Policing without brutality is beyond imagination
The Memphis police unit created in 2021 to help "reimagine" policing carried out one of the most brutal law enforcement executions since George Floyd.
Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn "CJ" Davis questioned the humanity of the cops who murdered Tyre Nichols. She expressed horror and sadness and repulsion at what she witnessed while watching the video, which was released Friday night. Davis acted quickly to fire the five Black officers responsible for murdering the 29-year-old Nichols, and they were subsequently charged with second-degree murder. She sought to make the video evidence of the deadly ambush available to the public, learning from the mistakes police chiefs in similar positions have made in the past.
A page on the Memphis Police Department’s website is about “Reimagining Policing” and the description states, in part, “Trust between law enforcement and the people they protect and serve is essential in our city.” These words aren’t simply aspirational. They’re an absolute misrepresentation.
The lethal assault of Nichols reminded the Memphis community and the country that policing in America is a breeding ground for wanton brutality. Police in Memphis and elsewhere perform the exact opposite function of protecting and trust-building. They stir up chaos, provoke violence, lie on police reports (this one initially said Nichols died after multiple confrontations and a “shortness of breath”), manipulate the media and leave towns and cities less safe. Cops extinguished 100 lives a month in 2022, 1,176 in total, according to data from the non-profit organization Mapping Police Violence. Less than a third of these cases involved violent crime. Samuel Sinyangwe, founder of Mapping Police Violence, told The Guardian, “These are routine police encounters.” With police killings only increasing year over year, it’s shortsighted for Davis to rebuke the former employees who carried out the execution of Nichols without taking a moment to reflect on what it means when a group of men trained under her leadership murder a helpless young man calling out for his mother.
Law enforcement in its current iteration is an impediment to Black progress, a knee on the neck and a fist to the face of the advancement of civil rights. It does not matter if the men in blue are Black, if the police chief is a Black woman determined to eliminate racial discrimination. They all operate under an intricate, irreversible web of white supremacy; the badge is a symbol of carte blanche and the edict is to stop the bad guys, even when none exist. Police find not shame but power in escalation. It is irrelevant what a person does wrong to warrant the arrest; once one officer has determined they must submit to authority, anything goes.
The myth that there are good cops among the terrorizers of wary Black victims wears more brittle each time a horde of police decide as a unit to act inhumanely. To some, it may be surprising to have learned that the men behind the attack were Black like Nichols. To Black people well versed in the inescapable rot at the heart of American law enforcement, it was far less shocking to find out that the five assailants were of the same race. Black police officers arrive on the scene with the same training as white police officers, each one a rogue vigilante masquerading as a competent voice of reason. The illusion that they are there to undo the oppression of their predecessors quickly fades.
While President Biden has decried the activist phrase “Defund the police”, police departments like Memphis have adopted the popularized term from 2020 of reimagining policing. In 2021, Davis oversaw the formation of the Scorpion (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit in an effort to reduce crime. This men who ended Nichols’ life before he could turn 30 comprised an eighth of the 40-officer unit. In light of this heinous crime, Davis defended Scorpion, telling the Washington Post, “We had great success. They did good work. This group, we believe, went off the rails that night.” By Saturday, Scorpion had been disbanded.
If these former cops were the exception to an otherwise unnewsworthy profession devoid of blatant racial stereotyping and without a warped sense of power dynamics, Davis’s indictment of the extrajudicial executors she once supervised would be believable. Instead, the Memphis police chief deserves minimal praise for acting swiftly to rid the force of her most corrosive members.
Police brutality existed long before Nichols, a skateboarder, photographer, a devoted son and father of a 4-year-old son of his own, was blitzed, hunted and permanently immobilized the night Jan. 7 (he died three days later). Police brutality will long outlive the 29-year-old taken down less than 100 yards from his mom’s house.
A law enforcement predicated on severely punishing those who pose no threat cannot be reformed.
A cop trained to abuse and kill when they’re in no immediate danger cannot be re-educated.
A police department reliant on ornate weaponry to control nonviolent offenders cannot reimagine their way into a world where innocent Black people aren’t regularly accosted by their so-called protectors.
The only thing worth imagining in this instance is the life Nichols would’ve led had a system so sturdily stacked against him not wrestled it away.