The shocking death of Tire Nichols after a beating by law enforcement officers has reopened a harrowing debate in the United States about police brutality, feeding the feeling that the huge national demonstrations that arose in 2020 with the death of George Floyd did little to solve the problem.
Also read: Tire Nichols: videos of the police beating a young man who died after arrest
Nichols, a 29-year-old black man, died in hospital on January 10, three days after he was brutally beaten by five police officers, also black. in the southern city of Memphis, Tennessee. The five police officers were charged with second degree murder.
Memphis police released footage of the incident taken from officers’ body cameras late Friday, but not before warning viewers of their brutality.
Video footage from officers’ body-mounted cameras shows a group of officers arresting Nichols and attempting to take him down using a Taser stun gun, then chasing him as he escapes.
I’m sad about where we are in America
In the following segments of the footage – which runs for an hour in total and offers audio only in parts – Nichols is seen crying for his mother and moaning as he is repeatedly kicked and punched by police officers.
As soon as the images were released, President Joe Biden said he was “outraged and deeply hurt.”
The vicious, unjustified beating of Tire Nichols and his ultimate death at the hands of five Memphis police officers is just the latest, painful reminder of how far America still has to go in fixing how we police our streets. pic.twitter.com/ITmrNNJhiT
—Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 28, 2023
“I’m sad about where we are in America,” said Lora King, whose father, Rodney King, suffered a violent beating by police in Los Angeles in 1991, also caught on camera.
The incident sparked tragic riots and destruction in that city and other regions. “We have to do better,” he added to CNN. “This is unacceptable”.
sad statistic
After Nichols’ death, many wonder what real progress has been made since 2020, the year George Floyd, a black man killed in Minneapolis under the knee of a white officer, sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement. blacks matter) that spread throughout the United States and other countries.
In the wake of Floyd’s death, promises of police reform swept across the country. However, two years later, the number of people killed during police interventions reached a 10-year peak in 2022: a total of 1,186 deaths, according to the Mapping Police Violence website. 26% of them black, although they represent 13% of the population.
We need to talk about this institutionalized police culture that has this unwritten law that you can use excessive force against Black and Latino people.
By way of comparison, fewer than 20 people are killed in France each year during police interventions.
One factor that explains this difference is the huge number of firearms in private hands in the United States -there are more weapons than people-, which considerably increases the feeling of vulnerability of the police during their interventions, leading them to draw their weapons more quickly.
Last year, 66 police officers were shot and killed while on duty, according to a fund set up to honor them.
But attorney Ben Crump, who has represented Floyd’s family and now Nichols’, sees a deeper dynamic.
“We need to talk about this institutionalized police culture that has this unwritten law that you can use excessive force against Black and Latino people,” he said at a news conference Friday.
“We’re going to have to have this conversation over and over again until it’s over” the problem, he said.
‘Unnecessary and aggressive’
The protests unleashed in 2020 led, among other things, to efforts to curb the considerable legal immunity granted to police in the United States and to create a registry of agents who used excessive force.
A federal bill, initially supported by both the Democratic and Republican parties, ultimately failed in Congress at a time when homicides were soaring, prompting Republicans to back down and resume their traditional call for “law and order.” .
In the absence of progress at the federal level, there were reforms mainly at the local level, modestly and unevenly across states, producing a patchwork of different approaches.
In the United States, there are almost 18,000 autonomous police entities (state police, city police, county sheriffs, state highway patrol, among others), each with its own rules.
We must stop relying on the police to respond to problems related to poverty
There were revisions to ban strangulations like the one that killed George Floyd, increased use of body cameras, or increased penalties for unwarranted police violence. The Memphis police were among those who embraced reforms.
Officers were barred from forcibly entering homes without warning, urged to intervene to prevent acts of violence by colleagues, while receiving additional training to reduce dangerous confrontations.
Still, the officers who stopped Nichols for a simple traffic violation were “irritated” and “the escalation was already at a high level,” said Cerelyn Davis, the Memphis Police Department’s first black female chief.
For the activists, the central problem is the broad powers of arrest that US police have, even for minor infractions.
“We need to stop relying on the police to respond to problems related to poverty,” said Kathy Sinback, Tennessee director of the American Civil Liberties Union, as it “leads to more frequent, unnecessary and aggressive actions by the police.” law enforcement towards members of the community.
Proof of this is that police officers have killed almost 600 people during traffic checks since 2017, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
SANTIAGO PINZON GIRALDO
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from AFP
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