When 29-year-old Tyre Nichols was stopped by police in Memphis, Tennessee, on Jan. 7 over what police said was suspicion of reckless driving, he was beaten so badly that three days later he was dead. A single statistic from an excellent New York Times video investigation helps illuminate how that happened.
According to the Times, several police officers gave Nichols 71 commands in 13 minutes — many of which were “confusing, conflicting and sometimes even impossible to obey” because of how police were pinning him down.
If you watch the disturbing video of the exchange, you can see how the instructions weren’t meant to help Nichols cooperate with the police. Instead, they provided the police with a pretext to further escalate violence.
Video footage shows how the police’s behavior was about bullying and striking fear in Nichols more than it was about upholding the law.
The deployment of often-nonsensical instructions underscores a key aspect of how Nichols ended up dead after a traffic stop. According to former law enforcement officials and experts, the police were exhibiting a policing ideology in which cops view dominating suspects as essential to their self-preservation and identity.
An examination of the video footage shows how the police’s behavior was about bullying and striking fear in Nichols more than it was about upholding the law. Police swiftly dragged Nichols out of his car during the traffic stop. At one point, while one officer pinned his wrist down, another one told him to place his hands behind his back. Around the same time, he was told to lie down — even though he was already on the ground. Moments later, the cops agreed that he should be pepper-sprayed, and he was immediately sprayed in the eyes.
Later, as the police tried to use a stun gun at him, Nichols ran toward what turned out to be his parents’ house. It is perhaps not surprising that he feared for his life given how the police seemed like they couldn’t be mollified….
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