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In January 2023, I traveled to Memphis to report on the killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man beaten to death by a group of Memphis police officers. Like most Americans, I have seen far too many videos in recent years of police brutalizing people, and I had reported on the particular failures of justice in Memphis, a city afflicted by both underpolicing—in the form of high rates of violent crime in its poorest neighborhoods—and overpolicing, in the form of widespread abuse.
Even so, I was shocked by what I saw when the city released videos. A team of police from a special squad called the SCORPION unit savagely beat Nichols and then didn’t bother to provide any medical aid. They did most of this underneath SkyCop, one of the ubiquitous Memphis surveillance cameras, evidently unworried that they would face repercussions for their actions.
They were wrong—but not that wrong. Although five officers were quickly fired, and the SCORPION unit was disbanded, it now seems possible that few, if any, will be convicted of the most serious charges in a man’s senseless death. This week, at a trial in Memphis, a jury acquitted three of the former officers involved in Nichols’s death on several charges, including second-degree murder. Two others have agreed to plead guilty to some federal and state charges, and one testified in the trial. The same three officers were convicted of witness tampering in a federal trial last year, and one was convicted of violating Nichols’s civil rights by causing bodily injury.
There is still no good explanation for why any of this happened; Memphis Police Chief C. J. Davis said that the officers appeared to have no reason to pull Nichols over in a traffic stop. Yet as soon as they did, some of the officers drew weapons and began pepper-spraying and manhandling him. When he—understandably—tried to escape, police called for backup, gave chase, and eventually caught him. “I hope they stomp his ass,” one officer, who did not chase Nichols and was not charged, was recorded saying. His fellow officers did, beating Nichols just yards from his mother’s house. He died at a hospital.
Prosecutors did face some challenges in this case, despite the existence of video evidence. First, officers are seldom charged with murder, and when they are, they are seldom convicted. Second, the three former officers who stood trial were, in the words of the deputy district attorney, the “least culpable,” compared with the two who agreed to plead guilty. Third, defense lawyers successfully argued that widespread news coverage in Memphis of the killing would preclude a fair trial, so instead of a jury pool from Memphis, which is majority-Black, the jury was all white and drawn from around Chattanooga, on the opposite side of Tennessee.
Even so, District Attorney Steve Mulroy seemed shell-shocked after the verdict. “Was I surprised that there wasn’t a single guilty verdict on any of the counts or any of the lesser included offenses, given the overwhelming evidence that I think that we presented?” he said, his voice straining. “Yes, I was surprised. Do I have an explanation for it? No.”
Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, not bound by the same ethical guidelines as a prosecutor, was blunter. “Those people were allowed to come here, look at the evidence, and deny the evidence,” she said.
The outrage that met George Floyd’s murder in 2020 seemed at first to be a turning point for criminal justice. After a string of high-profile cases starting in 2015, officials and the public were aligned in demanding law-enforcement reforms that would punish and prevent needless killings. But as I wrote when Derek Chauvin was convicted for kneeling on Floyd’s neck until he died, that case was a rare exception—not least because of the stomach-churning video evidence involved and the strong condemnation by the Minneapolis police chief. Although individual prosecutions were important, the greater need, I argued, was for systemic reforms.
The verdict in Memphis shows what an outlier Chauvin’s conviction was: Despite videos at least as horrifying, despite the police chief’s quick action to fire the officers and condemn their behavior, these three former officers escaped murder convictions. Meanwhile, the changing political winds and rising violent crime after 2020 helped the movement toward broader reform stall out, both locally in Memphis and nationally.
In early 2024, Memphis city council refused to reappoint Davis, but she continued serving as interim chief. Earlier this year, Davis got her permanent title back. Around the same time, the city of Memphis refused to enter into a consent decree that would allow oversight from the U.S. Department of Justice, which had found “a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” documented in appalling detail. City leaders knew that once Donald Trump took office, the Justice Department would pull back on oversight of local police departments and civil-rights laws, just as his administration had done the first time.
Trump has long called for more brutal policing, complaining that cops aren’t allowed to fight crime with the necessary toughness. “Please don’t be too nice,” he said in a speech to Long Island officers in 2017. After taking office this time, he closed a database tracking serious offenses by federal police officers, which was designed to facilitate background checks; he also issued an order to “unleash” police officers and to have private law firms provide pro bono legal defense for officers accused of misconduct.
“What I do know is this: Tyre Nichols is dead, and deserves to be alive,” Mulroy said on Wednesday. The failure of courts to secure murder convictions for the former officers who beat him, and of politicians to bring greater accountability, means that he will not be the last to suffer an unjust death.
Related:
- How criminal-justice reform fell apart (From 2022)
- How did it come to this? (From 2023)
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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