The nation and the city of Memphis struggled to come to grips Saturday with video showing police pummeling Tyre Nichols — footage that left many unanswered questions about the traffic stop involving the Black motorist and about other law enforcement officers who stood by as he lay motionless on the pavement. The five disgraced Memphis Police Department officers, who are also Black, have been fired and charged with second-degree murder and other crimes in Nichols’ death three days after the arrest. The video released Friday renewed questions about how fatal encounters with law enforcement continue even after repeated calls for change.
The shocking footage also captured one officer complaining about getting pepper sprayed while another can be seen lighting a cigarette in the background.
In one of the videos released by the police, an officer appeared to pepper spray himself at the scene of the arrest.
He can be heard saying: “Ah, you motherf***** made me spray myself.”
The recording shows police savagely beating Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx worker, for three minutes while screaming profanities at him in an assault that the Nichols family legal team has likened to the infamous 1991 police beating of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King.
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Nichols calls out for his mother before his limp body is propped against a squad car and the officers exchange fist-bumps.
Memphis Police Director Cerelyn “CJ” Davis has said that other officers are under investigation, and Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner said two deputies have been relieved of duty without pay while their conduct is investigated.
Rodney Wells, Nichols’ stepfather, said the family would “continue to seek justice,” noting that several other officers failed to render aid, making them “just as culpable as the officers who threw the blows.”
Demonstrators at times blocked traffic while chanting slogans and marching through the streets of New York City, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. In Washington, protesters gathered across the street from the White House and near Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Blake Ballin, the lawyer for fired officer Desmond Mills, told The Associated Press in a statement Saturday that while the videos “have produced as many questions as they have answers,” the question of whether the city would stay peaceful “has been answered.”
Some of the other questions will focus on what Mills “knew and what he was able to see when he arrived late to the scene” and whether his actions “crossed the lines that were crossed by other officers during this incident,” Ballin said.
The arrest was made by the so-called Scorpion unit, which has three teams of about 30 street officers who target violent offenders in areas beset by high crime, Davis said.
