What to make of Tyre Nichols’s killers, the response, and Black communities’ agony

Once again, video of police officers brutalizing a Black man has gone viral. Once again, a family is devastated and Black communities traumatized. Thirty-two years after the first such video documented the merciless beating of Rodney King, 32 months after the murder of George Floyd, Memphis Police officers pulled Tyre Nichols over, and now the world can watch as they beat the life out of him. 

The body cam footage documenting Nichols’ horrific death came, in a sickening sense, as no surprise: Days earlier, footage of police killing another Black man, Michael Dean, was made public in Texas; two weeks prior, Los Angeles police released video of Keenan Anderson, also Black, being tased to death. Law enforcement kills hundreds of people every year, an alarmingly disproportionate number of them Black people.

What was surprising in Nichols’s case was neither the killing nor its brutality, but the race of the officers carrying it out.

Watching uniformed Black men viciously assault and kill the slight Nichols added an agonized layer to reaction within Black communities. We’re asking ourselves heart-wrenching questions: How could they do this to another Black man? How can they face their own families? What were they thinking?

The argument has been made that, if Black officers kill a Black person, the violence isn’t rooted in racism — but this argument forgets history and the interconnectedness of all things. The White supremacy that instituted slave patrols — from which modern-day policing sprang — remains at the root of law enforcement’s structures, procedures, and policies. That foundational racism doesn’t ease up just because some officers are Black.

The racial inequities in U.S. policing have been extensively documented. They aren’t the work of individual officers or chiefs. Anyone working within such a system — even if they don’t, personally, hold racist beliefs or are themselves, Black — risks engaging in behavior that’s racist in nature and outcome. I served for 25 years with the Denver Police Force and then with the New York Police Department as Deputy Commissioner of Training and later Deputy Commissioner of Equity and Inclusion. I know.

I know what the uniform demands of Black officers. They’re asked to choose between being Black and being “Blue,” their faces used to market a diversity that does little to change the systems directing oppressive policing toward their own communities, and there’s little support for anyone experiencing crisis as a result. Indeed, many Black officers have their own stories of being profiled by law enforcement, sometimes even as their uniform sits folded on the passenger seat. None of that absolves anyone who abuses their power, but neither should we think their color absolves the systems in which they work of the structural racism that put them there with fists raised.

Black bodies have borne the weight of White supremacy since the first kidnapped Africans were enslaved on these shores. Our communities, families, and hearts have been shattered and shattered again, centuries of trauma compounded by each new horror, our energies stolen by a culture that dehumanizes and denies us. If we continue to place the responsibility for dismantling entrenched oppression on the shoulders of individuals — particularly Black individuals — we’ll only perpetuate the cycle of police violence, community reaction, and law enforcement “fixes” that ultimately fail. 

Like many departments, MPD produced a “reimagine policing” plan in response to George Floyd’s murder; like many, it got much of the language right but had too few evidence-led recommendations. This nation must begin to listen to the behavioral and data science that has established the facts: Racially disparate policing isn’t some vague notion — it’s measurable, and anything that can be measured can be changed. When we apply rigorous analyses to law enforcement’s own data, amplify communities’ knowledge, and facilitate far-reaching redesigns of public safety, we pave the way to a more equitable future.

Accountability is critical to any such effort. Five officers who brutalized Nichols were quickly charged with second-degree murder; a sixth, White officer — seen briefly tasing Nichols before he ran — has been suspended, as has a seventh officer whose identity hasn’t yet been released. The wide discrepancy in responses begs a simple question: Why was a White officer treated so differently from the others?

As vital as genuine accountability is, however, we must be clear: Neither firings, charges, nor trials will heal the pain carried by Tyre Nichols’s loved ones, nor the compounded and continuing traumas carried by Black and Brown people everywhere. 

This incident — especially coming as it did so close on the heels of similar ones — demonstrates with excruciating clarity the urgency with which we must uproot the systems, structures, and culture behind the brutality.

This country must replace its attachment to violence and systems of punishment with systems of care that provide all communities, particularly Black and Brown communities that have so long lived with burdensome policing, with the resources they need not only to stay safe but to thrive.

There can be no justice for Tyre Nichols, just as there can be no justice for Keenan Anderson, Michael Dean, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, or Breonna Taylor; justice would be each of those beloved people alive and at home.

But we can start with accountability, and from there, redesign public safety with evidence-led tools that have been proven to work — if we can find the courage to follow the science.

Dr. Tracie L. Keesee is co-founder, president, and COO of the Center For Policing Equity; she served for 25 years in the Denver Police Department and subsequently as the New York City Police Department’s deputy commissioner of training and deputy commissioner of equity and inclusion.