Today, Explained - The police killing of Tyre Nichols

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Memphis braced for an explosive reaction to footage of the deadly police beating. It never came. Wendi C. Thomas of the nonprofit newsroom MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, wasn’t surprised: “I know this city.” This episode was produced by Siona Peterous and Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Hady Mawajdeh, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The authorities in Memphis are moving quickly after the killing of Tyree Nichols earlier this month, maybe even more quickly than was initially assumed. So the day after Nichols was beaten, we now know seven officers were suspended from the Memphis Police Department. Six are identified. One is not. Five have been charged with crimes. And the department implies that more charges are coming. It says it's looking into the officers' actions and inactions, a reference to the fact that people are seen milling around

while Tyree Nichols is clearly hurt. Meanwhile, the Memphis Fire Department says it fired two EMTs and a lieutenant after an internal investigation, also citing both their actions and inaction. Memphis was ready for an eruption of protest after that footage was released on Friday, and it didn't happen. The protests were peaceful and contained,

and a lot of people outside of Memphis were surprised. Coming up, a Memphis-based journalist tells us what she attributes the response to. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Wendy Thomas is a journalist and a longtime resident of Memphis, 43 years. This is my home.

So things that happen here are deeply, deeply personal. You know, I went to public schools here. You know, my sister's a teacher, and my mom worked at the big public hospital. My dad was a university professor at what was then Memphis State. Yeah, this is my city. This is where I've chosen to do journalism. The journalism she's chosen to do focuses on power and policy and poverty. She's the founding editor and publisher of MLK50, Justice Through Journalism.

It's a nonprofit newsroom based in Memphis. I asked Wendy what she knew about Tyree Nichols. So, you know, we know, I think, a lot about Tyree, of course, a lot more since his death than we knew about him in life. You know, this is a 29-year-old young man who came here fairly recently from Sacramento, California. He's got a four-year-old son. He loved to skateboard. Way more agile than you might expect someone his height to be. I believe he was 6'2 or 6'3, a lanky guy. Some of the photographs that he's taken and that I've seen since his death are just amazing. These

sunshot views of Memphis down by the river with the bridge in the background, they'll take your breath away. He loved his mother's cooking. He loved his son. That's why he came to Memphis in the first place. Tyree Nichols died in the hospital on January 10th, but I have to think that his death did not begin the day he was beaten by police in the sense that there is always a history to these things.

And in a place like Memphis, there's often a very specific history. I wonder if we can walk back in time and if you can tell me when you think the events of that day really began. I would go back, you know, really to 2015 and when then city council member, now mayor, Jim Strickland, when he ran for office, when he announced his campaigns. We all want a cleaner, safer, and better Memphis, and that's why Jim Strickland will make crime his number one priority. His campaign announcement followed not long after a violent incident at a Kroger store, actually here in Memphis, where some teens

attacked people in the parking lot. You know, kind of random crime, but also a one-off thing. It wasn't like it was part of a pattern. Tonight, three people, two of them teens, are recovering after being brutally attacked by a mob of teenagers in a busy shopping center at Poplar and Highland. Witnesses say the attackers were playing a violent game. They followed hitting him with a pumpkin and he was already unconscious. So really all you could see was like blood and pumpkin. But the mayor really used that incident as a jumping point for his campaign with a tough on crime approach and placing himself as the answer to crime in Memphis. And the mayor has demanded just about every opportunity he gets that Memphis needs more police officers, hundreds of more officers on the streets, even though there is no proven correlation between the number of officers on the streets and crime rates.

But as these high profile incidents occurred, people wanted to feel safe and they just didn't ask a lot of questions about what that safety would look like, what neighborhoods were already being over-policed, and would they even be further over-policed during these calls for more cops. More and smart policing. We need more police officers. Everyone knows that. Stronger sentences for violent crimes. I think another important element to keep in mind is that the police have really had a lot of recruiting problems over the years. It's been difficult for them to find people who want to join the force. But the police department has actually lowered its standards over the years to get more officers on the force. The officers that were involved and had been charged with murder in connection with Tyree's death, none of them had been on the force for more than five years. And two of them were hired like in the last two to three years.

And so you just have to wonder what those lowering of standards, what impact that has on people's experience with the police. I mean, I think all of us who have done our job for a while can remember how horrible we were at it in the first year, second year, third year, and how much we've grown in the decades since. Take us up to the present day. What happens with crime? When there are more police officers, does crime go down? Well, violent crime actually has gone down, even though the mayor would tell you he still doesn't have the compliment of officers. But property crimes have gone up, particularly car thefts. I think that does contribute to a feeling that people are less safe. It's hard for me to determine what percentage of those feelings of a loss of safety are fueled by crime news, which is steady and consistent. And what share is generated by real risk?

I mean, I've had to confront this myself. You know, if you watch enough TV news, you'll be convinced that there's somebody just around the corner waiting to grab you up. But I had to say, OK, Wendy, are you really less safe? Is there crime going on in your neighborhood? Are you frequenting places where car thefts have been occurring? And the answer was no. The danger of what can feel like fear mongering sometime is that it can lead a community to stop asking questions. When you don't ask the right questions, you end up celebrating the wrong things. And so you have these additional officers coming in, so-called elite units being formed. In this case, it was the Scorpion Unit, where the officers who have been charged with Tyree's murder, they were all a part of after they had been in action, the mayor bragged that they had made like hundreds of arrests, but we didn't ask at what cost those arrests were coming. We didn't ask if these officers were being heavy handed. We didn't ask if use of force complaints had increased. We didn't ask any of those questions because it seemed as if the only thing

that matters is being tough on crime and making sure the rates are falling by any means necessary. I was reading a statistic this morning. In 2021, Memphis set a record for murders. 346 people in the city were murdered. The previous record was set the year before with 332 murders. Now, I hear you saying violent crime has gone down. There's this difficult thing to tease out here, right, which is that's a really scary thing to hear, even if muggings have gone down, for example, or rap went down in 2022. I think the increase you saw in Memphis in 2020 and 2021 is mirrored in large cities around the country, right? So we weren't immune to that and whatever the dynamics were that were happening during the pandemic, whether it's the social isolation or the closing of schools or what have you, that definitely was, you saw that reflected in rising homicide rates across the country. But those have come down, as have, you know, rapes and aggravated assaults,

that sort of thing, in Memphis, with the number of police that the city has, even though the mayor will let you know that he thinks we need, we still need hundreds more. And so I think that is a reality and something that I think can somewhat complicate the narrative. In 2020, as I understand it, the Memphis Police Department says that it needs some reforms. What led them to that conclusion? So I think these calls for reform really came out of George Floyd's killing. And the then police chief, Mike Rawlings, actually asked to be a part of this federal initiative called COPS, Complabrative Policing, and to invite outside consultants in to examine the police department and see what could be improved. Jeff Sessions decided that that was something that needed to end, that he wanted to end the COPS program and the DOJ. He thought it was better for police departments to investigate themselves. And so I think there have been those attempts at reform. The mayor, following George Floyd's killing and demonstrations here in Memphis around that, announced a reimagining policing

initiative and, you know, convened a panel of people, had meetings and what have you to try to see what could be done. How does the current police chief, C.J. Davis, a Black woman who's been very present in the media over the course of the past couple of days, how does she fit into attempts at reform? I have to say, I feel like when I've seen her on TV or press conferences, she comes across as sincere. Words can be empty sometimes. That's why it was important for me not just to deliver condolences or apologies or I'm sorry.

You know, what I wanted to deliver for this family at least was that first step of justice for them to quickly deal with these officers within the scope of my power and to help facilitate this movement to the DA's office as well. It was obvious to me that what I saw was beyond the scope of what is condoned in this police department and any

department I've ever worked in before. I sometimes wonder what kind of blowback she might be getting from her officers because she has been so very clear that what happened in that video was unconscionable. And the police tend to close ranks and back each other. And so it'll be interesting to see how she's being received internally as a result of her very clear stance for reform. That said, she's in an institution that has not shown itself, doesn't have the best track record of reform. And so her efforts may be limited. I mean, I guess time will tell. You know, what I haven't seen is kind of a dialing back by the mayor. And he's the one who hired Davis, right? And so you have to believe

that he hired someone who believed what he believes about being tough on crime. And even after Tyree Nichols was killed initially, Davis was still proud of the Scorpion unit and what they had done. It was only later that the department announced that they were going to suspend it and then permanently disband that unit. Tell me what you know about the unit that these police officers who've been charged were a part of. Well, the Scorpio unit allegedly was supposed to be about violent crimes, the worst of the worst. And so I think it came as a surprise to a lot of us that Tyrese Nichols' initial encounter with police was over a traffic stop. I certainly didn't

understand that you had elite units out in this part of town where the crime rates aren't any higher than any other parts of town and certainly are lower in a lot of instances, what about their running traffic, right? That's not how you would expect the bandwidth of an elite unit to be deployed. You know, again, these officers were all relatively inexperienced. And so when I think elite, I think experience, you know. I don't think people who, I mean, one officer, for example, two years before he joined the police force, he was working at a fast food restaurant. That's an honorable job. We need fast food employees. But that trajectory from fast food to elite police unit in the course of three years just seems a little quick. Where does the Scorpion Unit fit into the efforts at reform, at police reform?

I don't think it does. I don't think it fits into efforts for any substantive reform. I think it's a response to rising crime rates, people's desire to feel safe, and their reluctance to question how police will be used to make us safe. You know, I think one thing that's also important to note, you know, police in cities across the country, it's not unique to Memphis, will say they need residents to cooperate more in the course of investigation.

Like if you see something, say something. When you have this kind of police brutality, it makes Memphis less safe. People are not going to cooperate with officers that they're terrified of, right? They're not going to voluntarily call police to say, hey, I want to tell you something that's going on after what the video that they've seen. And there are other incidents that are emerging that people are talking about where they've had these kind of encounters, not fatal, of course, with the police, but others in which they believe excessive force was used. And so this kind of incident is exactly the opposite of what the mayor and the police chief would say that they want. Coming up after all of this, why did Memphis not erupt over the weekend? Wendy Thomas is going to tell us what she thinks. frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message,

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time for the holidays. Term terms and conditions withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Wendy Thomas, the publisher of MLK50, a non-profit newsroom in Memphis, was telling us earlier that decisions made by the city's mayor, Jim Strickland, and the is the district attorney, a man named Steve Mulroy. Earlier today, the grand jury returned indictments against five former Memphis Police Department officers regarding the death of Tyree Nichols.

These are the same five officers who were previously or recently terminated by the Memphis Police Department. Wendy, tell me about this DA. In August, voters elected Steve Mulroy, who had a background as a law professor here, used to serve on the county commission, was also a part of the DOJ and the Civil Rights Division at one point. I think the main thing that I would point to that has earned more credit in this case is the transparency and the frequent updates and the letting the public know that he hears them, he's trying, he's working, they're investigating. Be patient. Show us just a little bit of grace while we put this case together. And people were inclined to give him an opportunity to do that. Here are the charges. little bit of grace while we put this case together. And people were inclined to give

them an opportunity to do that. Here are the charges. Second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping resulting in bodily injury, aggravated kidnapping involving the possession of a weapon, official misconduct through unauthorized exercise of power, official misconduct through failure to act when there is a duty imposed by law, and official oppression. You know, for my team, at least, we were like, official oppression? You know, you can kind of guess what that is, but we were not familiar with that charge. We haven't heard of anybody being charged with that specifically. And that just speaks to the abuse of power that Mulroy felt like he saw in that video and through that investigation. So I think it feels like a deliberate effort to hold the system

accountable. That, I think, is of some comfort to residents during a very, very trying time. So the officers are charged. The DA gets a lot of credit. The public finds out about this. And then we start to hear about the video of Tyree Nichols' killing. And the language that the city officials in Memphis were using was really striking. It was the language of an absolute catastrophe. What did you hear about that video? The descriptions of the video before the public even got an opportunity to see it just really let you know how bad it was going to be.

You know, you're hearing horrific, inhumane, savage, reckless, and that just really stands in stark contrast, I think, to the kind of tempered language that we're used to hearing police or city officials use. There was no cause to wait to pass judgment on these officers or to let the investigation run its course. It was like, no, up front, we're going to tell you this is horrible. You're going to be horrified by what you see. I'm horrified by what you see. And I think it almost set the tone, gave the community permission to feel the rage they were going to feel. And the shared solidarity doesn't feel like quite the right word, but this understanding that emotionally we were going to feel similar things.

After the video was released on Friday, there was an expectation or a real fear that Memphis might explode in protests. I did not share those fears. Tell me why. Tell me why. I didn't share because I know my people. I know this city. I know the organizers, activists, the protesters, the folks who show up, the ministers, the lawyers, the teachers, the people who work in nonprofits. I know these, and they love the city just like I do. And they want to hold it accountable because they love it. And they have no desire to destroy the city.

And they have a history, a track record of behaving appropriately, right, of marching and being loud and getting in the police's face, but doing so without violence. The demonstrations that my team at MLK 50 and I have covered, you know, in the last five and a half years that we've been in existence, where the violence has occurred is when police have come in with the tear gas and the mounted police and the riot shields. That's where things have turned into a chaotic environment. It has not been because of the people holding the signs. And so if you know that and you know that about your community, you're really kind of put off by what felt like disrespect and the fear mongering. You know, you had city schools here, they canceled after school activities on Friday. The University of Memphis closed a little early. So did a mall that's about 15 miles from downtown,

which is kind of ridiculous. No demonstrations really go on out there. And so I did not share these fears. I'm not surprised that Memphis was calm because we're not the ones bringing the drama, bringing the smoke. Wendy, we know now that some lawmakers are calling for the federal government to look into this. Are there expectations that people in Memphis have now in terms of either what the federal government might do or what this police chief might do or what the mayor might do? Oh, absolutely. I think that there have been lots of calls for investigation into all the other special units within the Memphis Police Department. That would include the OCU, MGU, task force that involved federal agents as well.

There's also been calls for the Citizen Law Enforcement Review Board, which we know as CLERB here, for them to get subpoena powers, for them to have more teeth. They've largely been neutered. The recommendations that they'll make to the police department around use of force incidents or what have you are almost always disregarded. So this might be an opportunity for them to get some of the support that they might want, which is something that the mayor could put in place or the city council could put in place. The city council next week is posed to consider an ordinance that would require more reporting around traffic stops. So that's something we may see come from that.

I think we just have to do what we don't like to do in these instances, which is be patient. Continue to press for organizers and activists. They're going to continue to press for reforms in a systemic way as the DA and these federal agencies do their role, do their part. I'm hoping that this causes us to think about public safety more broadly as a community. It's an opportunity and we just have to see if we take it. I don't want to say I'm optimistic because I feel like we've been here as a country before and the fact that we're here again shows that we haven't done enough. But who knows, maybe this time will be the time.

That was Wendy Thomas. She's a journalist and she runs a nonprofit newsroom called MLK 50 in Memphis. Our thanks today also to Lucas Finton. He's a breaking news reporter at the Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis. Today's show was produced by Siona Petros and Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by Matthew Collette and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Hadi Mouagdi. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey and Afim Shapiro. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.