The cops were grossly incompetent, out of shape, spent 10 minutes panting after a 1 minute sprint, managed to mace themselves twice and then took it out on him by beating him to death. Every single one of them had at least 50 pounds on him, but somehow three of them couldn't manage to restrain him. And all he did was try to struggle and flee. The other cops who didn't beat him to death were joking about it later. One of them in the first interaction is hoping that they "beat his ass", and those cops are still on the force and not one of the 5 who are going to be seeing charges.<p>This wasn't a mistake, or emotions, this is training and group mentality. Cops in this country are just gang thugs.<p>And focusing entirely on race is missing the point. The race of a cop is 'cop'. And while black people disproportionately are on the wrong side of this, Daniel Shaver and Ryan Whitaker show it isn't exclusive.
<a href="https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis</a> <- if you want to skip the wp article<p>strange behavior all around... the pelosi video was weird too
heck, so was the dance hall confrontation and the mushroom farmer arrest... please 2023, give us some inspiration
Just remember:<p>Professional police, as a concept, had to be shoehorned into the Western legal system. It's not the default mode. It was introduced in this form as a way to subsidize the capture of fugitive slaves, because slavery was simply not profitable without violent help from the state.<p>And before you point to things like the London Metropolitan Police Service to suggest that professional police were a natural and widespread evolution, common to common-law democracies, remember that Robert Peel, partly in response to criticisms that professional police weren't fit for a slavery-free society, wrote the patrolman's instructions in part because he was concerned about the slave-patrol-into-police lineage.<p>This USA traditionally had elected Sheriffs, who served the courts rather than the prosecution, and who had no extra powers or arms granted them (in other words, they were tasked with catching fugitives by court order, although everyone can participate in that activity at their choosing).<p>Especially now, in the information age, when everyone can gather high-quality evidence using the tools in their pocket, and call for community help at a moment's notice, the benefits to continuing this experiment of having slave patrols in our communities are very near zero.<p>Let's get serious about the next stage in our society - one that is free from police, and which thus allows the many good people who become police officers because they want to help others to actually do that, free from obligations to maintain an unjust world order.
More context: <i>The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism</i> - <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/27/opinions/tyre-nichols-memphis-police-department-jones/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/27/opinions/tyre-nichols-mem...</a>
>A grand jury returned indictments Thursday against Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr., Emmitt Martin III, Justin Smith and Tadarrius Bean<p>Are these guys all black? I could watch the video on WP but I couldn't scroll down because of the paywall. The CNN article didn't even show the perpetrators faces which made me assume they were all white cops.
I don't understand the use of that level of force for a traffic stop. That being said most of those stories of people unlawfully killed by the police have in common that they started with resisting arrest which is not a great idea in the first place, it invites the use of more force and the suspicion by the police that they are facing a criminal, and that's when the fuckups happen.