[Proposed reforms at the federal level would not have saved the
life of Tyre Nichols. Only the fundamental transformation of systems
of punishment that have been normalized in American society and
culture can do that. ]
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TYRE NICHOLS AND AMERICA’S SYSTEMIC FAILURE  
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Peniel E. Joseph
January 30, 2023
Boston Globe
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_ Proposed reforms at the federal level would not have saved the life
of Tyre Nichols. Only the fundamental transformation of systems of
punishment that have been normalized in American society and culture
can do that. _

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The killing of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, at the hands of
the Memphis police illustrates the need to reimagine public safety in
America. The Friday evening release of body cam footage and video from
a pole camera has left the city of Memphis on the edge of a political
eruption, with Nichols’s death adding new layers of grief to a city
known as much for being the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968
assassination as for being the birthplace of the blues.

Coming a little over two years after George Floyd’s murder in
Minneapolis sparked the largest social justice demonstrations in
American history and a searing round of national soul searching,
Nichols’s death reveals what has and has not changed since then.

In the run-up to the release of the footage, many expressed shock and
surprise that all five officers who stopped, detained, pepper sprayed,
then brutally beat Nichols to death were Black.

We should not be surprised.

The police killing of Nichols should not be misinterpreted as an
example of Black racism but as a byproduct of systemic failure.

Since 2013, the Black Lives Matter Movement has called for a
reimagining of public safety through redistributing the resources
designed to support punishment toward investments in the mental and
physical health, well-being, and safety of Black communities.

Memphis is a case study in the ways in which structural racism within
law enforcement can impact Black residents living in a predominantly
Black city that has a Black chief of police, Cerelyn Davis. The fact
that all five officers had been fired and were facing second-degree
murder charges even before the release of the video speaks to a kind
of progress, but one that is nonetheless itself racialized.
Apparently, justice is much swifter against law enforcement who kill
Black people when the perpetrators themselves are also Black.

Chief Davis has been eloquent in her public statements
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“This is not just a professional failing,” she observed. “This
is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual.”

If only it were that simple.

The heartbreaking interviews offered by Nichols’s parents, who
described their son as having “a beautiful soul,” echo the
tragedies of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor (whose
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at the hands of the Louisville 
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botched no-knock raid in March 2020 came to light only after Floyd’s
murder), and countless other grieving Black parents, relatives, family
members, and communities.

Nichols would be alive today if America had embraced an abolitionist
perspective on punishment, prison, and policing that recognizes more
of the same will only produce further preventable tragedies.
Nichols’s death reflects a broken system, one wherein armed police
routinely turn traffic or even pedestrian stops into violent and
deadly confrontations with unarmed citizens. But it is also just the
tip of the iceberg.

The modern-day abolitionist movement is rooted in the centuries-long
struggle to abolish racial slavery and its supply chains. W.E.B. Du
Bois, the Fisk- and Harvard University-trained intellectual and civil
rights leader, referred to this era as “abolition-democracy” in
his monumental 1935 classic — still the best book on the post-Civil
War era ever written — “Black Reconstruction in America.” What
Du Bois meant by “abolition-democracy” was the simultaneous
eradication of the institutions, vestiges, and badges of racial
slavery and new investments in Black citizenship and dignity.

In a similar vein, during the civil rights movement’s heroic period,
Martin Luther King Jr. called for the creation of a “beloved
community” free of racial violence, poverty, and inequality.

Black Power-era prison abolitionists included the activist and
intellectual Angela Davis, whose writings, political organizing, and
example has influenced three generations of activists, including
contemporary abolitionists such as Mariame Kaba, Alicia Garza, and the
millions who demonstrated during the BLM uprising in 2020.

But there continues to be a purposeful disconnect between abolitionist
ideas, public policy, and the American public’s understanding of the
relationship between policing, crime and punishment, poverty, racial
segregation, and national conceptions of dignity and citizenship.

After decades of unequal treatment before the criminal legal system,
climbing rates of Black imprisonment, skyrocketing techniques of
surveillance in neighborhoods, schools, and playgrounds, and the
illegal extortion of impoverished Black communitie
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by law enforcement and municipal governments through a racist system
of fines and fees, grass-roots activists demanded an end to the status
quo.

Abolition of systems of punishment transcend even the well-meaning
legislative impulses behind the long-delayed George Floyd Justice in
Policing Act
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may very well never become law. The proposed reforms at the federal
level, including banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and
collecting data on police misconduct, still would not have saved the
life of Tyre Nichols.

Only the fundamental transformation of systems of punishment that have
been normalized in American society and culture can do that. This
includes rethinking why it is commonplace to have armed police
officers initiate traffic stops of moving or stopped vehicles.

The surveillance, harassment, weaponization of fines and fees,
brutality, and death experienced by Black people at the hands of law
enforcement have become so routine that the nation responds only to
the promise of spectacular Black death at this point. Just witness the
countdown to the release of the Nichols video that had media gathered
around like officials and spectators in the Roman Colosseum awaiting
the visceral rush of that era’s version of blood sport.

That the bloody hands of the officers are Black has added new layers
of pathos to this tragedy. Yet as the video shows, there were sheriff
deputies and other officers who failed to intervene to save Nichols.
His death, although catastrophic, is hardly a system failure from the
law-and-order perspective still embraced by Democrats and Republicans,
with both parties constantly seeking to provide further resources and
funding for dead-on-arrival “reforms” that only serve to embolden
police unions and a law enforcement apparatus designed to inflict
violent punishment on criminals and ordinary citizens alike.

Abolitionists imagine a world where notions of public safety are more
aligned with professed values of freedom, liberty, and democracy.
Investments in good schools, the elimination of food deserts, mental
and physical well-being, environmental justice, jobs, drug
rehabilitation, housing for the poor and at-risk young LGBTQ teens,
domestic violence prevention for Black women, and resources for
survivors of sexual assault would make our neighborhoods — from
Boston to Oakland — safer than the current status quo.

The police killing of Tyre Nichols is tied to a long history of
American institutions criminalizing Black bodies in a simultaneous
effort to exploit their labor and to mark them with a new badge of
servitude and indignity in the aftermath of racial slavery.
Slavery’s afterlife surrounds us — from high rates of maternal
infant deaths suffered by Black women, to the overwhelming rates of
Black incarceration, to educational gaps between white and Black
students, to the persistence of residential segregation and the wealth
gap.

Yet the most dramatic marker of Black people’s status as
noncitizens, even after the Reconstruction Amendments purported to
build a multiracial democracy in America for the first time, has been
the cheap value of Black life at the hands of institutional authority.
Whether those officials are white, Black, or people of color is beside
the point. The path forward toward a liberated future where Nichols
might have lived long enough to dote on his grandchildren requires a
move away from business as usual. That means having the hard
conversation about abolition, one that impacts immigrants and the
undocumented, citizens of all colors and backgrounds, and will have a
generational legacy that finally allows America to treat people who
look like Tyre Nichols with the humanity that they deserve.

_Peniel E. Joseph teaches history and public affairs at the University
of Texas at Austin. His latest book is “The Third Reconstruction:
America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
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_The Boston Globe: get unlimited access to New England's most trusted
news source. $1 for the first 26 weeks._

* Tyre Nichols
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* police abolition
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* W.E.B. DuBois
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* police violence
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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* Structural Racism
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