Tyre Nichols: A Black Man Killed by Black Cops in Memphis, Tennessee

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Like most of the rest of America, I was shocked by what I saw on the news on Friday, January 27. Though the incident they were covering had happened nearly threw weeks before – 29-year-old African-American Tyre (pronounced “Tye-ree”) Nichols was brutally beaten by five Memphis Police Department officers on January 7 and died from his injuries three days later – January 27 was the day the city of Memphis released body-camera and surveillance footage of the savage attack on Nichols.

Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old Black man who worked for FedEx and whose hobbies were nature photography and skateboarding. On the evening of January 7, at about 8:25 p.m., he was pulled over, allegedly for “reckless driving” – an infraction that, as one MS-NBC commentator noted, is entirely subjective. Speeding, running a red light or making an illegal turn are all traffic offenses readily visible and documentable. “Reckless driving” basically means “driving in a way the police officer watching you doesn’t approve of.”

Nichols pulled over when the officers approached him, and at first he behaved politely. He didn’t panic; he spoke to the officers in calm, measured tones and attempted to answer their questions as best he could. Something must have set them off, though, because Nichols found himself first being forcibly pulled out of his vehicle and then forced to the ground. Officers gave him contradictory instructions. Put your hands up! Put your hands down! Lie on your stomach! Lie on your back!

At one point during the encounter Nichols seems to have realized his life was literally at stake if he stayed there with the police relentlessly abusing him, so he tried to run away. The cops hunted him down and, if anything, his attempt to escape seemed to have riled them up even more. The cops took turns beating Nichols and kicking him, in the words of one person watching the tape, as if he were a football. At times some of the officers held Nichols and sat him up so their brothers in blue could punch him. At least two emergency medical technicians from the Memphis Fire Department watched the later stages of the encounter and did nothing to try to help Nichols.

The Sting of the SCORPION

Nichols’ death was especially shocking because Memphis, Tennessee had tried to do at least some things right. Their current police chief, Cerelyn “C. J.” Davis, is a Black woman, though the city’s mayor, Jim Strickland, is a white man. Memphis has at least attempted to reform the ways its police officers are trained, including so-called “de-escalation” classes on how to defuse street confrontations without violence or anger. D

avis has said at least some of the right things since Nichols’ killing. "As we continue to try to build trust with our community, this is a very, very heavy cross to bear -- not just for our department but for departments across the country," she stated. "Building trust is a day-by-day interaction between every traffic stop, every encounter with the community. We all have to be responsible for that and it's going to be difficult in the days to come."

But Memphis has also done bad things in its attempts to get a handle on street crime. All five police officers who attacked Nichols were members of the so-called “SCORPION” unit, supposedly an elite force within the police department set up to combat gang activity. Like the USA PATRIOT Act and the radical anti-AIDS organization ACT UP, SCORPION was first given an acronym and only later did they put together a name it would stand for: “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.”

The SCORPION unit was announced in October 2021 and launched a month later. At the time, Memphis assistant police chief Sean Jones told a reporter for a local Memphis TV news program that the unit would focus on drugs, gangs and ahto thefts. "It's important to us that each member of the community feels they can go to the grocery store or live in their house without their house being shot or shooting frequently occurring on the streets and on the roadways," Jones said in November 2021.

But the SCORPION unit’s aggressive tactics alienated members of the community they were supposedly protecting and serving. As a former Mmephis police officer told CBS News anonymously on January 28 (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tyre-nichols-former-memphis-police-officer-scorpion-unit/), members of SCORPION – including Demetrius Haley, one of the five officers involved in Nichols’ killing, whom the former officer interviewed knew especially well – believed in a “proactive” style of policing in which, if you didn’t confront the alleged “bad guys” aggressively, you weren’t doing your job.

"We deal with very bad people,”the officer told CBS..”There are fights and foot chases but we all have an understanding when it's time to stop." Unfortunately for Nichols, his family and the cause of decent law enforcement in general, the five police officers who killed him – Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith – didn’t get the message about knowing when it was time to stop.

Black-on-Black Police Violence

Nichols’ death also scrambles the usual racial script about these incidents because not only was he African-American, so were the five officers who physically attacked and brutalized him, and left him for dead. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Previous generations of would-be police reformers pushed for police dep-artments to hire more officers of color on the theory that this would make the departments more responsive to communities of color.

It hasn’t worked out that way. As Wesley Lowery, author of a book on police relations with the Black community called They Can’t Kill Us All, said on the January 27 edition of the PBS-TV program Washington Week (https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2023/01/washington-week-full-episode-jan-27-2023), “I have friends who say this to their kids when they have the talk, right, that when you see a police officer, they are not white or Black, they are blue. And police will often say that themselves, meaning something a little different. But in this case, what we saw here were agents of the state enacting severe violence against a man who, again, from what we can tell, did not seem to be posing much of a threat to them.”

The killing of Tyre Nichols is just one of a number of recent incidents that don’t fit neatly into either racist or anti-racist scripts of what “normal” encounters are like. Almost no one who talked about the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two years ago mentioned that not only was the Minneapolis police chief a Black man, only two of the four officers involved in Floyd’s killing were white. The other two were Asian. And in the recent mass murders of Asian-Americans in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California, not only were the victims Asian, so were the alleged shooters.

A number of people have suggested that the Memphis Police Department and Shelby County district attorney Steve Mulroy wouldn’t have moved as quickly against Nichols’ alleged murderers if they’d been white cops instead of Black ones. They’ve already been fired from the department and formally charged with second-degree murder and other crimes. In a January 26 press conference, Mulroy said, "We want justice for Tyre Nichols. … The world is watching us and we need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy."

But the iast time the nation was riveted on a case of police brutality, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, nothing much changed. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House of Representatives but died in the Senate, yet another victim of the insane 60-vote threshold of the filibuster. This time, though President Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass it again, it probably won’t even get through the House now that Republicans are back in control after the 2022 midterms.

A few local police departments, including Memphis’s, tried to institute “reforms,” but the biggest political result of the furor over Floyd’s murder was negative. Calls to “defund the police” were readily seized on by Right-wing politicians who used them to scare voters to death and lead them to oppose any significant rethought of just how we do policing in the U.S.

Indeed, one of the things I found most startling about the debate over American policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was the assertion by anti-racist activists that the origin of modern professional policing lay in the patrols organized by Southern state government and plantation owners to hunt down runaway slaves. At first I thought this was just anti-racist hyperbole, but then I did a little more reading and found it was absolutely true.

So one of the functions of professional police since the U.S. first started making police work a source of paid employment has been to set and enforce limits on the autonomy of African-Americans. And that has remained true even as more Black police officers have been hired.

The Toxicity of “Police Culture”

One of the most important aspects of Wesley Lowery’s Washington Week comment is that “when you see a police officer, they are not white or Black, they are blue.” It’s a measure of the persistence of what has been called “police culture,” a series of habits and assumptions that have been baked into American law enforcement for decades and that has proven significantly resistant to change.

“Police culture” essentially divides the world into two categories: cops and crooks. While it pays lip service to the idea that most people are neither cops nor crooks – just ordinary law-abiding citizens trying to do their jobs, make their livings and use whatever free time they have for legitimate entertainment – all too often police interactions with other people are based on an assumption that you have to “prove” you are law-abiding in order to persuade the cops to leave you alone.

Lowery also mentioned “the talk,” the conversation virtually all Black parents, especially middle- and upper-class Black parents, have to tell their children just how they should react when a police officer stops them for any reason, The idea behind “the talk” is if you just act deferentially enough to the officer, show your I.D. when asked to, speak in a soft-spoken manner, avoid doing anything that the officer even remotely might perceive as a threat, he or she will let you go and won’t put you on the “bad ‘N’-word” category deserving of arrest or worse.

One of the saddest TV news reports I saw was the one in which a professor nf African-American studies at Princeton University told a host on MS-NBC that what most horrified him about the death of Tyre Nichols was the fact that Nichols had done everything young Blacks are told to do in “the talk.” He was soft-spoken and didn’t challenge the officers who stopped him. The professor on MS-NBC said with profound sadness and regret that nothing he’d told his own son about how to handle an interaction with police would have saved him, any more than it saved Tyre Nichols.

One of the biggest mistakes the Memphis Police Department made whent hey set up the SCORPION unit was to staff it largely with police officers who had previously worked as corrections officers in jails or prisons. If you’re a prison guard, it’s all too true that everyone you interact with is either a fellow officer or a criminal. I suspect that locks people into a mindset that reinforces the already toxic aspect of police culture that assumes everybody is either a cop or a crook.

People have bemoaned the seeming lack of efficacy of attempts to train police officers to de-escalate the situations and reduce or eliminate the use of force. That’s just another way police culture reinforces and reproduces itself. All too many officers have recalled being teamed up in their first days on the job with older officers who’ve told them, “Forget all that bullshit they taught you in the Academy. Here’s how the world really works.” No matter how much training we give new recruits to the job to “de-escalate” situations, no matter how much we try to educate them in restraint, the old-boy network of police departments everywhere undoes it. So does the military-style ranks with which almost all police departments are organized.

One of the people who got interviewed on MS-NBC ini the wake of the Nichols killing was Libertarian author Radley Balko, who in 2914 published a book called Rise of the Warrior Cop. He told the story of how certain progressive police chiefs tried to get rid of the military-style ranks – and had to back down when their officers strongly rebelled. I remember seeing Balko interviewed on MS-NBC in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020, and I immediately ordered his book.

It was fascinating reading Rise of the Warripor Cop during the 2020 Presidential campaign because one of the biggest villains in his book was Joe Biden. Balko described how Biden pushed many “tough-on-crime” bills through the U.S. Senate and into law,often taking more hard-line positions than Republicans. Balko was especially critical of Biden for championing so-called “no-knock searches” in alleged drug cases, not only calling them a violation of the Fourth Amendment but telling all too many stories of innocent people getting killed, beaten or having their homes destroyed based on “no-knock” searches onflimsy or nonexistent evidence.

Ironically in light of more recent events, Biden’s justification at the time was that the Democrats couldn’t afford, politically, to have the Republicans own the “crime” issue and portray themselves as the “law and order” party. Once Biden ran first for vice-president no Barack Obama’s ticket and then for President on his own, he moved left onthe crime issue in order to gain support from Black primary voters – and this nearly cost him the general election and sliced the Democratic House majority from 40 seats to five as Republicans eagerly and gleefully poinced on calls to “defund the police” and made it seem like Democrats wanted to get rid of police forces entirely.

Only a tiny handful of people who said “defund the police” actually meant eliminating 100 percent of police funding. Most of them were calling to redirect money going to law enforcement and spend it instead on social programs,mental-health counseling and projects aimed at reducing the income gap between whites and people of color. But the Republican fear campaign, which produced TV commercials showing people calling 911 and getting no response at all, carried the day and the U.S. blew its most recent chance to rethink how we do domestic law enforcement.

The “Duty to Aid”: Not an Option

One of the most intriguing criticisms of the Memphis police assault on Tyre Nichols and his resulting death is the people who are saying that the police had a duty to help Nichols once they’d incapacitated him.This seems to have been one of the reasons not only for the Memphis Police Department firing the five officers involved in the attack on Nichols but the Memphis Fire Department letting go the two EMT’s who patiently stood there and didn’t do anything to stop the assault on Nichols. They just waitd until his police assailants were done with him.

But those who suggest that police officers and firefighters on the scene could have exercised a “duty to aid” and tried to stop the horrendous attack on Nichols files in the face of how hierarchical organizations and systems work. Faced with a choice between remaining true to the brotherhood (there’s a reason why the U.S.’s largest police union is called “Fraternal Order of Police’) and defying it, just about any police or fire officers will go with the brotherhood every time.

The talk about whether the Memphis police and fire officials should have tried to stop what was happening to Nichols reminded me of the stories I’ve read of what happened to Nazi concentration-camp guards who tried to call out their colleagues for the inhumanity of their treatment of prisoners. Squeamish guards who felt guilty and complained about what they were doing to the inmates were often told,”If you don’t like what we’re doing, we can always put you on the other side.” The idea of being tumbled all the way down the racial scale, from Aryan Übermensch to doomed under-class Untermensch, was enough to keep nearly all people in line and on board with the Nazis’ evil.

What happened to Tyre Nichols has been called a “lynching,” but in fact it’s worse than that. Lynching meant the wanton murder of (mostly) Black people by private citizens, while official law enforcement looked the other way and quietly condoned it. What happened to Tyre Nichols was the law-enforcement system itself going haywire and enforcing street “justice” on a young Black man who did nothing illegal and posed no threat to anyone.

In some respects, America is a giant concentration camp for Black people in particular. Black Americans are constantly being reminded that they have no rights white people, especially whites in positions of authority, are obliged to respect. Their rights to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness an be snatched away any time the white establishment or its representatives feel like it, and Blacks who are admitted into the “club” of law enforcement face a double pressure to prove they’re “one of us”or face retribution themselves.

That’s the real reason for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Tyre Nichols was done in by people who, at least superficially, looked like him. Throughout American history, Blacks who tried to rise above the station white America had decreed for them have been slapped down hard. Ad Blacks who gain a certain degree of power and privilege in the system by becoming police officers or even Presidents (there’s a reason why the Secret Service reported more threats against Barack Obama than any other President, before or since) are constantly being put on notice that it can be snatched away from them at any time.