[ A 1992 study claims that officers who show weakness are more
likely to be killed. Law-enforcement culture has never recovered.]
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THE POLICE FOLKLORE THAT HELPED KILL TYRE NICHOLS  
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David D. Kirkpatrick
January 28, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ A 1992 study claims that officers who show weakness are more likely
to be killed. Law-enforcement culture has never recovered. _

Protesters take over a bridge Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, in Memphis,
Tenn., as authorities release police video depicting five Memphis
officers beating Tyre Nichols, whose death resulted in murder charges
and provoked outrage at the country's latest instance , Gerald
Herbert/AP

 

Thirty-four years ago, near the crest of the crack-cocaine-fuelled
crime surge of the early nineteen-nineties, two F.B.I agents began a
novel investigation of threats to police. One agent was a former
police lieutenant in Washington, D.C. The other was also a Catholic
priest with a doctorate in psychology. Together, they plunged into the
prison system, interviewing fifty convicted cop killers. Most
criminologists today call such research pseudoscience. A sample size
of fifty was almost anecdotal, and why should anyone trust a cop
killer, anyway? The agents also had no benchmark—no comparable
interviews with criminals who had complied. Yet the sweeping
conclusions of their study, “Killed in the Line of Duty,” made the
front page of the _Times_, and, through decades of promotion by the
Department of Justice
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became ingrained in the culture of American law enforcement.

At the top of an inventory of “behavioral descriptors” linked to
officers who ended up dead, the study listed traits that some citizens
might prize: “friendly,” “well-liked by community and
department,” “tends to use less force than other officers felt
they would use in similar circumstances,” and “used force only as
last resort.” The cop killers, the agents concluded from their
prison conversations, had attacked officers with a “good-natured
demeanor.” An officer’s failure to dominate—to immediately
enforce full control over the suspect—proved fatal. “A miscue in
assessing the need for control in particular situations can have grave
consequences,” the authors warned.

Although few patrolmen today explicitly cite the study, some of its
findings survive as police folklore, like the commonplace that
unshined shoes can make an officer a target. Most significant, the
study’s core lesson about the imperative to dominate dovetailed with
a nineties-era turn in law-enforcement culture toward what was known
as a “warrior mind-set,” teaching officers to see almost any
civilian as a potentially lethal assassin—an approach that many
police trainers still advertise, even as the cops-vs.-citizens
mentality has fallen out of favor among many police chiefs.

The killing, this month, of Tyre Nichols by police in Memphis is the
latest reminder that the dominate-or-die impulse persists among some
rank-and-file officers. Body-camera and surveillance videos released
on Friday by the city of Memphis show that a cluster of officers
appear to have beaten Nichols to death merely for defying their
orders: commands like “Get on the ground,” “Lie flat,
goddammit,” and “Give me your fucking hands.”

No evidence has yet emerged showing any justification for the police
to have stopped Nichols, a twenty-nine-year-old FedEx worker and
aspiring photographer with a four-year-old son. Nor does it appear
that the officers gave him much reason for pulling him over. “Any
charges on him?” a police operator asked over a radio in one video.
There was no answer from the officers in the field. The police reports
described his offense as “reckless driving.”

A battle to dominate Nichols appears to have propelled the encounter
to its deadly conclusion. Police are taught never to reach into an
open car door because a driver might hit the gas, dragging the
officer. But after unmarked police cars had boxed Nichols in at a
stoplight and he apparently refused to step out, one of the officers
leaned deep inside the vehicle in order to force the driver out and
hurl him to the ground.

As four officers grabbed at his arms, legs, and torso, Nichols’s
words were mild. “I didn’t do anything! . . . All right, all
right, all right, O.K. . . . I am on the ground, yes, sir, yes,
sir. . . . All right, you guys are really doing a lot right now, I
am just trying to go home.” The officers, though, shouted orders and
expletives as if they were locked in a life-or-death struggle. “Get
the fuck out of the fucking car. . . . Turn your ass
around. . . . I am going to taze your shit. . . . I am going to
knock your ass the fuck out.” Under a torrent of contradictory
commands, Nichols appeared confused about how to comply.

Nichols was unarmed and physically unimposing. He suffered from
Crohn’s disease, which had left him rail thin—six feet three and a
hundred and forty-five pounds, according to his mother. The
officers—all, like Nichols, were Black—each looked nearly twice
his size. Later, in an exchange recorded after the beating, the
officers suggested to one another that he had reached for their
handguns. But the video footage makes that claim highly implausible,
Seth W. Stoughton, an expert on the use of force and a former
patrolman, told me.

In fact, several signs indicated that the officers never feared
Nichols. Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South
Carolina, who testified at the 2021 trial of a Minneapolis officer
convicted of murdering George Floyd
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typically shouts it out immediately if he sees a suspect reach for a
weapon, and none did anything like that in the videos of their
struggles with Nichols. When police threatened Nichols with a Taser at
one point and a baton at another, the other officers loosened their
grip on him to get out of the way. That self-protective flinching, in
fact, is what allowed Nichols to escape on foot and flee toward the
nearby home of his mother. And when Nichols was later captured and in
handcuffs the officers turned their backs on him and bragged about
their exertions like football players in a locker room after a
hard-won victory. They would have kept a closer eye on someone they
saw as dangerous.

Police are trained to weigh several factors before pursuing a suspect,
including the potential danger to bystanders and the likelihood that
the chase will end in a physical struggle. “The first factor is, why
are we chasing him? What are we trying to get him for?” Stoughton
said. After Nichols fled, the Memphis officers talked only of
retaliating against him for his defiance. “I hope they stomp his
ass,” one officer said, waving a fourth and fifth police vehicle to
join in the hunt. If their goal was only to apprehend Nichols, the
officers did not need to use a Taser, pepper spray, or baton. “Just
dogpile him—the least technical thing possible,” Stoughton said.
“Just get on top of him.”

The officers’ wild, punishing violence was what elevated Nichols’s
arrest beyond countless other incidents of police aggression that
never made the headlines. After catching Nichols again, the officers
kicked him in the ribs and skull as he flailed on his back. They
rained punches down on his face at a time when the pavement underneath
him left no room for his head to recoil, potentially injuring his
brain. Then one pulled out a nightstick. “I am going to baton the
fuck out of you,” the officer yelled.

Most startling, three officers grappling from opposite sides seemed
for a time to prop Nichols up on his feet as another swung a fist
through the air at his head, like goons holding up a snitch for a
Mafia boss in a movie. “I counted five strikes—big, heavy strikes,
what looked like haymakers,” Stoughton said. Police academies often
teach that blows to the face are not only potentially lethal but also
virtually useless if the goal is compliance. “Very few people in the
history of policing have been punched in the face and then decided to
do what the officer was asking. Your instinctive reaction is ‘I need
to get my hands up,’ or ‘I need to fight back,’ ” he said.
“There is a difference between defensive force and assertive
force,” Stoughton added. “The officers here were trying to assert
control over Mr. Nichols, not defending themselves, and they were
using applications of force that were gratuitous and egregiously
unjustified—far above the amount that would have been appropriate or
proportional to someone who was resisting the way he was resisting.”
When Nichols leaned against a car in handcuffs, drifting out of
consciousness, one officer even mocked his desperate calls for his
mother during the beating. “He has a mother,” the officer said,
dismissively. Nichols died three days later in a hospital.

The officers belonged to a unit of forty police called Street Crimes
Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or _scorpion_—an
acronym that does little to invite community trust. Memphis created
the unit in November, 2021, to address a spike in murders and gun
violence during the pandemic
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touted the unit’s success by citing statistics about the sheer
volume of its activity—the amount of money, guns, and cars seized,
or the number of suspects arrested. By disregarding whether the
arrests end in convictions—or even reduce crime—such metrics
encourage aggression, Stoughton said. “You are incentivizing
quantity over legality. Thirty years of research tells us that is a
bad idea.”

Targeted police units like _scorpion_, which concentrate on certain
high-crime neighborhoods, have a checkered history. There were
scandals at the Rampart unit, in Los Angeles, and the Gun Trace Task
Force, in Baltimore, among others, and the Memphis Police Department
said Saturday that it was disbanding the _scorpion_ unit. “What is
supposed to be targeted enforcement becomes ‘We run the streets
around here,’ ” Stoughton said.

A growing number of police chiefs and district attorneys, though,
argue that there is a way to prevent at least some needless killings
like Tyre Nichols’s, by focussing on why the police pulled him over.
Along with the shibboleth that a failure to dominate encourages cop
killing, the nineties study helped implant a second myth in police
culture as well—that stopping cars is exceptionally dangerous to
officers. That notion rests on the misuse of a statistic: a large
percentage of police killed on the job die at roadside pullovers. In
reality, such encounters are so numerous that the odds of death at any
given stop are no higher than in other police work.

Yet units like _scorpion_—created to go after gangs, guns, and
drugs, not issue tickets for speeding and other traffic
violations—often use such trivial infractions as a pretext to
justify pulling over a car and looking inside it. Convinced that they
risk their life each time they stop such a driver, many officers
approach each encounter prepared for a life-or-death struggle. Few may
be as hyperaggressive as the officers who killed Nichols, but their
fear and belligerence can still evoke a reciprocal urge in a driver to
talk back or flee, sparking a deadly cycle.

Stopping cars on little more than a hunch is also hopelessly
inefficient. Five or more patrol cars and eight or more officers spent
as much as an hour detaining Nichols on a night when they could have
been targeting dangerous crime. Multiple studies have concluded that
such a dragnet approach is ultimately an ineffective strategy for
confiscating the guns, drugs, or other contraband that police seek in
cars. Pretextual stops may even be counterproductive: they alienate
law-abiding citizens in the high-crime neighborhoods where their
coöperation is most essential. “We are talking about using a hammer
on a problem that really requires a scalpel,” Stoughton said.

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd
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police and prosecutors in jurisdictions from Philadelphia to Los
Angeles are attempting to end pretextual stops altogether. The city of
Fayetteville, North Carolina, was one of the first to try the
experiment, a decade ago. Civilian complaints about the Fayetteville
police plunged, and so did traffic fatalities, with no notable
increase in gun violence or drug crime. Eliminating pretextual stops,
in other words, may reduce crime more effectively than units
like _scorpion_ do. Tyre Nichols, of course, would still be alive if
the police had never pulled him over. ♦

_David D. Kirkpatrick is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he
started his career as a fact checker. In the interim, he worked for
twenty-two years as a reporter for the New York Times, in New York,
Washington, Cairo, and London. While at the Times, he shared Pulitzer
Prizes for public service, international reporting, and national
reporting. He is the author of “Into the Hands of the Soldiers:
Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East
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* Tyre Nichols
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* police brutality
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* Police training
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