Death of Tyre Nichols shows why police should be held to account
Protesters chant during a rally against the fatal police assault of Tyre Nichols, outside of the Federal Courthouse in Houston, Texas, on January 28, 2023. PHOTO | AFP
I made a mistake, last week, and watched the videos, showing the arrest of a young black man, Tyre Nichols, by a team of seemingly hysterical Memphis police officers who subsequently beat him to death.
In fact, I only watched the first few minutes. It was so heart-wrenching. Only later on, in just one news story, that same implanted video had a black screen with white lettering advising people not to watch it, as “there are some things that cannot be unseen”.
And that’s the problem. For that young man trying, so reasonably, to calm down those raging police (long before he was literally screaming for his Mum as they beat him), has haunted me ever since.
It is an event so horrible, and yet, seemingly what humans can do to humans, and self-justify. For the self-justification was writ large.
One of the assailants sprayed Tyre with pepper spray and got some on himself, going on to say ‘he made me spray myself with pepper spray’ or words to that effect.
That’s just a blank shock for me – how did Tyre ‘make’ that police officer spray himself: it’s so absurd, yet collectively and as a shared perspective, those officers had lost all rationality, human reason, and any scrap of maturity or wisdom.
Yet they had been put into positions of responsibility.
Of course, with the problems of US police above the law long cast as a matter of racism, this black-on-black attack could take but a skip and a jump to curse the policing system of the USA, and move on.
Yet, some seven years ago, I was sent another video that I long regretted watching. It had been taken from an upper window of a hall of residence at the University of Nairobi during a literally ‘mind-blowing’ police raid.
Students had been hauled out – our brightest and our best, sponsored by villages, the hard workers and studiers at school, our finest future professionals — and made to lie down in a line on the pavement across the road.
Our police officers were then roving up and down that line beating them with batons, which, to be clear, means breaking legs and inflicting mortal injuries.
That one video changed my perspective on the Kenyan police forever — and it wasn’t good before, based on a host of appalling first-hand experiences, across too many drunk and drugged-up police, too many with rationality gone and no adulthood evident.
So, if there is a lesson for us all from the death of that boy, please could it be to work with all our police on the idea they are bound by the law, and responsible, themselves and individually, for every action they take?
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
