Three decades ago, eyewitness video of the savage beating of a black motorist by US police brought officers to justice.
But his acquittals a year later for the attack on Rodney King set Los Angeles ablaze, where anger at police brutality rippled through the city, with riots that left dozens dead and caused $1 billion in damage.
This Friday, America was shocked by another tragic video of a brutal attack by five Memphis police officers on a 29-year-old black man.
On January 10th, three days after being beaten, Tire Nichols passed away from the injuries he sustained.
The five officers, all black, were fired and charged with second-degree murder, among other charges.
The relative speed with which the authorities acted contrasts with the official reaction after the Rodney King beating.
But both cases gained notoriety because of the existence of graphic material proving police brutality, said Jack Glaser, an expert on police racial bias at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Before Rodney King, there weren’t many people with video cameras, and the fact that someone filmed what happened got national attention,” he told AFP.
“Now this has become exponentially more evident with everyone constantly carrying smartphones, as well as police with body cameras,” he added.
– Accountability –
The existence of images, captured by police or citizens, helps in efforts to hold security officers accountable.
“When (image proof) is lacking, there is a tendency towards obstruction and solidarity among police officers to protect their jobs.”
Patrick Oliver, a former police chief in Cleveland, Ohio, who now leads a criminal justice program at Cedarville University, agrees that the relative speed with which authorities acted in this latest case of police violence is the result of overwhelming hard evidence.
“It’s strange” that they act so quickly against police officers, he told AFP. “The Memphis Police Department basically believes there is sufficient evidence to justify its administrative charges.”
The decision to release the video publicly so quickly was a strategic one, an attempt to alleviate initial public pressure, he said.
“The video was released once the agents were fired and the charges were announced.”
“People who are justifiably outraged by this episode will know that the police department took action against the five officers and that the state’s attorney has already taken criminal action.”
– “The tip of the iceberg” –
Lora Dene King, Rodney King’s daughter who was seven in 1991, said Nichols’s death was part of a long line of examples of police brutality stretching from her father’s beating to the famous “I can’t breathe”. ” repeated eleven times by Eric Garner in 2014, when he was suffocated to death, until the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“This whole situation makes me sick, there’s no reason he shouldn’t be alive,” said Lora King, referring to Nichols.
“Soon it will be just another case and we will move on with our lives, and it will happen again.”
For Glaser, there was a cultural change with the recognition of the prevalence of police violence against black men.
“Police chiefs understand more and more that they cannot simply ignore cases and that they will be held accountable,” he said.
In his opinion, however, episodes such as the death of Tire Nichols are just “the tip of the iceberg”, which gained notoriety because of the existence of the video and the brutality of the attacks.
“But there are many, many cases of excessive use of non-lethal force, of unnecessary actions,” he said.
“This is the kind of situation that indicates how serious the biases are and how savage the police mentality is.”
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