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tyre nichols, a 29 year old black man in memphis, was beaten up by several cops on jan 7th and died three days later. all five of the cops, who are black, were fired, arrested, and charged; the police chief denounced their actions as 'inhumane'. the bodycam video will be released about 3 hours after this post at 7pm EST. hopefully we won't see a recurrence of the floyd riots, although several cities, including atlanta which is dealing with its own controversial cop shooting incident, are preparing for an eventful evening. the police reform movement, which has stalled, may also be pushed back into the forefront of public consciousness.
4 videos have been released on the city of memphis vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis
I doubt it. In theory, I'm okay with brutality for the sake of effectiveness. If a criminal is pointing a gun at police officers, by all means shoot him in the head to protect the police. If a criminal is violently resisting arrest, by all means have 5 policemen tackle him to the ground to restrain him. And if his head gets smacked and he gets a concussion while being tackled, so be it, and the police shouldn't be charged.
That is almost never how these brutality cases go. Usually it's a bunch of tyrants beating the crap out of someone they see as lesser than themselves for fun. It's not only excessive, it's unnecessary. They're not going too far in the line of duty: making a distasteful but utilitarian tradeoff between effectiveness and kindness, there's literally no point. If someone is already on the ground, already restrained, and no longer a threat then beating them further does not help capture them or keep the police safe. Police are humans just like everyone else, and they have the same tendencies towards bullying and abuse of power as everyone else. These people have often grown up in poor violent communities and they are the same poor violent people as the people they're policing, they just have more authority. In theory, the police would screen for this during the hiring process, and most of them do with some effectiveness. That is, I bet the proportion of violent thug-like people in most police forces is less than in the average population. But it's not zero, and it's not close enough to zero to ignore. The 90%+ of virtuous brave moral police officers do their jobs effectively and then don't get arrested for brutality so they don't make the news. Most of the time. There are exceptions, there are false accusations. But most of the time the police who actually get in trouble deserve it, and the issue is with people falsely generalizing that to say that all police are bad when they're usually not.
Assuming the video footage corroborates that this was pointlessly excessive, then these officers being imprisoned will make Memphis better off, because having violent thugs in the police force accomplishes nothing but justify the hatred that criminals and noncriminals alike have for the police and make them less likely to feel guilty about committing crimes. Police who follow the law and have respect for civilians are more effective at establishing a rapport with their communities and disincentivizing crime beyond just the threat of violence. Get the thugs out, hire better and more competent people who actually respect the law to replace them. This is not a tyrannical dictatorship, everyone has to follow the law, including the police and politicians.
Which brutality cases are you referring to? I can only think of Rodney King as fitting your narrative. Floyd wasn’t that.
Yeah. I'd consider this worse than Floyd if only since there's a legitimate argument that it was more negligent manslaughter from positional asphyxiation compared to continuing to wale on a restrained suspect indiscriminately.
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