There was another police killing earlier this month, another bad police killing, another senseless police killing. It’s been a long time now since 2020, when these killings drew so much more focus, but the echoes were loud, and the killing itself—from all currently available evidence—was as inexplicable as they come. It was especially inexplicable, in fact.
Reuters has a timeline of the compiled video of the incident which was released last night. Police reports in Memphis reportedly say Tyre Nichols was pulled over due to reckless driving. Once stopped, he was told to exit his vehicle, then pulled from his vehicle, then pushed to the ground while officers threatened to tase him, spray him with pepper spray, and beat him. He tried to get away, and he got away, and he ran. Once caught, the beating continued—with pepper spray, baton, fists, and possibly more weapons—for at least six minutes before he was handcuffed, dragged to a patrol car, and propped up though limp. Thirteen minutes after the beating ended, a stretcher arrived. He left shortly thereafter in an ambulance, then died in the hospital three days later.
What this was, and what these are, is an extrajudicial killing, a murder carried out by agents of the state without lawful authority to execute. Those employed and trained to protect justice and keep the peace used their power to kill a man. It wasn’t their goal—it couldn’t have been their goal—but it’s what they did. They beat a man to death. It was as inexplicable as these come.
Policing is a difficult and important job, and like many other difficult and important jobs, it can only be done well when accompanied by effective training and accountability. It gets a little circular at this point: If killings like this can happen, the training and accountability aren’t effective. Five police officers were fired, and charged with a litany of crimes, so there’s some accountability, but it wasn’t enough to stop this before it happened. The killing happened. A man is dead.
There are so many challenging things with these killings, and with how to respond. If they can happen, change is necessary, but given how many police departments there are in this country, how’s one to know which ones need changes right now? There are national things that need change—the Supreme Court’s handling of qualified immunity is brazenly immoral, unconstitutional, and stupid, as is Congress’s refusal to address it—but there is no one button to push. There is so much noise about how to change and what to change, and even if we were working with the same definition of what constitutes successful policing, successful policing is not the most straightforward thing in the world to measure. Has progress been made since 2020? I don’t know. Probably, at least in a lot of places, but I don’t know. There are black and white incidents, like this one, but grayness is much more common.
There’s also the issue of race. This was a usual police killing in that the dead man was Black, but it was unusual in that all five officers held accountable for the killing are also Black. It’s natural to conflate issues of policing with issues of race—a high proportion of police brutality incidents involve Black detainees, and an argument that’s made is that society doesn’t care as much about issues that disproportionally affect the Black population—but policing issues are not purely about race. They’re intertwined, so to examine the issue thoroughly, race has to be involved, but this then leads in part to the divisiveness that accompanies policing political discussions: A lot of people are attached to ideas that racism is in the past, or that racism only looks like it did in the past, or that racism only looks like it did in middle school history class representations of the past. It’s not on Black people to crack that exterior—I’m not trying to tell Black people how to proceed with their entirely justified grief and rage—but it’s a problem for the conversation, because there are so many levels to the conversation and the issues are so (justifiably) emotional that it becomes complicated and confusing fast. It’s hard to talk about police reform without accelerating to arguments about systemic racism and sidetracking with a thousand anecdotes and a half. “What about ___?” “What about ___?” “Well these officers were black!”
So no, we can’t try to treat policing and race as entirely separate issues. But what we can do, or at least what those of us can do who don’t want police carrying out extrajudicial killings and aren’t particularly at risk of being extrajudicially killed (I am very white), is try to find baselines and start with those. One such baseline? Policing is a difficult and important job, one that needs effective training and accountability. We can work through disagreements on what “effective” means in both those spheres. But we have to start somewhere.
