The politicians who decry Tyre Nichols’ killing are the same ones protecting the power of the police to tyrannize us.
by Jack Mirkinson, Discourse Blog
It is horribly fitting, somehow, that the release of the footage showing five Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols to death came so soon after the most recent string of high-profile mass shootings in California.
In the space of a week, we have seen two deeply interconnected examples of the American addiction to violence, and of our political system’s total unwillingness to do anything to stop it. Because just as the gun people are happy to accept a world of endless death, the cop people are, on a fundamental level, content to accept the institutional tyranny that constitutes policing, even if things get a little out of hand now and again.
By “cop people,” I mean the political, economic, and cultural forces that have collaborated to give the police almost infinite sway over our lives. Their language may have gotten smarter, but their devotion to the power of the cops has not changed one bit. This is especially true of the Democratic Party, which hides behind talk of “systemic racism” and “better policing” to mask its fealty to the police.
It’s now a bit of a cliché to dwell on how rote and standardized our response to mass shootings has become—the thoughts and prayers tweets, the anguished public statements, the debate over how much to focus on the killers, the demands for change, the sinking feeling that nothing much will ever change. We all know the drill. But the same kind of leaden routine happens when the police kill a Black person in America. The president issues a statement decrying the killing but urging people to stay calm. The victim’s family is interviewed about their incalculable grief, often accompanied by Benjamin Crump, the most prominent lawyer fighting police brutality. The police say that this is not what “good policing” looks like, that the officers disregarded their training, that no decent cop would ever approve of something like this. The mayors and governors and congresspeople vow to press on with some grand new “reform” that will finally make cops behave themselves. Protesters take to the streets, flanked by a sea of cops tasked with controlling the people’s rage. And then things subside.
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