US Another reckoning for police brutality

As Nyliayh Stewart marched along Interstate 55 alongside protesters last Friday night, the moment of sorrow and anger felt familiar. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, Stewart had been a teenager in Mississippi when she received word in the middle of the night that her cousin Darrius had been killed by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop while he was running away, according to witnesses at the time.

They had grown up like siblings. Stewart, now 24, heard the chants calling for justice for Tyre Nichols, the latest Black man killed by police in America, and felt the anger and anguish for his family. Unlike the five Black Memphis officers charged with Nichols’s killing, the cop who shot and killed Darrius, who retired from Memphis police, was never indicted.

“This should not have happened,” said Stewart. “This family should not have to bury him. My family should not have had to bury my cousin.”

Months after Stewart’s killing, amid the national outcry over police violence, Memphis police received body cameras. And now, as the city reels yet again, following the death of

a 29-year-old FedEx worker and skater, Tyre Nichols, at the hands of police, calls for further police reform have erupted again.

Last Friday night, hours after city officials released video footage described by the police chief, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, as “heinous, reckless and inhumane”, Memphis residents descended on the highway bridge dividing West Memphis, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, cutting off traffic for hours. In this historically Black city, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at a motel in 1968 when he was in town supporting striking sanitation workers.

Nearly seven years earlier, more than 1,000 Memphis residents took over the same bridge in the largest act of civil disobedience in the city’s history following the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

Residents last Friday night described how the police “terrorised” citizens by targeting impoverished neighbourhoods in the city.

Outside Martyrs Park, where protests first began, community organisers called for continued rallying as city officials wrestle with how to move forward following charges against five Memphis officers and the relieving of duty of another officer and two Memphis firefighters, and in light of civil rights investigations. Stewart said reform of police practices and training was needed, as well as ending “unnecessary traffic stops”. That echoed other community organisers’ demands.

Last Saturday, the city police department announced it would permanently disband the so-called Scorpion unit whose officers were involved in Nichols’s death.

Protesters argued that was just the first step in getting justice. “We’re not done,” one organiser said through a megaphone. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

They called for the release of information on all officers and personnel involved in Nichols’s death on top of the murder charges laid against the five Black officers who attacked him. They also demanded an end to pre-textual traffic stops, such as pulling people over for broken tail lights and loud music, and the dissolution of other units and task forces the Memphis police department operates.

Disbanding the unit, one of several police task forces in Memphis dispatched to neighbourhoods to suppress crime, had been one of several demands protesters and Nichols’s family made in the aftermath of his death.

In a statement, the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, said the unit’s dissolution marked an “appropriate and proportional” response to Nichols’s death and a “decent and just decision” to Memphis residents.

“We hope that other cities take similar action with their saturation police units in the near future to begin to create greater trust in their communities,” they said. “We must keep in mind that this is just the next step on this journey for justice and accountability, as clearly this misconduct is not restricted to these specialty units. It extends so much further.”

Martavius Jones, chair of the Memphis city council, told the crowd that it was now up to city officials to take further action to reform the police department. “Hold us accountable,” he told the crowd. LJ Abraham, a local community organiser, and others looked over to Jones and reiterated they would.

‘We hope other cities take similar action with their saturation police units to create greater trust in communities’

Jones, who grew up in Memphis and has been on the city council since 2015, told the Guardian he gave credit to the police chief and Shelby county district attorney for respectively firing and charging five officers but would listen to residents for guidance.

“We’re the body that can put forth reforms that can address this, and do our best to try to prevent this from happening again,” Jones said.

Community organiser Antonio Cathey, who grew up in Memphis, hoped that the city could work toward healing and rebuilding broken trust in the police. Cathey described how police had harassed him and installed cameras outside his house. Community members needed to continue pressuring officials and reorganise. “There’s no trust right now,” he said. “We know that the police will put more resources into Black neighbourhoods than white neighbourhoods to oppress the oppressed.”

In Memphis, city data compiled by the TV station WREG showed that police are seven times as likely to use force on Black men as white men, a troubling yet consistent disparity seen throughout the US. In Nichols’s case, police claimed he had driven recklessly but the police chief said she couldn’t substantiate that cause based on the video footage.

For Stewart, it didn’t matter that the officers were Black, noting that they were part of a system with its roots in slave-catching patrols and were a “racist organisation that needs to be demolished and rebuilt”. “Once you put that uniform on, you chose that,” she said.

“We got to stand up for what’s right,” she added. “We’re having kids now. And it’s like our kids could be next.”