Memphis fires Tire Nichols amid debate over police abuse reform in the US

Nearly a week after video was released of the fatal beating of a defenseless young African-American man named Tire Nichols by five black Memphis police officers, two officers and three Memphis firefighters have been demoted from their posts for their actions and omissions during car night.

The authorities have so far avoided what they feared most: a wave of protests across the country, but they have not managed to silence the voices calling for a debate on police reform that has been postponed too many times in the United States.

This Wednesday, the first day of Black History Month, the city of Memphis woke up prepared to fire the boy at a funeral that was scheduled to be attended by a handful of personalities from the political class, such as Kamala Harris, along with a group of officials sent by the White House on a consolation mission.

All eyes are now on Washington, where a law called to change the rules of daily police violence in the United States has languished for two years due to the Republican blockade.

The legislative initiative came after the death by suffocation of the African American George Floyd under the weight of the knee of the white agent Derek Chauvin.

It happened in May 2020 and lit a fuse that other tragedies (unpunished acts of police abuse with the proper names of Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner or Trayvon Martin) failed to ignite before.

Floyd's murder led to a bill bearing his name that was introduced by Democrats in Congress in 2020 and again in 2021. The bill aims to establish a national registry of police misconduct to prevent criminals from agents avoid the consequences of their actions by moving to another jurisdiction.

In the United States there are more than 18,000 police departments and each one imposes its rules.

The law also proposes increasing control over the conduct of agents and condemns actions mediated by racial or religious prejudice.

Defenders of the regulatory proposal affirm that it "would save lives" by prohibiting, among other practices, strangulation to immobilize a detainee.

It also reserves "deadly force" as a "last resort."

Image from a police video, in which Tire Nichols is seen on February 7 after the beating that cost him his life three days later.

PA

On both occasions, the initiative crashed against the Republican wall in the Senate due to discrepancies over the concept of "qualified immunity", which assists agents in situations in which they suspect that their lives are in danger.

One of the main arguments against it is that it would persuade those who want to start a career in the police.

Now that, after the last legislative elections, the conservatives have a majority in the Upper House, who presented these measures in the campaign as a master plan to dispossess the police forces of their power and lead the country to chaos in the streets, it seems little that law is likely to go ahead.

President Joe Biden took advantage of the second anniversary of Floyd's death to sign a police reform executive order, limited in scope.

“I know that progress can be slow and frustrating,” Biden said that day at the White House.

"But today we are acting."

For the moment, this action does not seem to have been felt on the streets: according to the organization Mapping Police Violence, a sentinel of police abuses, the number of deaths by bullets at the hands of the agents has remained practically the same since 2020 (1,123, in 2022 ).

The chances of a black person dying at the hands of the police are nearly three times greater than that of a white person, according to those data.

All in all, it would not be fair to say that nothing changed after the Floyd tragedy, which unleashed a wave of protests across the country and placed the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement at the center of the conversation.

The one with Nichols, a delivery man who loves photography and

29-year-old —who was stopped on January 7 for an alleged traffic violation while he was just “trying to get home,” as he told the uniformed officers who ended his life with punches, kicks, and clubs—, It will be remembered at least as a case in which the police acted after the fact with unusual speed and determination.

The five main suspects, whose "elite" unit, belonging to a program called Scorpion, has been dismantled, are already fired and charged with crimes as serious as murder, abuse of authority or kidnapping.

The spread of the video was also faster than other times;

They have taken three weeks instead of, as on previous occasions, several months or even a year.

What did follow the expected pattern was the divergence between what the agents stated happened in the report and what can be seen to actually happen on the recording.

Nichols died three days later at the hospital.

The ambulance that took him there took 22 minutes to arrive.

Demonstration in Memphis for the death of Tire Nichols.

The banner reads: "End police terror." DAVID DEE DELGADO (REUTERS)

The rapid management of the crisis after the facts were known was influenced by the fact that the defendants were black, like the victim, which has not prevented in the United States the racist interpretation of an event that speaks of the "dehumanization of the Afro-American citizen before the police". according to some analysts.

Also decisive was the role of Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, the first black woman to hold the position.

In 2020, she was working in Durham, North Carolina, and was one of the most critical voices from within the establishment during the riots that followed Floyd's murder.

The Memphis Police Department website includes a section called

Policing .

That didn't stop the Scorpion program from launching in 2021, as homicides skyrocketed in the city: four groups of 10 officers each, authorized to patrol the city's crime hotspots in unidentified cars. .

They were also allowed to stop drivers indiscriminately ‌to investigate homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies.

The one in Memphis is not the only program of these characteristics launched in the United States.

All of this is united by the fact that they operate with greater room for maneuver and less supervision than regular police officers.

“Some of these units have touted impressive arrest and gun seizure records, though those statistics don't always correlate with a decline in crime.

They are all based on the idea that police officers need less supervision to be effective.

That is a fundamental misconception,” said

Radley Balko, author of a book on “the militarization of American police forces,” in

California police kill a man with amputated legs who was running from officers

The organization Mapping Police Violence calculates that in 2022 there were only nine days in which there were no deaths in the United States due to police bullets.

Last Thursday was not one of those days. 

Huntington Park police officers, south of Los Angeles, then killed Anthony Lowe, a 36-year-old man with both legs amputated.

The event is recorded by a mobile phone recording taken from inside a car.

In it, Lowe is seen walking away from his wheelchair.

He appears to be running from two policemen who are walking towards him pointing their guns at him.

The video does not show the moment of the shooting.

The Huntington Park Police Department said in a statement that officers were there to respond to a stabbing allegedly committed by someone in a wheelchair;

that they tried to arrest Lowe;

and that he ignored his orders.

He “Threatened to move [toward the police officers] or throw the knife at the officers.”

In the images there is no record of that.

Lowe's family has demanded the officers be fired and indicted for murder. 

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