On June 20, 1940, Sheriff Tip Hunter and Officer Charles Reed took 31-year-old Elbert Williams from his Brownsville, Tenn., home, and he was never seen alive again. Three days later, Williams' corpse was pulled from the Hatchie River. Eighty-three years later, and 54 miles away, officers killed Tyre Nichols. Eighty-three years of cops killing Black men — 83 years where we know the identities of the cops who did it — and what has changed?
Are we supposed to take comfort in the fact that, though police remain as brutal and dangerous as ever, at least now people of every race and gender can become cops and be our quasi-legal lynch mobs? Is this all the progress our society knows how to make? Let’s let everybody kill Black men with impunity, not just white people? It’s sickening.
What reforms would have fixed this?
I mean this question sincerely. Tyre Nichols was killed by Memphis police for no reason, or, worse, for fun. He died hollering for his mother, and that basic, instinctual crisis prayer wasn’t enough to move the killers or their bystander buddies.
What more or better training could possibly address this?
And, you know, fuck this idea of better training. We keep expecting these mothers living through the nightmare of their children being killed to go out and, with no training, talk grieving communities out of rioting. And again and again and again, the mothers of people killed by police in the middle of their own tragedies take on this further responsibility with no training. And they do it successfully.
What garbage line of thinking do we have as a society where we just expect a person in the raw pain of losing a family member to also know how to and be able to function as crowd control, and we don’t have any expectations of cops being able to refrain from killing people unless they have copious amounts of training and constant psych evaluations and money, more money, always more money?
I’m a middle-aged white woman with a boring life. My run-ins with the cops have either been disappointing and frustrating — like when I was a teenager and called the police to report that someone had broken into my house and left me things, and they laughed and said it sounded like I had a boyfriend — or positive and helpful. So it’s taken me a long time to wrap my head around the concept of abolishing the police.
Let me be clear: It's not that it took me a long time to come to the conclusion that we should abolish the police, but rather it took me and is taking me a long time to even understand what that would mean. Who would protect us? Who would investigate crimes? Who would keep the peace? Who is going to ticket the people who drive like escapees from Grand Theft Auto?
Here’s the hard truth, the thing I have a tough time looking squarely at and accepting as real: Those things aren’t happening now. We give police the impunity to act how they like and all the money we can shovel at them on the off chance they will occasionally do some of these things, sometimes, for some of us.
Memphis police did not protect Tyre Nichols nor his mother. Police did not protect Amadou Diallo or Tamir Rice or Elijah McClain. Since police beat Rodney King and we all watched it on the news, we have had 32 years of video of cops beating and killing people, and for 32 years, we’ve been insisting that this just has to do with how we’re training cops and making sure they get the resources they need. We’ve changed how we train police. We’ve increased police budgets and made sure they get all the military surplus they could ever dream of. And we are still here, watching the sadists we pay brutalize us.
Tennessee Democrats are putting forth legislation to try to reform the police. Omar Yusef at the Commercial Appeal reports:
[Memphis' state Rep. G. A.] Hardaway acknowledged Tennessee Democrats have multiple bills regarding police police reform they plan to file by Tuesday’s deadline.
Most of the bills Hardaway discussed Saturday focused on mental health care and evaluations for officers. One would establish annual mental health evaluations for officers. He also added they’re contemplating legislation for law enforcement officers to have “random” mental health checkups.
I mean, I guess. But this assumes that bad cops are mentally ill, that you’d have to be sick in the head to do something like this. But usually a criteria for mental illness is that whatever is happening is detrimental to you. Like, if you think your grandmother is sending you messages from beyond the grave to burn down your neighbors’ garages and you do it, that’s obviously going to get you diagnosed with a mental illness. But if your grandma, rest her soul, comes back to tell you how proud she is of you for how kind you are to puppies, no mental health professional is going to worry about that.
So if these cops are steeped in a culture where bravado and brutality are celebrated and rewarded, they will find being violent makes them happy and fulfilled. It might be hard for an evaluator to know that something’s wrong.
I can see how this might lead to people with consciences being kicked off of or leaving the force. Because the proper reaction to being a cog in the machine of violence is depression and anxiety. Being in a sick situation could make you mentally ill. So, we’d lose the people who have the sense enough to be traumatized by what their colleagues are up to and be left with a bunch of people who are thriving in an unjust dynamic.
People keep saying, “Oh, this is just a few bad apples making the police look bad.” This is not just a few bad apples. We’ve been identifying bad apples for a century (and experiencing bad apples long before that). We have to accept that police departments are attractive to bad apples, and sometimes create bad apples. We can focus on routing out the bad apples, but there will always be more, because the system is designed to make bad apples. We can tweak the dials and adjust the belts, but the machine is still going to do what it was designed to do. Good cops are the exceptions.
If we want to change that, we have to dismantle the system that makes bad cops and put in a new and different system. Otherwise, we accept the unacceptable as inevitable.
