Brothers With Badges Don’t Stem Violence

Brothers With Badges Don’t Stem Violence

– By Ed Kociela –

This diversity thing is clearly not working.

At least in Memphis, where we saw how a handful of black cops killed one of their own in a brutal beatdown.

The cops punched, kicked, and used a baton as they pummeled Tyre Nichols on a public street in Memphis earlier this month. They then propped him up and punched, kicked, and beat him with a baton some more, his bloody and battered body resting against the side of a police car in the cold night. Emergency responders from the Memphis Fire Department stood nearby but, for 20 minutes, were not allowed to render aid to the fatally injured man. Perhaps they could have intervened to save his life. Perhaps not.

All because the young man may or may not have been driving recklessly.

We saw the awful video Friday, a gruesome reminder that black and blue just, somehow, cannot find a way to get along; that even if they share the same skin color, they can carry the bias and hatred usually thought of as that of guys wearing white sheets with pointy caps.

Look, we are not jumping to conclusions here.

There is no reason why anybody, regardless of their suspected crime, deserved to be shackled and beaten to death. The behavior of the Memphis cops would have been unacceptable regardless of who they had in custody and what they had done. We saw the evidence, the damning body cams that captured their blows, their words, their evil as they killed a young man crying out to his mother.

The city has justifiably fired those cops and charged them with the death of Tyre Nichols.

Justice?

Perhaps in a most technical manner where bad guys get charged, bad guys go to court bad guys get convicted and bad guys go to jail forever.

But, true justice?

Never.

There can be no justice in the killing of Tyre Nichols, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Manuel Ellis, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and far too many others – some familiar names, some not – regardless if the cops were black or white because justice was never a part of the equation.

We can empathize all we want with these families that lost sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, but the truth is, unless you are a person of color who sends family members out into the world each day, not knowing if they are going to make it home at night or not, we cannot relate. Our lives are too safe, too ordinary, too bourgeois to relate. We drive around the Hood, we don’t drive through it. We talk about it, we don’t live it. Many of us join the great white flight migration and settle in communities where everybody is nice, tidy, and look like us. We may profess our disdain for racism, but I’ll bet somewhere along the line you drop in a stereotypical black voice in a joking manner and get a good laugh without realizing the racial insensitivity or crassness.

It may all seem insignificant, but if you are a person of color, the world is a much different place. Like, if you can’t trust the police to protect your life, who can you trust, you know?

The five cops who were charged in the killing of Tyre Nichols were part of a special tactics team that many police departments across the nation are employing these days to supposedly combat drugs and street thuggery. The problem is, so-called “elite” teams like this often go rogue, unchecked, unfettered and stray into vigilante turf. They take on militaristic proportions without the permissions or agenda. They get trigger happy. They dole out what they call “street justice.” They are the posse, man, and they are coming to get you. Especially if you have color in your skin. They are not as compelled to follow rules and procedure as their peers, which means they can stray more and more into illicit behavior while their superiors in the department turn a blind eye as long as the crime stats go down. The suits don’t want to know how these street cops are doing what they are doing, what methods they are employing. They just want good numbers to justify them.

And, because they are hiring black cops to police black residents, they believe, mistakenly, that they are checking all the right boxes to ensure equality and fairness without understanding the cultural dynamics at play.

According to a report by The Marshall Project, an independent journalistic think tank, “The killing of Tyre Nichols certainly demonstrates that the presence of black officers and even leadership is anything but a miracle cure for curbing brutal and racially-biased policing.” The study also notes that despite the Memphis Police Department’s relative diversity, it has had “ongoing issues with excessive force, and officers of both races have been involved in recent cases of alleged brutality.”

In other words, the problem is systemic, a cultural phenomenon, something that has been allowed to grow and take root in police departments nationwide. It has been going on for decades now with no relief in sight because nobody really wants to peel back the layers on policing and police tactics because of what they might find at its core.

Why are so many black folks wasting away in jails?

Why are the graveyards filled with black folks who were put there by angry cops?

Are all cops racist animals?

Of course not. But, there are enough of them to give you pause and make you nervous if you are a person of color and the police car in your rearview mirror lights you up. I mean hey, I am a white guy and I don’t want to see that.

The tactics and weapons of the past are long gone, but the attitudes are not, which is why it doesn’t matter if you put brothers with badges on patrol in the hood.

We are still going to see the old demons of systemic racism boiling over out on the street.

And, this diversity thing?

It is still not working.

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