During his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, Joe Biden recognised the family of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died three days after he was beaten by a group of police pfficers in Memphis last month.
“There are no words to describe the heartbreak and grief of losing a child,” Mr Biden said
Mr Biden has made passing police reform one of his key promises, but activists and observers say he’s been a “consistently inconsistent” ally on civil rights, as The Independent has reported.
He failed to secure on a previous goal of passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by May 2021, and called on lawmakers once again during his Tuesday speech to pass federal police reform.
“Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter will come home from walking down the street or playing in the park or just driving their car,” Mr Biden said. “And when police officers or departments violate the public’s trust, we must hold them accountable.”
Nichols’ parents stood to applaud the president during the emotional moment of the speech.
They were among more than a dozen family members of victims of police violence in attendance, guests of First Lady Jill Biden and the Congressional Black Caucus as the killing of Nichols reignited a national conversation on policing in a way not seen since the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Caucus members also wore black pins reading “1870” in white text, commemorating the year of the first-known police killing of a freed Black American man, Henry Truman, in an effort to shed light on the killings of Black Americans by police officers.
Body camera footage released by Memphis officials shows a large group of Memphis Police Department officers violently pull Nichols out of his car and repeatedly punch, kick, and user a taser on him, until he slumps motionless against a car.
The recordings also captured officers bragging about their exploits to each other, trading stories about how hard they punched Nichols. He died in hospital three days later.
Six officers – Preston Hemphill, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith – have been fired from the Memphis Police Department. The latter five also are charged with second-degree murder.
Three fire department employees were also fired.
Footage showed a large crowd of first responders standing and talking for minutes as Nichols lay slumped against a car without receiving medical treatment.
He died three days after being arrested, and a private autopsy showed he had suffered “extensive bleeding.”
The Biden administration has made a point to offer its condolences to the Nichols family, with the president calling RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, the young man’s mother and step father, and the vice-president speaking at Nichols’s funeral.
“This violent act was not in pursuit of public safety. It was not in the interest of keeping the public safe,” she said at the ceremony in Memphis. “Was he not also entitled to the right to be safe?”
She urged Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, bipartisan police reform legislation that passed the House of Representatives in 2021 but stalled in a deadlocked Senate with Republican opposition. The bill, named in honour of the Black man who was murdered by Minneapolis police officers in 2020, was co-authored by then-Senator Harris.
“Let the memory of Tyre shine a light on the path toward peace and justice,” Ms Harris said in her brief remarks.
