On Friday, the US city of Memphis authorities published a painful video clip showing two policemen beating a 29-year-old black man, which led to his death, which sparked limited protests in a number of American cities to condemn the police’s behavior without developing into the unrest feared by officials.
A long video clip taken by police cameras and a street surveillance camera shows police officers arresting Tyree Nicholas, trying to pin him down with a detonator and then chasing him after he tried to flee from them.
Later scenes from the video, which lasts for about an hour, and in parts of it voices are heard, show Nicholas crying, calling for his mother and groaning while the policemen punched and kicked him.
Downtown Memphis was quiet on Saturday morning, and only a few stores were open, while others remained closed, after peaceful demonstrations, on Friday evening.
Memphis African-American entrepreneur Andrew Lewis, 29, said watching the video broke his heart. “You really don’t know how hard people can beat a guy for 30 minutes or more,” he said.
Nancy Schulte, 69, who works at a hotel in downtown Memphis, said she lost respect for the city’s police after watching the footage.
“It’s horrible,” she said. “Watching five big, built men beating this guy up.”
“This has to end.”
Five Memphis police officers, all of whom were black, have been charged with second-degree murder for allegedly striking Tyre Nicholas, who died in hospital on January 10, three days after he was arrested on suspicion of reckless driving.
During a press conference, on Friday, the victim’s mother, Rovon Wells, called for calm, but she turned to the policemen who beat her son “to death,” as she put it, by saying, “You have shamed your families by doing this.”
“My heart aches … for a mother to know that her son was calling her in her hour of need and I wasn’t there,” Wells said at the news conference.
“My son was a kind hearted… he was good. No human being is perfect, but he was close to that,” she added.
“For far too long we have witnessed these incomprehensible actions by those who are sworn to protect us, and that must end,” Senator Joe Manchin said in a statement Saturday. “This cannot be the America we are fighting for, and we must unite.” to deal with that.”
“It could have been me”
And the family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, accused the police of trying to cover up the actions of some of its members, stressing that Nicholas did not violate traffic rules or hold the officers’ guns, as the police say.
“This is our conclusion after watching the video several times: He was never trying to take these cops’ guns,” he told MSNBC Saturday morning.
Crump considered that Nicholas’ killing reflects a culture of police impunity in cases of assault against non-white people in the United States.
“It’s policing culture. It doesn’t matter if the cops are black, Hispanic or white. There are some innuendos and some unwritten rules that allow excessive force to be used against people of a certain race.”
DeMarcus Carter, 36, who works as a maintenance engineer in Memphis and is of African American descent, said he supports this idea, adding, “I felt it could have been me” the victim, by talking about watching the video.
“If I had been in the neighborhood at the time, I might have died,” he added.
Same behavior if not worse.
Protests took place in Memphis, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and other cities on Friday evening, albeit limited and largely peaceful.
In downtown Memphis, about 50 protesters gathered in a public park and later blocked a major thoroughfare and marched, chanting “No justice, no peace” and “Say his name: Tyre Nicholas.”
The White House said that its senior staff had offered the mayors of more than a dozen cities, including Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia, to provide federal assistance in the event of demonstrations.
Memphis Police Chief Cereline Davis compared the video to scenes of the beating of Rodney King in 1991, which followed days of rioting that left dozens dead.
“I was in law enforcement during the Rodney King incident, and it’s very similar to that kind of behavior,” Davis said. “I’d even say it’s the same behavior, if not worse.”
