When a black man, a son, father, brother, nephew, and a friend loses his life at the hands of five black now ex-cops, mere miles from where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid down his life, it’s hard to talk about racial progress and to celebrate Black History Month.
April 4, 1968, as part of his “Poor People’s Campaign,” Dr. King went to Memphis to fight for striking African American sanitation workers and to get better housing, wages, and workplace safety, for the underprivileged. More than five decades later, in the irony of ironies, when five black, now former police officers, beat to death a 29-year-old skateboard enthusiast, it shook our collective core.
Incidents such as the beating death of Tyre Nichols by black police officers could require the Department of Justice (DOJ) to create a new hate crime classification. Tyre’s unprovoked beating and subsequent death necessitate vigorous prosecution as a black-on-black crime driven by implicit self-hatred. The phenomenon puts a question mark in front of every elite police unit operating today.
Sadly, the savage beating of Tyre is suggestive of the progress made in this country to boost confidence in law enforcement. Yet, from the sadistic clubbing of Rodney King in 1991 to the 2020 murder of George Floyd and numerous other instances of police abusing innocent black people, men, women, and children in urban America, face this reality every day.
Let’s get real. Black cops victimizing black people is nothing new. And, looking back to the hiring of the first black police officers, the brutality perpetrated on black communities is well documented. For example, in Chicago Two-Gunned Pete, Sylvester Washington, a black cop believed to have killed nine men more than 80 years ago. Yet, Washington was invaluable to the law enforcement hierarchy in maintaining order on the city’s South Side, in a section known as the Black Belt.
In 2005, there was a case against five New Orleans police officers (NOP), two of whom were black, accused days after Hurricane Katrina of shooting and killing two black civilians and wounding four others on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge. None of the victims was armed, or had committed any crime, and one victim, a mentally disabled black man, was shot in the back, to prompt an investigation by the DOJ.
In the end, the five former NOP officers pleaded guilty to various charges related to the shooting, and received three to 12 years imprisonment for their crimes.
It is no surprise that according to a Stanford University research study that the first systematic analysis of police interaction captured by body cameras suggests that police officers consistently use less respectful language with black community members than with white community members. Therefore, it logically follows that police use of force is more likely to occur in communities of color.
Mounting political pressure on police departments to control crime contributes to a spike in allegations of police brutality, excessive force, and coerced criminal confessions. A decade ago, when appearing on the Bill Mahr television show, Princeton University’s Dr. Cornel West declared that in the United Stated, the police shoot a black person every 28 hours. “The criminal justice system itself is criminal,” said Dr. West.
Black people have dealt with venomous hatred since being brought to this land in shackles. Yet, the potency of hate fueling the ferocious beating of Tyre is sinister in a way that, after 400 years, shocks all of us.
In some areas, the black-on-black hatred that is the source of epidemic bloodletting in our inner cities is so distressing and widespread that law-abiding black urban dwellers now fear those who look like themselves on either side of the law. Therefore, one of law enforcement’s most critical challenges is to find ways to counter the rampant crime and violence impacting the urban landscape that doesn’t perform like an instrument of organized state-sponsored violence.
The recent turmoil in Memphis isn’t Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis’ first brush with controversy. The more than three-decade-long law enforcement trailblazer, when a member of the Atlanta Police Department, created an elite squad similar to the now-infamous Scorpion strike unit in Memphis. In Atlanta, Davis’ “Red Dog” unit was disbanded after the filing of several lawsuits against the edgy-antagonistic Atlanta crime unit.
Dan Grossman, an Atlanta attorney who filed several successful lawsuits on behalf of victims who alleged being roughed up by Red Dog officers, said, “If anyone in Memphis had checked with anyone from the world of police oversight in Atlanta, they would have learned that creating a Red Dog-like squad using Red Dog-like tactics was inevitably going to result in police misconduct and violence.”
Grossman’s admonishment is a warning to the upper echelon of police departments throughout the United States that unleashing the thuggish and rouge elements of law enforcement to inflict, without impunity, havoc on communities of color will fail.
In our hearts, we know that the treatment of blacks by law enforcement isn’t going to change because five black ex-cops killed an innocent black person.
Anthony Stanford is a political analyst, columnist, and author of the book, “Copping Out the Consequence of Police Corruption and Misconduct.”