None of Us Should Turn Away From the Death of Tyre Nichols

America’s Always Been at War With Itself — And Democracy Can Only Survive If It Makes Peace

Image Credit: Cheney Orr

They warned how horrific it’d be. Memphis’ police chief said the video would show “acts that defy humanity.” The Director of the FBI called it “appalling.” And yet. If anything, they’d understated the case. The video of the death of Tyre Nichols? It is absolutely gut-wrenching, jaw-dropping, stomach-churning. I found myself crying out “My God,” over and over again, watching it.

I’d spent the day before — Holocaust Memorial Day — watching documentaries about that, modern history’s greatest crime. And on a visceral level? This video reminded me of that. It is bad on that level, and though some may object, I can’t help but — if not make an outright comparison, which I’m not doing — then at least find a resonance. In what way, though?

Let’s begin at the beginning. Many of you will think you’ve watched the video, and many haven’t. Many versions of the video I’ve seen floating around are sanitized or shortened or what have you. The best version I’ve seen, by far, is the one on the Washington Post’s website, where they sync up audio and video from multiple cameras. And when you see what happened unfold that way, well, it’s not just “the video” any longer. Now you feel as if you’re really witnessing the event.

That event I can scarcely do justice to in the confines we have here. Because the full documentation of it? It’s 38 minutes long. You could write a book about it, and hopefully many will. What it shows, briefly, is a sequence of events which go like this. A man is pulled over for a traffic stop. A routine traffic stop. And then the horror begins, almost instantaneously.

He’s stopped with what can only be described as absurd, incredible, outsized levels of rage and aggression. “Get the eff out of the car!!” “Get on the ground!!” Already, incredibly, the police are screaming at him in a kind of senseless rage.

Now. I’m going to pause already, though the story’s barely begun, to offer a simple enough thought. This would never happen in any other country — any other country — that I know of. In nearly every one of those, a routine traffic stop is…just that. It’s usually something like a polite interchange between a civil servant, a cop, and a citizen. OK, you did something wrong. Here’s your fine or ticket or what have you. Never — never in my life — have I seen these levels of rage and aggression, anywhere. Not even anything close to them.

It’s hard to make this point, because in America, such rage and aggression are normal, and that’s part of the problem, which I’m going to get to the heart of, but slowly, forgive me. In America? It’s totally OK for your boss to curse at you, scream at you, insult you, demean you. Authority figures of every kind in America have a kind of social power which doesn’t exist almost anywhere else: they can get away with aggression and rage that’d be considered literally off the charts in nearly every other society. So for example if, anywhere in Europe, or probably most of Canada, your boss screamed at you in rage, and called you all kinds of names…that’d be a serious issue. It violates basic norms. It’s an offense….by them. But if in America minor league authority figures like working superiors can abuse their power and belittle people…then is it any surprise that police can lash out in completely disproportionate levels of rage and aggression? Like, completely over the top ones?