The race of a cop is “cop.” Nobody should have needed to see a video of five Black cops lynching Tyre Nichols to figure that out. Nichols was beaten to death by Black cops (five of whom have been charged with murder); Tasered by a white cop who encouraged the beating (who has been suspended but still not charged); and abandoned by people with a duty to render aid (three Memphis first responders have been relieved of duty) as he slumped, dying of injuries, for 23 minutes until an ambulance showed up on the scene. [...] Then, a police force made up of a diverse group of people whose forebears were enslavers, slaves, and slave catchers took to the streets in riot gear and armored personnel carriers to keep Memphis “safe” from people who wanted to protest the brutality of those cops.
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All cops are employed to uphold a system, a system conceived of by white folks, for white folks, that operates to oppress and control Black people. It’s not surprising if Black people do not even find it difficult to participate in the oppression of other Black people, especially when they align themselves with an institution (in this case, the police) instead of working to take down that system. To put it a different way: When a cop says they “bleed blue,” believe them.
[...]
Normally, the police union’s spokespeople run to any camera they can find to defend officers caught performing violence, but not this time. We can also clearly see that the justice system cares about the race or ethnicity of police officers: These five Black officers were fired and charged faster than any white police officer I can remember, including George Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin.
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Systemic racism does not require an individual to harbor hatred for another race in their hearts; it simply requires individuals to participate in the corrupted system.
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Studies show that even when a massive influx of cops into a city leads to a small reduction in major crimes like homicide, it comes with an explosion of arrests for petty, victimless crimes, and, of course, increased brutality against Black people.
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Capturing (and if need be, killing) their targets is the primary way they justify their continued existence. Police are judged everywhere based on their numbers of arrests, the number of people they catch. And like all predators, they tend to target the weakest among us.
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Many in [black] economically depressed communities, which are legitimately beset by crime, are willing to accept more oppressive policing than what happens in white communities in exchange for its false promises of enhanced safety.
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The fact that our society doesn’t often believe Black people when we are the victims of police brutality and violence, or thinks that we are ultimately at fault for the violence against us, has the effect of isolating us from that society and makes us targets of violent cops. It’s the same reason serial killers usually start by preying on those who are homeless, who engage in sex work, who are addicted to drugs or are otherwise marginalized by society.
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Even with clear and convincing video, cops are only convicted when their Black victim dies face down begging for their life. Any attempt to fight back, to live, results in acquittal for the cop.
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Another officer, a medic, a neighbor—there were any number of people who could have intervened to save Nichols’s life. Nobody did. The cops who beat him knew nobody would be coming to help.
They also assumed nobody would demand justice after the fact. Note that the most damning video of his murder does not come from the cops’ body cameras (which, as usual in this situation, mysteriously did not capture the full encounter) but from a surveillance camera mounted on the light post that the cops probably didn’t know was there.
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If Nichols had survived his injuries and there were no video evidence of this encounter, the officers would still be on the force and Nichols would be the one charged with a crime.
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I hope they don’t get me. I hope they don’t get my kids. But all I can do is hope, because too many people have decided that my death or my children’s death is a price they’re willing to pay for the fear the cops induce. In the meantime, asking me to differentiate between a white cop and a Black cop is like asking me whether a tiger is orange with black stripes, or black with orange stripes. It really doesn’t matter.
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It should go without saying that this kind of predatory behavior cannot be “reformed.” You can’t fix this with more training videos or diversity initiatives or trust falls or whatever else mayors claim their police need more money to do. As long as we accept armed paramilitary forces roving the streets looking for people to catch, we accept the disproportionate murder of Black people at the behest of the state.
Elie Mystal @ The Nation
I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a black parent. And I am so damned grateful. How black people have not risen, organized en masse as a people, against the state is beyond me. Other than the fact they know they would lose.
UPDATE 02/08/2023: I'm guessing this is why those officers were shut down so fast. They had severely beaten another man at a traffic stop just three days earlier.
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