MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The city of Memphis released nearly an hour of graphic video Friday evening showing the beating of Tyre Nichols, footage capturing the moment-by-moment developments of a traffic stop that spiraled into a savage display of force, once again leaving an American city reeling from police violence.
The video — which includes numerous angles from police body-camera footage — shows the violent encounter between Nichols and police during his Jan. 7 arrest, which stemmed from a traffic stop.
The footage formed the basis of murder charges that were filed Thursday against five Memphis police officers from the department’s now-embattled “SCORPION” unit.
Before the footage was released Friday, Nichols’ family called for peaceful protests.
RowVaughn Wells — Nichols’ mother — made the plea at a candlelight vigil Thursday and at a Friday news conference in honor of her 29-year-old son, who died Jan. 10 after a violent arrest by police that left him in the hospital.
“When that tape comes out (Friday), it’s going to be horrific. But I want each and every one of you to protest in peace. If you guys are here for me and Tyre, then you will protest peacefully,” Wells said at the vigil Thursday night.
“We want peace. We do not want any type of uproar, any type of disturbance. That’s what (the) family wants. That’s what (the) community wants. Please, please, protest, but protest safely,” Rodney Wells, Nichols’ stepfather, said at Friday’s news conference.
Lawyers for the Nichols family have compared the video to footage of the 1991 Rodney King beating, but in higher definition. It compiles body-camera footage and pole-camera images, Shelby County District Attorney Steven Mulroy said.
Four videos of the incident were released — three of which were recorded by cameras worn by officers and a fourth from a pole-mounted police camera in the neighborhood where the beating occurred. The video starts when officers stop Nichols.
Police are seen with their guns drawn the moment they step out of their cars and approach Nichols, who is still in the driver’s seat of his car in the middle of a lane.
“You gonna get your ass blown the f--- out,” one officer yells while Nichols is still in the car. Numerous officers have their guns drawn.
An officer tells Nichols to get out of the car, then drags him from the driver’s seat.
“I didn’t do anything,” Nichols says as he is hauled from the car. “All right, I’m on the ground.”
“OK. Stop,” Nichols says as officers scream at him to get on the ground. “OK dude, dang. ... You guys are really doing a lot right now. ... I can’t breathe.”
Nichols gets up after about 30 seconds on the ground by his car and begins to run away. An officer tries to shoot him with a Taser, though it’s not clear if it hits Nichols.
Footage from the pole camera shows a subsequent interaction, after police tackle Nichols to the ground following a chase.
“Shut the f--- up,” one officer yells as Nichols screams from the ground.
“You want to get sprayed again?”
Nichols can be seen wiping his face after getting pepper sprayed.
When Nichols is already on the ground, one officer makes the others move.
“Watch out, I’m gonna baton the f--- out of you,” he yells at Nichols.
Nichols gets back to his feet and is moaning as another officer punches him in the face with his left hand.
“All right, all right,” Nichols says.
Three officers kick him and attempt to restrain him as Nichols lies on the ground by a curb. After a few minutes of police hitting and attempting to restrain Nichols, they sit him up against a police vehicle. From there, Nichols slumps to the ground, without officers noticing for nearly a minute.
The video does not show any officer attempt to deescalate the situation, nor does it show any officer tell another to stop attacking or restraining Nichols. It is not clear in the footage if Nichols refuses to give police his hands.
After the confrontation ends, the police officers involved in the chase and beating discuss what has just happened as they catch their breath and wipe pepper spray from their eyes. Some agree that Nichols must have been high on something. Others say he was driving into oncoming traffic when they pulled him over. They talk about their roles in the incident.
“Man, I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog,” one officer says.
Other officers say they were “rocking” Nichols but also claim to one another that he was grabbing for their guns.
“He literally had his hand on my gun,” one officer says.
Officers can be heard laughing as Nichols slumps to the ground from an upright position propped against the car.
“He high as a motherf-----,” one officer says.
“Hey sit up, bro,” an officer yells at Nichols when he realizes that the man has collapsed. “Sit up, man.”
The officer then lifts a limp and bloodied Nichols back into an upright position.
Nichols’ mother said Friday before the video’s release that she couldn’t bring herself to watch the video. She had heard it was “very, very horrific.”
“And any of you who have children,” she said, “please don’t let them see it.”
Responses by politicians to the graphic video began streaming in Friday evening, with President Joe Biden saying he was “outraged and deeply pained to see the horrific video of the beating that resulted in Tyre Nichols’ death.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass criticized the officers seen in the footage.
“Tonight, we saw ferocious violence from an out of control herd,” Bass said in a statement. “No words can express the chilling familiarity of a Black man crying out for his mother as he is beaten to death by officers.”
“This is far worse than Rodney King,” said Ed Obayashi, a Northern California sheriff’s deputy and use-of-force expert. “In all my years of use-of-force cases, I have never (seen) one where they are holding him up to beat him.”
Nichols’ stepfather told reporters Friday that his family was “satisfied” with how swiftly the officers involved were charged.
“We’re very satisfied with the charges,” he said.
The couple spoke at a news conference in the morning in the airy Mt. Olive Cathedral Christian Methodist Episcopal Church on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a prominent street in downtown Memphis on which King marched with striking sanitation workers days before his assassination in 1968.
“I want to say to the five police officers that murdered my son,” RowVaughn Wells said, tearing up on the stage of the church, “you also disgraced your own families when you did this. I’m going to pray for you and your families.”
The five officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith — were released from the Shelby County Jail early Friday morning, according to jail records. Attorney Blake Ballin, who represents Mills, confirmed his client’s release on $250,000 bail.
The police encounter occurred when Nichols was pulled over on suspicion of disobeying traffic laws, according to Memphis police.
Nichols was returning home from Shelby Farms, a public park in Memphis where he enjoyed watching the sunset and taking photos, according to his mother, before the incident took place.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Nichols family attorney Antonio Romanucci compared the video with that of the Rodney King beating. “This one people would consider more violent, more shocking (than the George Floyd video) and certainly very much like Rodney King. They were defenseless.”
The release of the video put the Police Department in Memphis — as well as departments across the country — on notice for a possible outbreak of protests.
A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson said the agency was prepared for protests and had “contingency” plans that are always in place, but she said no “special preparations” were being made around the release of the video.
New York City police were also preparing for protests, with officers asked to remain on duty at the end of their shifts, according to the New York Daily News. Hundreds of protesters gathered in Times Square.
“My message to New Yorkers is to respect the wishes of Mr. Nichols’ mother,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said. “If you need to express outrage, do so peacefully.”
But activists on the ground in Memphis expressed frustration with speculation that the city would erupt in chaos after the release of the video, saying the brutal imagery should instead spark questions about the policing culture fostered by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and police Chief Cerelyn Davis.
“I think my biggest quarrel with messaging is this anticipation for a riot versus the hard questions that should be asked to the mayor and the police chief,” said Keedran Franklin, the co-founder of the Memphis Coalition of Concerned Citizens, who also organizes with the national group Black Men Build.
“No one has ever seen Memphis go up in flames. We’ve had major protests here,” Franklin said. “We don’t get violent.”
During the day Friday, businesses in downtown Memphis mostly remained open, though a few stores closed early in light of the video’s release. People were eating at restaurants, and a few shops were boarded up.
When the video was released, a group of more than 100 protesters began marching from Martyrs Park, just south of downtown Memphis. Some clutched homemade signs demanding justice. Familiar chants of “No justice, no peace” roared from the crowd as they marched onto Riverside Drive.
Protesters reached the bridge that spans the Mississippi River between Tennessee and Arkansas, then turned back and began heading toward Martyrs Park.
Standing off to the side was a man with his family, including three young children.
The man, who declined to give his name, said he felt compelled to attend the rally because he lived in the area and felt solidarity with those calling for change.
“Sometimes it takes more than talking to be heard,” the man told the Times.
The death of Nichols comes after the Memphis Police Department, like many nationwide, enacted reforms following the murder of Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
Memphis police adopted reforms such as requiring its officers to intervene if they witnessed misconduct or excessive force by their colleagues — following a model set by a nationwide police reform initiative called 8 Can’t Wait, according to UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, who studies police accountability.
With the Nichols beating, the country could be “headed into another moment of reckoning just a few years after George Floyd’s murder,” Schwartz said.
She said she was surprised by the speed with which the officers involved were fired and charged, calling it “very unusual for these kind of cases. Officers are really rarely disciplined or, even more rarely, criminally prosecuted.”
“The Police Department is acting uncharacteristically for any law enforcement agency, uncharacteristically quickly, to have fired the officers,” Schwartz said.
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(Times staff writer Jany reported from Memphis. Times staff writers Goldberg and Queally reported from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Richard Winton and Alexandra E. Petri contributed to this report.)
