From Atlanta to Memphis

A little over a week ago, many city governments braced themselves for protests following the release of the video showing multiple police officers fatally beating Tyre Nichols in Memphis. They knew it was that bad, and it was. The officers were swiftly charged by Memphis’s newly elected DA Steve Mulroy; the previous incumbent had notably never charged a police officer with murder. This killing followed closely on the police shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán – hitting him with 13 bullets – in the Atlanta public forest slated for destruction in order to build a police siege training facility (learn more here). The police had previously characterized protestors as “terrorists.”

A lot of public discussion after police killings focuses on whether the victim properly ‘complied’ with police orders. In Memphis, for example, articles noted that Tyre Nichols was given numerous totally contradictory commands, making ‘compliance’ impossible. The subtle implication is that if someone is ‘not complying’, then there’s a license to kill, which is a dangerous proposition. A society that gives the death penalty for not immediately obeying a police order is authoritarian. Moreover, think of the Atlanta forest protest – the essence of protest is non-compliance. Environmental protesters and climate activists are regularly murdered by state and corporate forces in other countries, but we are not used to thinking of that happening here. That assessment may need to change. 

I have seen a lot of articles about Memphis, and fewer about Atlanta. I haven’t seen any connecting the two – what is the narrative of police violence that binds these two incidents? For commenters focused on addressing the individual failings of police officers that lead them to kill, there may seem to be no connection. Some such commenters were busy wondering whether Black officers could possibly enforce white supremacy (yes, they can. As many Black commenters online said, there were Black overseers too), while other extremely right-wing voices took the matter out of the realm of policing entirely by calling it “Black on Black violence.” But if you look at policing from the perspective of structural power, the two incidents are deeply connected. Manuel Terán was protesting the construction of a facility that would train police in violent siege tactics, the type of aggression that the Memphis “Scorpion” unit (to which the officers who killed Tyre Nichols belonged) used to such a shocking degree. Scorpion units are in nearly every police dept in every major city (must-read Balko piece here) though often with different names. “Proactive policing,” special plainclothes units etc. are where much of the militarized policing budgets go, which contributes to why police have such poor clearance rates for serious crimes that require thorough investigations, despite our consistently raising their budgets.

The systematic indoctrination of police recruits with violence has been well documented – one of the leading police trainers in the U.S. calls his method “killology” – and several threads came out in the past week noting this (see here and here). No, more training will not prevent these police killings because they are themselves the result of police being trained to kill, and police unions have successfully resisted increased civilian oversight. Any training to counter this aggression would be ineffective without a root and branch transformation of the institution. Indeed, many commenters were quick to note that the Memphis police force had implemented the “8 can’t wait” reforms and similar measures in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (see also this and this). 

Those of us frustrated by all these dead ends ought to start asking better questions. A society that ratchets up policing as a response to all social stressors is one that lacks imagination and will become increasingly unhealthy. A society that uses policing to avoid addressing the climate crisis, and insists on building “cop city” to make the city more attractive to business while making it much more vulnerable to flooding and police killings, is one headed for a reckoning.