What Makes “Ordinary” People Commit Horriffic Crimes: The Black, White and Blue of Police Violence
Perhaps the most major event this week in January 2023 the nation and the world was the police killing of Tyre Nichols by five Black police officers in Memphis.
Once again, we are forced us to look at racism in our culture and in and among members of the police force.
When a White cop or cops harm or kill a Black man — as in so many past cases, such as George Floyd — the fallout is loud, swift, and focused on the racist aspect of the mistreatment and abuse of power. At least 200 Black people were killed by police officers across the U.S. in 2021. Yet, for almost every year we have tracked police violence, more White people have been shot to death by police than Black. I wonder how that statistic would look if it compared police beatings rather than “shot to death” incidents. The Black/White ratio of traffic stops points clearly to the racism in policing. And when stopped who is more likely to be searched? Racism in policing is blatant.
Tyre Nichols’ case has refocused the discussion of police brutality and racism with a slightly different focus because unlike previous high profile cases this one was not black and white. This time five Black police officers brutally beat a Black man to death over a traffic stop. Five Black five Black men in uniform — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith, sworn to serve and protect — tased, beat and stomped on 29-year-old Tyre Nichols because he was allegedly driving recklessly — an accusation that is unproven as of this writing. He tried to run from his assailants but they caught him and “kicked him in the ribs and skull as he flailed on his back.”
Noting that “police academies often teach that blows to the face are not only potentially lethal but also virtually useless if the goal is compliance” David D. Kirkpatrick, writes in The New Yorker: “The [five officers charged with Nichols’ murder] rained punches down on his face at a time when the pavement underneath him left no room for his head to recoil, potentially injuring his brain. Then one pulled out a nightstick. ‘I am going to baton the fuck out of you,’ the officer yelled.” (As heard on the video released by Memphis police.)
Nichols was much more than a skateboarder, as he’s been described. He was a 29-year-old father of a four-year-old son, a FedEx worker and aspiring photographer. He was six-foot-three and his Crohn’s disease left him just 145b pounds. He was unarmed and not at all imposing.
A 2018 video of Nichols being interviewed at the DMV shows his smiling and speaking calmly about the long lines.
The incident reportedly occurred not far from where Nichols’ mother lives. When he called by those who ed out for her he was mocked by his tormentors. He died from his injuries three days later.
Tyre was also an aspiring photographer who wrote of his passion, his art and creativity:
Unnecessary and Over-Reaching Police Violence: It’s not just one thing
There are many issues to unwrap: including systemic racism and internalized racism in police treatment of alleged or suspected lawbreakers and deeper than that, why are some people more likely to be suspected of wrongdoing to begin with.
Profiling in traffic stops is well known. Stanford researchers found that black and Latino drivers were stopped more often than white drivers, based on less evidence of wrongdoing. Black men are stopped more often and almost always have their cars searched once pulled over, something g White drivers seldom if ever experience. Some point to the history of ‘Slave Patrols’ as the origins of the disenfranchisement of POC and police brutality.
Human nature makes us seek answers, causes and find ways to prevent future harm and unnecessary death. But there are no simple answers or quick and easy “solutions.” Police misconduct and abuse of power is a multi-faceted problem with complex causes. Rosalyn Morris writes “Comply or Die: Why Do Police Have License to Kill With Impunity?” She notes that American police kill civilians at a much higher rate than other than other wealthy democracies.
“In the year that American police officers killed 1,099 people — Canadian police officers killed 36 people, Australian police officers killed 21 people, and Icelandic and Norwegian police officers killed ZERO people.”
Van Jones, CNN, writes:
“…the narrative ‘White cop kills unarmed Black man’ should never have been the sole lens through which we attempted to understand police abuse and misconduct. It’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers Black lives.”
Jones, an African-American news and political commentator, author and attorney also notes that Black people — such as the five who killed Nichols — are not immune to ant-Black rhetoric.
“Society’s message that Black people are inferior, unworthy and dangerous is pervasive. . . Self-hatred is a real thing . . . Black people can harbor anti-Black sentiments and can act on those feelings in harmful ways.”
While Black men are definitely far more at risk statistically, police violence and misconduct has also harmed and killed White men, as one dear friend of mine whose White son was shot in the back by knows all too well. The problem thus appears to be Blue culture, or as Morris writes:
“The problem is that American police have a corruption problem, a racism problem, a police brutality problem, and an accountability problem.”
Kirkpatrick, opines that police folklore known as a “warrior mind-set” suggests that police friendliness could be fatal for the cop and thus:
“Teach[es] officers to see almost any civilian as a potentially lethal assassin — an approach that many police trainers still advertise, even as the cops-vs.-citizens mentality has fallen out of favor among many police chiefs.”
Many beome police officers out of a love/desire for power. And far too many have a mind-set that a badge and a uniform place them above the law they are sworn to defend and with an arrogance of authority oftentimes feel they can inflict as much harm as they see fit with impunity.
But, the murder of Tyre Nichols did not happen in a vacuum or even in isolation.
Also this same week:
· Sayfullo Saipov was found guilty of deliberately driving a rented truck into a bicycle path and killing eight people in New York City.
· Yet another mass shooting occurred in California marking 39 such incidents already in 2023, barely a month in with death tolls piling up . . .
· The trial of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and his 22-year-old son began and is being televised, allowing us to ponder if this once prominent attorney did it and why . . .
· Lori Vallow Daybell is about to on trial for joining a cult, believing her two children were possessed by demand and killing them. After fleeing to Hawaii and refusing to reveal where her children were, their bodies were found buried in Vallow’s brother’s back yard. . .
· And, we await the trial of Bryan Kohberger, 28-year-old criminology PhD student in the stabbing murder of four Idaho college students.
And, as all of this insanity was unfolding, I watched the Sherri Papini story on Lifetime. The story of the woman who was criminally charged and incarcerated for faking her own kidnapping. It is important to note that Papini, who is White, blamed her fabricated abduction on minorities, claiming she was taken and held captive for three weeks by two Hispanic women.
> > Sherri Papini, Lori Vallow, Bryan Kohberger, Alex Murdaugh and the five former police officers charged with the murder of Tyre Nichols, were all seemingly “normal” people living functioning, productive lives . . . who behaved in ways that made headlines leaving us to wonder why. < <
Beneath Papini’s accomplished exterior was a very troubled woman. As a child she claimed she was abused by her mother but her mother says she hurt herself and falsely blamed her mother. Sherri married and had two children she adored but felt the need to be a perfect mother, according to the Lifetime movie. She had a loving husband but felt he “didn’t see her” and developed a clandestine a text relationship with an old HS boyfriend who helped her fake her kidnapping, a hoax she was so committed to she endured physical pain to show bruises.
As we pontificate on, analyze, try to make sense of, or find explanations for each of these bizarre and horrifying stories — the fodder of the news media — it all got me thinking about human nature. All of us are on a continuum of “crazy” to sane: eccentric, odd, peculiar, weird, different, neurotic, OCD, phobic, anxiety-ridden, depressed, bipolar, narcissistic, alcoholic, drug dependent — to criminally insane, schizophrenic, sociopathic. A continuum. But it’s far from a straight line continuum. It’s a very jagged line with many ups, downs, twists, curves and detours. There is no normal. I think about family members and friends and myself. All of us have our fetishes, idiosyncrasies, needs and some strange behaviors.
Some say the dividing line is how well you function . . . but perhaps what is meant is how well you can fake it. The face we all keep by door.
I once read that the secret to a happy relationship is finding the person whose weirdness you can live with.
