The heartbreak and anger in writing about police is that they never run out of people to kill.
Right after I learned about the cop who killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a protester against the multimillion-dollar police facility that the City of Atlanta is tearing down a forest to construct, I learned about Tyre Nichols. Tyre was a young, Black man who loved to skateboard and take pictures. Memphis police department cops stopped him in a vehicle on January 7. He ran – which is reasonable because cops routinely kill Black people and he wanted to live. Cops often punish people who flee, just like the cops who took Freddie Gray on a “rough ride” for running in 2015. MPD beat him and took him to the hospital. He died three days later.
I immediately noticed that almost all of the reforms that liberals suggest will save Black lives were present in Tyre’s death. Diversity was not an issue: the five cops who killed him are all Black. The body cameras strapped to their chests did not deter their fists from delivering blow after blow. Memphis has about 2,000 cops, and if this were a “few bad apples” in the department issue, then maybe they all happened to be working on the same shift. Cops did not shoot Tyre; they opted for a less deadlier force: they beat him for three minutes, shocked him and pepper-sprayed him.
In fact, Memphis police department boasts that they have met all of the features of Campaign Zero’s #8CantWait campaign, which includes a requirement for officers to intervene when other officers are using excessive force and a requirement to de-escalate encounters with civilians. The department has been under a consent decree for decades. MPD hired its first Black woman police chief in 2021 and holds Black History Knowledge bowls and basketball programs to “build trust” and relationships with local teenagers.
Some police reform advocates are silent about the failure of these reforms and have pivoted loudly to blaming qualified immunity – a doctrine that prevents police from being sued for misconduct. Those who care about justice must absolutely challenge qualified immunity, as long as they understand that the protections that cops receive through the law is not the basis for their violence. Cops brutalized and killed people before they had immunity. The job necessitates it, which is why abolitionists have fought to reduce and eliminate police funding, encounters with cops, and the underlying reasons why cops have jobs in the first place.
Others place their hope in the prosecutor. All five cops were arrested and face charges that include second-degree murder, assault and kidnapping. They quickly posted bail and are currently free. I wonder, as I have written about before, why didn’t the increasing prosecutions of cops deter these five men from beating Tyre? They presumably know about Derek Chauvin, the most recent high-profile cop convicted of murder after killing George Floyd. Did they pause to consider the recent conviction of officer Kim Potter who killed Daunte Wright? What about their fellow MPD officer Patric Ferguson, who was charged with murder in 2021 after he killed a man in the back seat of his police car and got rid of the body? Why aren’t these prosecutions and convictions saving lives? Police in the US executed more people last year than every other year previously recorded.
The response that I often receive is that police will stop killing Black people once cops start getting arrested more easily, prosecuted more vigorously, convicted more swiftly, sentenced more harshly, and sued for damages more directly. Not only will this never happen, the hope that it might happen one day requires police to keep killing people in order for us to find out.
However disappointing, I completely understand that some people may earnestly believe in these sets of reforms because they want to believe that something, anything can happen to stop or at least reduce police killings right now. Others tout these reforms because they benefit from police protecting private property, threatening workers, enforcing racial hierarchies, surveilling civilians, and more. Politicians, especially. They line up the public to a theme park full of reforms and just promise us a different ride would be worth our time, energy, and effort. We have to get out of the park.
Organizers in Memphis appear to be doing just that. DeCarcerate Memphis issued a set of demands in the aftermath of Tyre’s death that includes data transparency; ending the use of unmarked police cars; removal of cops from traffic management; and the disbanding of special task force units within MPD. They’ve recently won the demand to disband the unit that killed Tyre, and released a toolkit for the public to understand, replicate and support their other efforts. These non-reformist reforms reduce the role and power of policing, rather than simply changing the colors of the people committing the harm.
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist. She is also a social movement lawyer and writer based in Washington, DC. She is the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
