[Content Warning] Tyre Nichols: Traffic Stops While Black
Tyson Lewis | February 9, 2023
“And at best, I'm just getting it wrong
And at worst, I've been right from the start
It hurts, I'm bein' torn apart”
-Mavis Staples
[Content Warning: Contains graphic images and descriptions]
Tyre Nichols was pulled over and beaten by a group of five officers who employed an overwhelming barrage of “non-lethal” and “less than lethal” weapons on him on Jan. 7, 2023. By Jan.10, Nichols was dead in the hospital.
A full autopsy has not been released, but the preliminary findings have been that “Tyre suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” Attorney Benjamin Crump Stated. The full report was scheduled to be released at a later date.
Nothing warrants a man being beaten to death by a group of cops— especially not a traffic stop for reckless driving. The officers initially claimed that there was a confrontation from which Nichols fled. In the weeks following, they walked back those claims after they had been disproven by the release of body cam footage by the Memphis Police.
The two-and-a-half-week gap between the beating and the release of the bodycam footage to the public allowed time for the initial narratives of the police to be disseminated. Had there been no footage, that would have been the official narrative.
Body cams are a necessary part of ensuring the police are held accountable for egregious wrongdoings. They are crucial, regardless of the hesitance of police departments to release footage for fear of civil unrest.
“I expect our citizens to exercise their First Amendment right to protest, to demand action and results," Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis said in a statement on Jan. 22. “But we need to ensure our community is safe in this process. None of this is a calling card for inciting violence or destruction on our community or against our citizens. In our hurt, in our outrage and frustration, there's still work to be done to build each other up.”
The statement was given with the expectation of protests and with the implication that the contents of the footage could cause civil unrest. Her mention of protesting is brief in comparison to her claims against potential uprising.
Rhetorically, Davis is capitalizing on the common tropes utilized whenever the police kill someone and it gets the attention it deserves. Capitalizing on public distrust of protests and protestors was an all too common strategy during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests following the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.
Language like Davis’s in her statement foreshadows and attempts to justify aggressive police tactics that escalate peaceful protests or exacerbates already tense situations. An ironic response given the protests are against police brutality. These instances become the most reported even amongst massively peaceful protest movements.
An important piece of context in critically engaging with Davis’s statement is that 93% of the protests following the murder of George Floyd were peaceful protests. Keep that in mind, and contrast that with how those protests were framed. Continue to keep that in mind as protests for Tyre Nichols occur and are covered by news outlets.
Davis said of the bodycam footage, that she was left “horrified.”
Special to The Echo | The Seattle Times
The common discourse that occurs following American police killing civilians has ensued and is actively ongoing, as is the broader cultural discourse because of the frequency of these killings. Every thoroughly reported act of state violence brings with it a great deal of hardworking journalists who cover every detail of the situation as it comes out.
Simultaneously, there is always a media circus of pundits and talking heads engaging in the discourse by utilizing preconceived hegemonic frameworks. Jason “I don’t get what people are protesting about” Whitlock is a perfect example of what to critically assess as more news comes out regarding this case.
In an interview with the popular right-wing talking head Tucker Carlson, Whitlock distracts from the topic of Tyre Nichols’ death by any means necessary. He levies criticisms against news coverage of the beating as a conspiracy to distract from Ukraine. Even more bizarrely, he blames “single black women”— which he extends to criticize Cerelyn Davis for whom he criticizes…for being a black woman.
“I would examine the racial element of this, because there is a racial element,” Whitlock said. “It looked like what young black men do when they’re supervised by a single black woman. And that’s what they’ve got going on in the Memphis Police Department”.
In the same interview, Tucker Carlson frames a question he was about to ask by saying that news ought not show the footage. He critiques media coverage and rhetorically sets up an “us and them” distancing himself and other media outlets. He also showed the footage.
“You don’t want to put ugly things on TV and inflame passions,” Carlson said. “You want people to be reasonable and think things through and reach wise decisions. They really want to make people enraged”.
Leading up to the release of the body cam footage, Attorneys and family members commented on the contents of the video, as they had seen it before the general public. They were all horrified by its contents. The attorneys described the police as having used Nichols as a “human pinata”. To be “enraged” seemed to be justified.
The body camera footage was released on January 27, allowing people to see the horrors committed by the five officers. Though not all of the footage was released,the footage that was released was enough to spark protests; its contents were immediately violent, and only got worse as Nichols was unable to comply with their kafkaesque slew of demands.
“The review of the available footage found that officers shouted at least 71 commands,” New York Times analysts Robin Stein, Alexander Cardia and Natalie Reneau wrote, “during the approximately 13-minute period before they reported over the radio that Mr. Nichols was officially in custody”.
Even with this initial and damning release of body cam footage, there is still much more footage to be released and analyzed. 20 additional hours of footage will be released at the discretion of the Memphis Police Department.
There have already been changes in the Memphis Police Department as a result of the situation. Most notably, the Memphis police have gotten rid of what was called the “scorpion unit.”— an aggressive unit that often pursued people on minor crimes in search of more severe crimes. They had developed a reputation of engaging in violent confrontations.
“They did it to Damecio Wilbourn, 28, and his brother as they pulled up to an apartment building last February. They surrounded Davitus Collier, 32, as he went to buy beer for his father in May,” wrote The New York Times. “And last month, they beat Monterrious Harris, 22, outside an apartment complex, where he said he was waiting to spend time with his cousin”.
As well as the five participating officers being fired and charged with second-degree murder, three personnel of the Memphis Fire department were also fired, as they did not give Nichols an “adequate patient assessment”.
Not only did the police— who are supposed to protect people— kill this man, the EMTs responsible for public health were reckless. This is a painful reminder to many that American systems can be lethal, and systems that are supposed to ensure health can be negligent.
Why does this keep happening?