Time for a cultural reset
The problems with U.S. policing date back to slave patrols. Others more versed in policing have pointed to the “warrior cop” ethic taught in some police training, to “warrior cop” culture, and the “officer survival” movement as a source of police violence. Police overreaction and the emphasis on dominating any interactions with civilians keep leading to deaths and more distrust of law enforcement. Are Americans seeking technical and training solutions to what is more a product of police culture?
Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2020:
Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.
How little that has changed. Even now, when the police officers involved are themselves Black, as Tyre Nichols was.
What happened to Nichols in Memphis, and to others, feels like a lynching under color of law. One of the fired officers charged with second-degree murder in the case took cellphone photos of Nichols, bloodied and handcuffed, and shared it with friends like a trophy from a big game hunt. Or a lynching postcard.
A special Memphis police squad dragged Nichols from his car and beat him to death without, documents and records suggest, telling him why they had stopped his vehicle. The same police unit had a recent history of such behavior, the Associated Press reports:
A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday accuses the same officers now charged with murdering Nichols, 29, with also violating the rights of another man from the same neighborhood as Nichols during a similarly violent arrest three days before Nichols’ arrest.
According to the lawsuit, Monterrious Harris, 22, was visiting a cousin at an apartment on the evening of Jan. 4 when his car was “suddenly swarmed by a large group of assailants wearing black ski-masks, dressed in black clothing, brandishing guns, other weapons, hurling expletives and making threats to end his life if he did not exit his car.”
Harris thought the men were trying to rob him, the lawsuit says, and he tried to back up his car before hitting something. He then reluctantly exited with his hands raised and was “grabbed, punched, kicked and assaulted” for up to two minutes, the complaint states. The beating stopped only after people came out of their apartments to see what was happening, the lawsuit alleges.
“Not once did any member of the Scorpion Unit identify himself as a police officer,” the lawsuit states (Huffington Post):
The Army veteran said he was pummeled by the men, leaving his head bleeding, his eye swollen shut, and the injuries to both his legs left it difficult to walk. His lawsuit includes photos of his face, depicting cuts to his forehead and under-eye bruising, that are said to have been taken nine days after being discharged from a hospital.
“The only crime Mr. Harris had committed was being young and African American,” his lawsuit claims.
Harris had every reason to fear for his life, as did Nichols. President Biden in his State of the Union Address spoke to the danger young, Black men face in encounters with police. Black parents routinely have “the talk” with their young sons:
Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car.
Most of us in here have never had to have the talk, the talk, that Brown and Black parents have had to have with their children. Beau, Hunter, Ashley, my children — I never had to have the talk with them.
I never had to tell them if a police officer pulls you over, turn your interior lights on right away. Don’t reach for your license. Keep your hands on the steering wheel.
Imagine having to worry like that every single time your kid got in a car.
And it does not matter if the police officers are Black. Training alone won’t fix this. Police in this country need a cultural reset.