Tyre Nichols was killed by police officers. Them being Black doesn’t diminish the claim the system is racist.
If you haven’t seen the news, Tyre Nichols, a 29 year old Black man, was beaten to death by 5 police officers during a traffic stop. The stop happened on January 7th, and Tyre passed away on January 10th. Last night the body cam footage of the incident was released, with people comparing it to the brutality against Rodney King in 1991, which led to the Los Angeles uprising in 1992, when the officers were acquitted.
I have not watched the footage, outside of a court of law I don’t know why it’s necessary for us to consume the brutal beating of a Black man like it’s some sort of perverse entertainment. We don’t need to see it, we know what happened - a traffic stop with no probable cause escalated and the police killed another Black man. It’s not a new story, it’s not unusual in any way bar one.
Every single one of the five officers involved were also Black. Which has been the perfect catalyst for those who oppose the statement Black Lives Matter, and it’s context around police violence, to “prove” it’s not a racist system. How can it be? They were Black too.
The truth is BLM supporters have been speaking for years about holding Black and brown police officers accountable for their acts of violence too, because white supremacy is a mindset anyone can hold. Take a look at UK politics if you don’t know what I mean by that. Suella Braverman is a child of immigrants, both of Indian origin, and just this week she decided to scrap three of the key commitments the government had made after the Windrush report was released. Priti Patel is also the child of immigrants, again of Indian origin, and she is the mind behind the policy that sends asylum seekers in the UK to Rwanda. Kemi Badenoch is a child of Nigerian immigrants who doesn’t believe in white privilege, supports the idea that the UK isn’t institutionally racist despite decades worth of evidence to the contrary, and says she doesn’t care about colonialism and that we should teach about the “good” it did. Then there’s Kwasi Kwarteng who said people who support the Black Lives Matter movement and oppose British Imperalism have a “cartoon like” view of history, and that the removal of monuments in tribute to slave traders was “vandalism.”
It’s pretty clear that not all skinfolk are kinfolk, and they are more than happy to throw other people of colour under the bus if they think it’ll gain them more power. Whether that’s political power or police power doesn’t matter, the essence is the same. Upholding policy, reinforcing sytems, and repeating rhetoric that puts the lives of Black and brown people at risk is white supremacy, regardless of who is doing it. These five officers are another example of that.
And there’s probably more reasons for this behaviour than even the best psychologist and sociologists could begin to unpack, but here’s my thoughts. I think it’s pack mentality. I think subconsciously it comes from the knowledge that these systems, these institutions aren’t for you but the hope that if you’re inside the pack it won’t attack you. So you do as the pack does, you say what the pack says, you walk the same line the pack walks and you don’t step out of line.
But the reality is, when doing that backfires on you, you are not offered the same protections as your white peers. Because no matter what you say, no matter what you do, you’re still not white. Look again at our political system. Boris Johnson stumbled his way through his tenure as Prime Minister, making mistake after mistake, caught up in a new controversy every few months, charged with breaking his own laws and still he was supported. In fact, when given the chance to vote for no confidence in him, his party did the opposite. Even now there are many in the Conservative party who would have him back as leader. For years he was allowed to make this country a laughing stock, to damage our economy and our international standing. Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor wasn’t afforded the same treatment. It took all of a week for his party to turn on him - yes he was incompetent and totally unsuitable for the role, that is not in contention. The point is, so was Boris Johnson, but the treatment of the two was night and day.
The 5 police officers in this case were fired from the department. Within 16 days of Tyre’s death, they were arrested and charged with murder, kidnap, assault and misconduct. How often does that happen? That the thin blue line doesn’t protect it’s own? That the police chief openly states there was no probable cause for the stop? That there’s no attempt at a cover up or spin story? Compare it to the case of Eric Garner who was killed in 2014. He was killed with a prohitbited chokehold, much like George Floyd. The only officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo, was a white man. He was not dismissed from the police until 2019. Or the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson. Michael was shot at 12 times, hit 6, and Wilson faced no charges. He resigned from the department, but applied for numerous policing jobs in the aftermath.
2021 saw a record number of officers in the US charged in fatal police shootings, and that record number was 21. There were at least 230 police killings in the US in 2021. So far 4 of these have lead to a conviction, and only 1 of those is for the killing of a Black person. Of the 230 killings, 192 had the race of the deceased recorded. Of these, 91 were Black. 39.5% of all police killings in the US in 2021 were Black, and 47.3% of all cases where the race was recorded were Black. 1 resulted in anyone being convicted.
Death by the police is the sixth leading cause of death in the US for young Black men, and as you can see from the 2021 data, it’s almost never met with consequences for the one who did the killing. What I’m getting at is that the officers being Black doesn’t diminish our claim that the police system is racist, it supports it. Because Tyre becomes yet another Black man who doesn’t get to grow old thanks to the police, and the police response to the officers who stole his future is clearly at complete odds with the norm. And to be clear, what’s happened to those police officers is absolutely right and absolutely just. The reality is though, it’s not the normal outcome in cases like this. Because whether you wear a badge or not, if you’re not white, it doesn’t serve and protect you.