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Dear John,
By now you likely know about the murder by Memphis police of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man and father of a 4-year-old son. A video of the beating came out last night and it's horrifying in its brutality.
The pain we all feel is the too familiar, relentless trauma that policing inflicts. We have been here so many times before.
After Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd and millions of Americans rose up in protest, I believed that we had reached a tipping point. I thought we would demand and get change to policing that would reduce violence and harm. Instead, we just left behind a year that set the record for police killings. Tyre Nichols will be one of the 1,000+ people that police kill this year.
The five officers who killed Tyre are Black. But it doesn’t matter who wears the uniform or steps into the role. The role comes with the expectations and indoctrinations entrenched in the history of policing and its inextricable link to our legacy of slavery.
Enslavers established modern policing hundreds of years ago as a way to enforce slavery, to control and oppress Black people. Police went on to uphold segregation, enable lynchings, and crush civil rights protests.
And police are just one branch of a sweeping system — prosecutors, judges, prisons — that has always enabled racial oppression through the continued dehumanization of Black people.
Right now, all we can offer to the Nichols family is prosecution and punishment of the officers who took Mr. Nichols' life. But our mission at EJUSA — that you make possible — is to build a path toward justice that doesn’t rely on punishment. This reimagined justice will prevent violence by delivering healing, safety, and accountability that repairs harm for all.
My thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Nichols' family, his son, and the entire Memphis community.
We will continue to transform safety and justice so that a system rooted in racial oppression is no longer the primary response to violence. We keep us safe. Investing in our communities is what keeps us safe.
Toward justice,
Jamila Hodge
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Equal Justice USA
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