Photo: Alex_Schmidt - Getty Images
Police car lights at night
It’s happened again just as everyone knew it would. A video has provided irrefutable evidence of police assigned to protect inner city neighborhoods brutally murdering an unarmed young Black man for a minor offense so viciously it shocks the conscience of the nation.
We all know what comes next. There will be anguished cries for real police reform nationwide to hold police accountable for their deadly violence in Black and Brown communities that would have been outlawed long ago if it ever occurred in White neighborhoods. Democrats are reintroducing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in Congress and it will go nowhere. Republicans will block it.
But that doesn’t let all the rest of us off the hook. We really do hold the power to change that in our democracy. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is the disgust decent Americans feel seeing videos of police committing deadly racial violence isn’t nearly as great as the votes Republicans attract at election time for “backing the Blue.”
The latest police atrocity can’t be explained away with the usual shallow readings of the Constitution’s Second Amendment every time police shoot Blacks during routine traffic stops. The five Memphis officers charged with murdering Tyre Nichols used their bare fists, boots and batons to break his neck and beat him to a bloody pulp.
Another factor led some Republicans to be more critical of the Memphis police although they still refused to support reforms to rein in police. All the officers charged with killing Nichols were Black. Only the most naïve Black motorist would ever feel safer being pulled over by a Black officer instead of a White officer.
No Less Heartbreaking
But as Nichol’s mother RowVaughn Wells said at his funeral, that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking. “It makes it even harder to swallow because they are Black and they know what we have to go through,” Wells said. “I don’t understand why they had to do this to my son.”
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In his eulogy, Rev. Al Sharpton expressed his sorrow Nichol’s life was taken by police with family members in the civil rights movement who helped win equal rights and job opportunities long closed to African Americans. “There’s nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us who fought to open doors that you walk through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight to get you through them,” Sharpton said.
But the worst possible lesson anyone could take from Memphis police brutally beating Nichols to death would be that diversifying police departments by race doesn’t make any difference. It’s not true.
Memphis, which has nearly 2,000 officers, is one of the few cities with a majority Black police department of 58% intentionally recruited over decades to reflect the city’s Black population of 64%. Throughout most of U.S. history, it was impossible to study what difference racial diversity made in policing because it didn’t exist. Policing was done by White males.
Less Use of Force
But in 2021, a study in Science examining years of records of the Chicago Police Department found Black and Latino officers made far fewer stops and arrests than White officers and used force less often, especially against Blacks. These effects were greatest in majority Black neighborhoods and were the result of enforcing fewer low-level, nonviolent offenses.
In a study published a year later comparing responses by White and Black officers to 911 calls in similar neighborhoods found “White officers use force 60% more than Black officers on average and use force with a gun more than twice as often.”
Elected Republicans blocking federal standards of accountability for police hasn’t stopped decent Americans from taking steps on their own to reform police culture in their own police departments. Since Floyd’s murder in 2020, state legislatures have passed nearly 300 police reform bills.
A year after Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Republican legislature closed Gov. Tony Evers’s 2020 special session on policing within minutes without taking any action, Evers passed a ban on police chokeholds, annual reports on police use-of-force incidents and a $600,000 grant program funding community-oriented policing. Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and the Fire and Police Commission had already banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants.
That’s not any solace when a Black motorist is pulled from his car by police officers, pushed to the ground, pepper sprayed and shot with a Taser. That’s what caused Nichols to get up and run for his life. Such disrespect for police led five of them to catch him and knock him down again, punch him in the face, kick him in the head and groin and pound the life out of him with clubs. They were panting when they celebrated with fist bumps. It’s hard work beating someone to death and calling it policing.
No one should call it that. Every American community deserves a police department whose authority they can appreciate and respect.
