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Police brutality not always white-on-black

Clarence Page, syndicated columnist

Was anyone not shocked by the sickening video of Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating by Memphis police?

Yes, observed D.L. Hughley while guest-hosting “The Daily Show”: “Black people.”

“The only people who were shocked by that are people that haven’t been paying attention,” the Black comedian said, sparking a mixture of laughter and applause in the racially diverse studio audience. “But, for us, that’s just like a flashback.”

Comedy, often called a mixture of tragedy plus time, helps bring some sense of order to our conflicted emotions at moments like this.

Bodycam video shows Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx driver, beaten relentlessly by five Memphis police officers. Each of the five officers was fired and charged with second-degree murder, among other offenses — so swiftly compared with most brutality cases that it led to a subset of gallows humor. Would justice have moved this swiftly if the perpetrators were white?

Such dark humor reveals, among other headaches, how much we Americans have come to internalize the wrongheaded notion that police brutality is a white-on-Black crime.

Video released by Memphis police of Nichols’ encounter helps disabuse us of that notion, as if we needed to be. We see police slam Nichols to the ground, kick him in the head, punch him in the face, strike him with a baton, drench him with pepper spray, tase him and constantly curse at him, while he pleads for his mother and screams as best he can that he only wants to go home.

Instead, he was taken to a hospital in critical condition and died three days later.

Seeing the faces of the five Black officers, I could not help but ask myself: How much do we Black folks hate each other and ourselves?

James Baldwin captured the tragedy in an essay about Harlem in the 1950s. “Negro policemen are feared more than whites,” he wrote, “for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”

I heard similar sentiments from Black South Africans when I was reporting on the country’s apartheid regime in 1976. Black police resented their second-class status under the white-minority regime so much, I was advised by Black township residents near Johannesburg, that I would be better off, even as a Black American, if I were arrested by a white officer.

What went wrong in Memphis? Attention immediately turned to SCORPION — Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods — a specialized crime-fighting unit formed by Cerelyn Davis shortly after she became the city’s first Black and female police chief in 2021.

Although various cities scored some impressive records of arrests and gun confiscations with these units, which operate with more leeway and less oversight than regular officers, “those statistics don’t always correlate with a decrease in crime,” Radley Balko writes in a guest essay for The New York Times. Balko is a former Washington Post columnist and author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.”

It is generally agreed that policing is more effective when there is mutual trust and respect between police and the communities they serve. But Balko and various independent academic studies have found a strong correlation between high rates of violent crime and high rates of reported police abuses, which tend to undermine trust and bring down rates of solving crimes and closing cases.

Still, New York Mayor Eric Adams, a retired police captain, cautioned in a CNN interview that “units don’t create abuse. Abusive behavior creates abuse.”

He referred to his own city’s revived anti-crime units, now called Neighborhood Safety Teams, which he reinstated less than two years after the units were disbanded because they were implicated in such notorious deaths as Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Kimani Gray. But he also noted that he is making improvements on the old version of the plainclothes anti-crime units, which he agreed had used overly “aggressive” tactics.

Indeed, according to a 2018 investigation by the nonprofit news outlet The Intercept, these units accounted for just 6% of the city’s police officers but were involved in more than 30% of fatal shootings by police officers.

So I wish Adams and all other similarly situated city leaders good luck. No one has a one-size-fits-all solution to the complexities of big-city crime. But, put simply, it begins with trust between police and the communities they are sworn to protect and serve.

Citizens shouldn’t have to live in fear of crime or the police, no matter what color they may be.

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