It Is a Police Thing

 I have done little today except sleep and have a very long conversation with a friend.

However, I did see much of the Tyre Nichols video. Until I read Why you absolutely should not watch the Tyre Nichols police killing video, I intended to post a link to that video. I agree with The San Francisco Chronicle on these points:

But posting videos of violence online — next to cat videos and party photos — makes it more likely that someone might encounter the video unexpectedly, at a time or age when they are unprepared or ill-equipped to process it. Even as it spreads an important message, it minimizes its significance, turning the death of a human being into a spectacle, something we watch on a screen. The artist Questlove, responding to the release of the Nichols video, posted a warning message to his Instagram followers: “Do NOT Watch It. Do NOT WATCH IT!!!!!” he wrote. “For The Love Of God. Torture P*rn Is Not Going To Serve Your Soul.”

Police misconduct should be a priority for every single American. If our law enforcement doesn’t make each and every one of our communities feel safe and, instead, is a source of threat, it undermines the social contract at the heart of democracy.

To honor Mr. Nichols’s life, we need to do the work of making change by insisting elected officials improve training protocols, hold wrongdoers accountable, and build communities with the resources to manage the wide spectrum of human problems without overreliance on police. 

Those things don’t happen as a result of watching a video.

No, I want to make a point that I have not quite seen or heard while some seem to be making the argument that with the police officers being Black, there is no racism. No, the point is that race does not matter, it is an institutional problem which impacts on non-whites. Trying to use the race of the Memphis police officers is misdirection, an attempt to forego examining the impact of current police culture on non-white and the poor.

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