black callers every day on his show.

I asked him whether what would already, under any circumstances, be a terrible story is made worse by the fact that, in this instance, a Black man was killed by other Black men.

“I have heard that sentiment,” he acknowledged. “And I think what Black people are saying is that it’s hard to process man’s inhumanity to man when that man looks exactly like you. In other words, they should know better, because they’ve had to traverse the same territory as the rest of us.”

For Smiley, where this tragedy took place is also significant. “This is Memphis, Tennessee,” he noted. “This is where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and he was there to support sanitation workers who were being treated unfairly and unjustly.”

And then there is this wrinkle.

“This is also the same place where Black folks had to fight to get these Black men on the police force,” Smiley said. “Imagine the Memphis Police Department in the 1960s, when King was killed. There were no Blacks in that department. So you owe your job to Black people who protested to get you there, and then you turn around and behave the way that you’re behaving?”

It was an assumption of those recruitment efforts that Black cops would treat Black people more fairly. So, I asked, what happened here?

“You cannot separate the behavior of these particular officers from the institution that produced them,” he said. “There are always these questions about whether these cops are Black first or blue first. And what I’ve learned over the years — and you know this because your dad was a cop — is that one size does not fit all. Some guys are Black first, others are blue first.”

What exactly went wrong with these five Memphis police officers, I wondered.

“I would simply describe it as an empathy deficit,” Smiley said. “Maybe it came from their childhood. I don’t know … But when you get access to power, like cops have, it doesn’t change who you are. It just makes you more of what you already are … You combine an empathy deficit with power over everyday people, and you’ve got a problem.”

For African Americans, he added, this case is a no-brainer. They’re siding with Tyre Nichols and his family.

“We will speak truth to power on behalf of the powerless,” Smiley said. “When we see wrongdoing, we call it out. That’s why Black people are not afraid to call these Negroes out. They were wrong. When Black people see these five cops, they say, one, ‘You all should have known better,’ and two, ‘You disappointed us.’ That is the worst kind of shame.”

It’s up to the criminal justice system to hold these five former officers accountable. But, in the Black community, that process is already well underway.