Tire Nichols: In between, he called for his mother In 2022, for the first time, the EU produced more electricity from renewable sources than from gas

Tire Nichols was the youngest of four siblings. He worked shifts for parcel delivery company FedEx. He spent his free time with his four-year-old son, friends and football, with his skateboard and his camera. He was especially fond of sunsets and the sesame chicken recipe from his mother, who he lived with and whose name he had tattooed on his arm, she said at a news conference. In short: he led the normal life of a 29-year-old American.

This life ended on January 10, 2023 in a hospital in the city of Memphis, Tennessee. “Heavy bleeding caused by massive blows,” says an initial autopsy report. Three days earlier, Tire Nichols lay on the curb at an intersection in the neighborhood where he lived as police officers beat him, sometimes with a baton, kicked him and pepper sprayed him for several minutes.

Videotaped of the crime, Nichols can be heard screaming in pain, in between calling out to his mother, whose house is only a few steps away, “Moooom!” When the police finally stop, they drag the lifeless Nichols upstairs and lean him onto the tires of their car until emergency services arrive a few minutes later.

Once again

The city of Memphis released footage of the crime last weekend. Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets there, and there were also protests in other American cities. Another black man beaten to death by police officers, another seemingly innocent traffic stop that culminated in a deadly excess of violence: the list of recalls in this case is long.

There’s Rodney King, who was stopped and beaten for speeding in Los Angeles in 1991; he survived badly injured.

There’s George Floyd, who was killed by a police officer in 2020 by kneeling on his neck for nine and a half minutes while Floyd was tied to the ground.

Both are just two particularly well-known examples out of hundreds – and there are also film recordings of these two cases that made it publicly visible how brutal the police officers acted.

control, oppression and violence

That in the Tire Nichols case not only the victim is black, but also the perpetrators are black, adds to the pain for Nichols’ mother RowVaughn Wells: “It makes it even harder to swallow,” she said, according to the Washington Post , “because they’re black and they know what we’re going through.”

That does not alter the fact that the discussion about the intertwining of structural racism and police violence has flared up again: how is that possible? Why is there so little change in the training and further training of police officers, in their working methods and in their self-image?

The warrior ideal

New York criminal justice expert Alexis Hoag, who used to work as a criminal defense attorney in Tennessee, where Tire Nichols lived, sums it up briefly. “It’s the police culture that needs to be overhauled,” she tweeted. Police work in the United States is based on control, repression and violence, regardless of the color of those who perform it. This is at the expense of those who would be placed under general suspicion because of their skin color.

Civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have expressed similar views. In Tennessee, 47 percent of police brutality deaths are black, according to the nonprofit data project Mapping Police Violence; however, according to the census, black people make up only 17 percent of the state’s total population.

Experts have also been pointing out for years how much the working methods of the American police authorities follow a combatant ideal that legitimizes or glorifies violence. Police officers, Harvard criminologist Seth Stoughton wrote back in 2015, were told that they could be in mortal danger in any situation they had to control by any means necessary: ​​“Officers learn to recognize every person they are dealing with, such as an armed threat and any situation as an imminent use of deadly force.” This image is still prevalent in training: “You are constantly bombarded with the message to fear that your survival depends on it.”

He weighed only 65 kilograms

The case of Tire Nichols is an example of where this culture leads. Bodycam footage of the police officers involved shows them constantly yelling instructions at Nichols, some of which he is unable to follow at all. For example, he should lie down on the floor, although he has been there for a long time, or raise his hands, although they are held. He himself claims that he “just wants to go home”, addressing officers with “yes, sir”, while those yell things like, “I’m going to beat you up.”

Nichols was unarmed and, according to his mother, had Crohn’s disease and weighed only 140 pounds. The videos do not show that he even tried to threaten the police officers in any way. The only thing he does at a given moment: he returns words. “I’m already on the floor,” he bursts out, sounding more panic than anger. Then he runs off, which he can apparently only do because two police officers back off from a third-party hit-and-run.

There was nothing against Nichols, they should have let him drive on immediately, the police officers knew after inquiry, as the videos show. Her claim that he was speeding and later tried to reach for a gun has not been confirmed.

Looking at the footage, Nichols’ run away could be interpreted more as an impulsive act of desperation despite conflicting and clearly completely disproportionate instructions from the police officers than as suspicious.

The officials at that point seem to escalate in turn, as if he had insulted them. “You’re going to squirt now,” one of them says when they’ve caught up with Nichols. He is then beaten and sprayed with pepper spray at the same time, three officers beat him at this time.

Disbanded special unit

The task force, which included the officers who beat Tire Nichols to death, was disbanded after the incident. The so-called Scorpion Unit was only established at the end of 2021 after violent crime in Memphis rose sharply during the pandemic.

Four groups of ten police officers each traveled in civilian vehicles and specifically stopped vehicles in particularly high-crime areas that they suspected of having guns. The Tire Nichols abuse started with one such traffic stop.

A police practice that often escalates into violence, especially in the United States – on average, at least one person is killed every week by female officers who were not armed or otherwise violent.

Here, too, there is a racial imbalance in the statistics: black people are affected more often than average. Experts such as Stoughton warn that, according to several studies, these random checks do not reduce crime, especially in hotspot areas, but are counterproductive when in doubt: by making law-abiding citizens suspicious, distrust in the police increases. Stoughton compares the method to a hammer, “which would actually require a scalpel”.

The five police officers have since been charged with manslaughter. Everyone wants to plead not guilty. They were released on bail. Two other officers were fired. These consequences were swift and decisive compared to other cases.

On a larger level, however, hardly anything has happened since the murder of George Floyd and the mass protests that summer. Congress has still not passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; this provides, for example, for the establishment of a national register that prevents police officers who have become violent from simply moving to another neighborhood and thus avoiding the consequences.

Given the new majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives, Nichols’ violent death is unlikely to move anything in that direction.

Meanwhile, the investigation continues in Memphis. Tire Nichols, as much can be said, would probably still be alive if he had taken a different route home or if he had started a few minutes later. He had set up a website for his photos with these words of welcome on the homepage:

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.