After five Black Memphis police officers were fired and charged with murder in the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, William Jones, a 48-year-old Black man, told NBC News that, when he was a teenager in Memphis, the police routinely used violence to break up their pickup football games. “And a lot of times,” he said, “it was the Black officers who beat us worse than white officers.” When he heard the identity of the officers charged in Nichols’ murder, Jones said he “was not surprised at all.”
If it doesn’t surprise us that a gang of officers would beat a Black man to death, then it shouldn’t surprise us that the gang of officers who did so were Black.
Nor should we be. Police are trained the same way no matter their race. They are judged by the same standards no matter their race. They typically have a union to defend any lawless behavior they engage in, no matter their race. And no matter their race, they belong to an increasingly militarized profession that engages the American public like enemy combatants.
If it doesn’t surprise us that a gang of officers would beat a Black man to death, then it shouldn’t surprise us that the gang of officers who did so were Black. We give police an awesome amount of power and discretion. And we make it near impossible to hold them personally liable for any constitutional violations they unleash while in uniform. There’s nothing about being Black that stops a person given such power from running roughshod over someone he judges to be without power. And it’s a safe assumption that a random Black man pulled over in a city as Black and poor as Memphis has little power.
Granted, this is not what Black people hoped would happen when police forces were integrated. As the Rev. Al Sharpton said when he eulogized Nichols Wednesday, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while he fought for Black city workers in Memphis (in that case, Black men in the city’s sanitation department.) “There is nothing more…
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