End "Elite" Police Brutality
Until we see substantial police reform instances of police abuse, misconduct, and brutality are almost guaranteed to continue.
On January 7, 2023, Tyre Nichols was pulled over by Memphis police officers for a traffic violation. Not long after the initial stop, those officers went on to, in the words of Antonio Romanucci, the attorney representing Nichols’ family, beat him like “a human piñata” for three continuous minutes. A few days later, on January 10, the 29-year-old skateboarder, photographer, and father, died after succumbing to his injuries. Surprisingly, the officers who were involved in the beating were all fired almost immediately; even more surprisingly, they have all since been charged with second-degree murder, among other charges.
Weeks after the incident, on Friday, January 27, four videos of Nichols’ interaction with the police and the subsequent beating were released to the public, which led to protests erupting all over the country. In my opinion, the national outrage that occurred in response to those videos — the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — was entirely justified. While there is never a shortage of examples of police harassing, injuring, or even killing civilians, it appears that one of the biggest similarities between this case and the case of George Floyd is that, due to the heinous and blatant use of excessive force, it’s extremely difficult to defend the actions of the police officers involved.
The parallels between Nichols’ death and Floyd’s death are easy to see, and many people have been making that comparison. One aspect of Floyd’s murder that activists, politicians, and the corporate media insisted on focusing on was that Floyd, a black man, was murdered by a white cop. A major difference in the case of Tyre Nichols, also a black man, is that all of the officers who were involved in his death are black themselves.
I won’t claim that racism never plays a role during instances of police brutality; in fact, I actually believe that it often does. I would even argue that, given how prevalent racism used to be within this country, systemic racism does exist and it likely has an effect on how our government operates, which includes the police. However, I disagree with the notion that systemic racism explains or even contributes to all of society’s problems. To me — and I assume to many others as well — attempts to portray everything as racist come off as lazy and disingenuous, as there are many factors other than racism that shape the world around us.
In my opinion, this most recent police killing shows that police brutality is more about a culture of authoritarianism than anything else; one in which agents of the state feel empowered to treat civilians however they see fit with little risk of facing accountability. Such a culture is due to, among other things, an excessively bloated government, the overcriminalization of victimless crimes, an us-versus-them mentality that has been steadily increasing between police and civilians for decades, and a complacent populace that accepts and often defends this sort of behavior from police officers and other public officials.
One of the reasons that many people believe racism is the main driver of police brutality is that the corporate media tends to only focus on the instances where the racial aspect of the event can be exploited. That isn’t to say that many of those cases don’t involve racism or that they aren’t worth paying attention to, just that there are many others, including the recent murder of Tyre Nichols, that don’t fit the narrative that every instance of police misconduct is rooted in white supremacy.
One such example is Daniel Shaver, a white man, who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Mesa, Arizona, back in 2016. Although there was no racial aspect to that particular incident, it’s easily one of the most egregious examples of police brutality that I have ever seen. The fact that Shaver’s murder didn’t neatly fit that racial narrative isn’t the only parallel to the case of Tyre Nichols, however. Another disturbing similarity between the two police killings is that they both involved officers shouting contradictory and confusing commands, and then reacting violently when those commands proved impossible to be fully complied with.
Both instances highlight how police officers will often escalate simple situations to the point of lethal force, either deliberately or through a combination of arrogance and incompetence, likely due to that us-versus-them mentality I mentioned earlier.
Another part the corporate media plays in the perception of police brutality is that when they don’t immediately exploit any racial components to the story, they will often regurgitate the press releases from the police departments in question. In this most recent case, many major outlets copied the language from the Memphis Police Department’s press release and reported that a “confrontation” occurred, instead of digging even slightly deeper to discover just how brutal that “confrontation” really was. This shows how friendly the corporate press treats our government and other institutions that they’re inherently supposed to view adversarially.
As I previously mentioned, the release of the videos of Tyre Nichols' beating sparked protests across the country that were reminiscent of the protests that took place after the death of George Floyd. I personally think that the media exploiting the racial aspect of Floyd’s death helped stoke the anger that led to the violence and chaos that occurred during the protests of 2020.
I also think the several months of lockdowns, mandates, and overall stress from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic that preceded Floyd’s murder played a large part in why people reacted the way they did during that time. The fact that those policies haven’t been in place for quite a while now might at least partially explain why the protests in response to Nichols’ death have been less violent and widespread than what was seen a few years ago, as there’s less pent-up emotion and anxiety factoring into the current situation.
The protests of 2020 largely consisted of mass rioting and looting, accompanied by calls to “defund the police” — a catchy slogan but unfortunately a superficial and ineffective proposed solution — which showcased how the overall movement lacked the ability to effect real change. Had that momentum been more directly targeted, maybe some actual meaningful police reform could have taken place. Some examples of such reform would be putting an end to the War on Drugs, ending qualified immunity, banning no-knock raids, ending the 1033 program that allows local police departments to acquire excess military gear and weapons, requiring police officers to undergo de-escalation training, and prohibiting (or at the very least, reforming) the use of “elite” units within police departments.
Those last two suggestions, requiring de-escalation training and dissolving “elite” police units, are the most relevant when it comes to the case of Trye Nichols. Several of the officers involved in the beating of Nichols were part of the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods (SCORPION) unit, which was started in 2021 and has recently been permanently disbanded in the wake of the backlash Memphis PD has seen since Nichols’ death. This situation has caused the use of such units, which are used by police departments all across the country, to rightfully come under much more scrutiny.
According to the Associated Press:
Police department leaders across the country bill the specialty squads as “elite” units of officers sent into neighborhoods as a direct response to an increase in specific crimes, often arguing they are a tool to dedicate additional resources.
But policing reform advocates and people who live in the Black and brown neighborhoods that these units usually patrol often say the officers employ aggressive tactics sometimes bordering on brutality, have little oversight and use pretextual stops of cars and pedestrians alike to search for larger crimes.
The use of “pretextual stops” likely played a major role in the situation that led to the death of Tyre Nichols, as it all began from an alleged traffic violation. Such stops are done with the initial infractions often being minuscule — if not entirely fabricated — and are then used as opportunities to try and discover evidence of more serious crimes. The SCORPION unit was created with the intention of focusing on things such as car thefts and other gang-related crimes; it was not created for plainclothes officers to conduct routine traffic stops in unmarked cars. It seems obvious that those stops were simply a tactic that the SCORPION unit used to try and find illegal guns, drugs, or anything else that could lead to an arrest.
That tactic seems to suggest that these “elite” police units are more or less unnecessary. If the sort of criminal activity that these units are supposed to focus on is so infrequent that they need to stop people over minor traffic infractions — which only potentially leads to the discovery of more severe crimes — then what’s the point of creating these “elite” units in the first place? Clearly, the SCORPION unit and similar units from other police departments feel the need to justify their own existence.
These units also seem to exacerbate the aforementioned us-versus-them mentality that many police officers tend to have. When the risk of misconduct and abuse of power is already prevalent among average police officers, creating units within police departments that are considered “elite” elevates that risk. I won’t pretend to be an expert on social psychology, but to me, it seems like there are several obvious reasons for this phenomenon.
One reason could be that being part of these units incentivizes police officers to try to earn, and then maintain, that title of “elite”. That incentive, along with access to military gear and the lack of de-escalation training, leads to the sort of behavior recently seen out of Memphis. I assume this is because the people with the sort of personality traits that are attracted to the idea of being a police officer in the first place are often aggressive and confrontational. You could argue those traits might be necessary for some situations police officers may encounter, but when the officers lack the self-control and ability to properly regulate that behavior, problems arise.
The cops who become members of these “elite” units likely exhibit more of that aggressive type of personality than the average police officer, and that probability coupled with the lack of oversight many of these units receive is a recipe for disaster. Aggressive and confrontational police officers with an incentive to live up to the title of “elite” and a need to justify their unit’s existence while also having little oversight over how they interact with the public seems like a fairly obvious problem.
Another example of how these units exacerbate the us-versus-them mentality that is rife within police departments is the extra layer of separation from the public these units create. Police officers are already prone to view their fellow “brothers and sisters in blue” to be on one team — their team — and average citizens as being on another. The creation of “elite” units within police departments likely deepens that my-team-against-your-team perspective, and potentially leads to police officers being more willing to use violence and aggression against anyone on the opposing “team”.
Considering how problematic these “elite” units are — which are sanctioned by their respective police departments — one starts to wonder about the dangers of police officers potentially grouping together in cliques or groups that are kept secret from their departments. While it’s difficult to know for sure how common that sort of thing is, there have been documented cases of literal gangs forming within police departments, and those gangs then operated with the power and authority of law enforcement. In my opinion, units like the SCORPION unit out of Memphis, Tennessee, incentivize police officers to form such groups which in turn increases the likelihood of those groups or cliques turning into violent gangs.
These are just some critiques of “elite” police units, and the misconduct of these units is just one aspect of the much broader problem of police brutality. There are many problems with the way police operate in this country, and the solutions to those problems are more complex than simply calling for police departments to be defunded. Until we see substantial police reform instances of police abuse, misconduct, and brutality are almost guaranteed to continue, and the fissure between law enforcement and the general public will continue to expand.
Trye Nichols was the most recent victim of police brutality to garner national attention, and his death has renewed calls for major reform. Unfortunately, those calls will most likely fade in the coming weeks and months with little reform actually taking place, if any. There are policies that can be enacted that will help to prevent this sort of behavior from our police officers, but until those policies are seriously considered and eventually put into place we will undoubtedly see more and more of this senseless and violent abuse of power from armed agents of the state.
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