January 29, 2023
Like Groundhog Day in Hell, we braced Friday night for the release of another snuff film of a young Black man being brutally murdered by the police. Tyre Nichols— a gifted photographer, a skilled skateboarder, a father, a son— died needlessly at the hands of five sadistic Memphis officers. The fact that the officers were Black doesn’t matter, because as cops say themselves, the only color that matters is blue.
We have reasoned, pleaded and protested, to no avail. George Floyd’s murder in 2020 was supposed to have produced a “reckoning.” That was supposed to be the moment when the scales were lifted from America’s eyes, when they finally saw what Black Americans had been trying to tell them, literally for decades. The video was irrefutable, the anguish too palpable. That was supposed to be the moment when we collectively cried, “Enough!”
But then, the pandemic receded and people were able to go outside for something other than protests… and then the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act failed to pass in Congress…and then the murder rate increased and Democratic officials not only retreated from police reform, but called for more funding for the police. The appeals for a radical new approach to public safety disappeared.
The results were predictable. In 2021, the number of people killed by the police barely budged, and in 2022, police killed 1176 people, more than in any other year on record, (Source: “‘What Are We Doing Wrong?’: US Police Killed Record Number of People in 2022,” by Julia Conley, CommonDreams.org, 1/6/23). Of those, only 31% involved an alleged violent crime and 11% did not involve any offense at all (ibid).
By all accounts, Tyre Nichols was a “gentle soul,” who never had so much as a “parking ticket,” (Source: “Tyre Nichols remembered as a wonderful son who loved skating and sunsets,” by Victoria Bisset, Hadley Green and Robert Klemko, The Washington Post, 1/28/23). Yet, even if he had a record and was engaged in criminal activity, we tell ourselves that the police are not supposed to serve as judge, jury and executioner, in the span of minutes!
The truth though, is far darker. As Jill Lepore details here, American policing began as slave patrols. In the early 20th century, American policing was organized and deployed to conduct “a war against the enemies of society,” who were defined as “[m]obsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants and Black people,” (Source: “The Invention of the Police,” by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 7/13/20).
Is it any wonder that such a system dehumanizes and kills unarmed Black people at alarming rates? Is it any surprise that Black and Brown officers who become part of that system often display the same brutality towards Black and Brown citizens? We should understand by now that it is not the color of the police, but the color of those policed, that dictates the outcome.
So when we call for justice for Tyre Nichols, we need to understand what that means. It doesn’t just mean prosecuting the officers who killed Tyre. That is accountability, which is a prerequisite, but not a substitute, for justice. It doesn’t just mean disbanding the SCORPION program in Memphis, or even every program like it around the country, which treats Black and Brown communities like war zones and positions the police as a hostile occupying force with unchecked power to violently control, rather than protect, residents. Justice for Tyre Nichols will be impossible until we face the fact many Americans define “safety” as the absence of Black people from their neighborhoods, their classrooms, their places of leisure and labor, and consider our deaths an acceptable price to pay.