On the night of January 7, 2023 nothing was further from the thoughts of five elite police officers in Memphis that nineteen days later they would all be in the cells of Shelby County Jail, having been arraigned on second degree murder and kidnapping charges.The indictment related to what they had thought at the time was nothing remarkable. It was one of many incidents involving “a black male suspect". Once again society would be rocked at the unthinkable incomprehensible obscene brutality ministered by otherwise normal appearing officers of the law.
The name Tyre Nichols may or may not have immediately rung a bell in the minds of The Five but he was no longer just another, "black male suspect". In death he suddenly had become a persona, a real person, who as a deceased had dramatically changed their lives. This whole episode of a suspect "resisting arrest and sustaining injuries while attempting to escape" had to be a part of the routine of The Five's unthinking job routine. It was just all in their unquestioned job definition until Tyre did them the dirt and went off and died.
The Five are not alone in their lack of thinking that characterizes everything and everybody in relation to policing and society. However when there is a corpse the whole ball game changes and there is a repetition of the crises that have punctuated policing for the past sixty years. In the interims between corpses no one gives a second thought to the fact that, in spite of increased resources, fire power and military equipment, the problems being addressed just seem to get worse not better. Periodically there is a death which engenders an outcry which dies down till the next "black male suspect" dies…..
ALL IN A REGULAR DAY’S WORK - TILL THERE IS AN INCONVENIENT CORPSE -
Of course with “this incident”, like all the others with a “black male suspect”, there was the matter of filing a report. The elite cops knew the routine drill. They were accustomed to the body cameras and the recording devices. All that those contraptions meant was that they just spat out some inane rationale justifying their violence. They could all corroborate one another. Their story was boringly straight forward or so they thought.
Nobody knows how many times previously The Five, who were members of the SCORPION UNIT, had reported, “resisting arrest and attempting to escape and sustaining some injuries in the subsequent altercation”. Their UNIT ironically was the mnemonic for “The Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods”. Little did their boss Carolyn Davis, think when she established the Unit in 2021, immediately following her appointment as Police Chief of Memphis, that she would be disbanding it so soon in response to the anger of the Nichols family and anger all round.
Police Chief Davis, who had established similar units in previous assignments, fired The Five following an investigation into the death of Tyre Nichols. Without being too cynical almost anything goes till there is a corpse. Davis had with an air of exasperation, explained, “They have all kinds of de-escalation training. We take them off the streets so they can have a de-escalation moment, have an opportunity to do some retraining…..the officers’ actions that led to Nichols’ death showed there was a problem not just with the training, but with the police culture in Memphis”
Forgive Jay H. Ell if he is cynical about this all since if there had been no lifeless body would anybody outside of Memphis ever have heard of The Scorpion Unit of Memphis? This is what Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland declared weeks after the launching of the unit, “The SCORPION unit has had five hundred arrests - three hundred and ninety felony arrests. They have seized $103, 000 in cash, two hundred vehicles and two hundred and fifty three weapons". One needs to know what the hell the charges were, what were the outcomes? As Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner, commented, “Those numbers should have been a warning sign in and of themselves… where they are pulling in one hundred and eighty people into custody after the unit gets started you’ve got to take a closer look at what they are doing….what those charges are, what probable cause is, what the reason for the stop is….” . The inescapable inference from all of this is that these guys were just a collection of legal vigilantes who reigned violence that finally led to this tragedy. Reverend Sharpton’s allegation that had Tyre Nichol’s been white he would have not been stopped appears to be more than just WOKE rhetoric.
The more one delves into this the worse it gets. What were the racial percentages of those stopped by The Five? To bounce back to the Nichol’s travesty, the reason for the stop was ostensibly “reckless driving”, yet there is no evidence for this. The camera situated on a lamppost that blew The Five’s report reflected no images of reckless driving. The further that one applies one’s mind the sicker it gets. There is sixth cop whose only defense is that he cleared off before they butchered Tyre. Then three EMT’s have been fired because they apparently were more concerned with chatting with The Five than meeting the medical needs of the “accused”. The culture is sadly epidemic.
Before Jay H. Ell continues - full disclosure - he worked as an ER Physician where he was in constant contact with the police and EMT’s where the culture was highly attentive to those they took into custody, They were bringing “accused” into the ER on their say so that they were feeling ill or had injuries.
Jay H. Ell having made this obvious statement that one cannot tar all officers of the law with the same brush, maintains that society cannot rely on whether the culture happens to be positive or not as to whether ”an accused” is going to be beaten up or not. As with Memphis and Minnesota, tor example, the culture was not too hot and the only window into what was going on was when there was a corpse.
WHO GETS THE BLAME? - THE FIVE? TYRE FOR DYING? THE DOCTORS? MEMPHIS? THE CULTURE OF THE DEPARTMENT AND OR SOCIETY?
The Five, Memphis, society and the role of Police Cultures
Who are The Five who have been charged? Are they just The Five who are taking the rap because Tyre did them the dirt and went off and died? The police chief intimated that they were just part of culture of the Memphis Police Force which has two thousand and eighty one members. Another seven were subsequently disciplined in connection with the alleged murder.
Who could have guessed that Tyre had a weak constitution? How were The Five to know he had Crohn's disease, and at six foot three inches only weighed a hundred and forty three pounds and obviously was not up to being beaten up. How good were the doctors? What did they miss? For G-d’s sake he was a young man, can’t they manage trauma?
Well, The Five in the dock have names - Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills, Emmitt Martin, Justin Smith and Tadarrius Bean. They are people. They have to have feelings of some sort or another. They aren’t sociopaths or even malignant narcissists. Are they married and do they have children? Indeed Mill's lawyer argued that Mills was a "respectful father and devastated to be accused in the killing". They all must have mothers and fathers. How are the shocked parents reacting to their sons being the poster children of the polecats of America?
A more pertinent question is how come all theses bad eggs came to be in the same basket? They all colluded in this alleged heinous crime.? Four of “The Five” have been disciplined for violations in the course of their duty. In two of the disciplinary actions the charge was they failed to report that force was utilized in the arrest. The enquiring body didn’t bother to investigate whether the force was warranted or not? All that begs the question why these bad eggs were part of an exclusive squad? The Chief who formed the Unit admits that the culture in her department sucks, so anyone she would chosen would have been suspect. Seven more officers have been disciplined over the incident. The culture apparently extended to the EMTs whose job it was to minister to the sick and injured. Who are they? Did everyone who was a bad egg in Memphis enlist either in the police force of their ancillary services? The answer is scary and complex.
Difficult to buck the culture - you just become part of it
It is very difficult to buck the culture around you and defy the prevailing belief system. Hitler could not have effected the scale of genocide that he did if he didn’t receive the buy in from ordinary Germans who bought the lie and its final solution. Daniel Goldhagen’s detailed researched treatise, Hitler’s Willing Executioners - Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, gives conclusive evidence that the collective consciousness of society unquestionably participated in the most cold blooded genocide in living memory.
While the cops of Memphis are not comparable to Hitler’s Germany the psychodynamics are the same. This was really the culture of the Memphis police department, its overseeing disciplinary body, and the Mayor who unquestioningly and gleefully exaggerated the scorecard of SCORPIO’S immediate successes only to condemn The Five when it all hit the fan. He never asked the basic questions as to why, how and who of all those early arrestees In his initial braggadocio. He never gave it a thought. It appeared that Memphis had criminals and crime that they didn’t even imagine. SCORPIO delivered what was expected and more and they weren’t the only show in America as other corpses have revealed.
Richard Balko defined the morphing of the police into “soldiers” in his seminal work, “Rise of the “Warrior Cop. The Militarization of the American Police ”. Since the sixties the quest to combat drugs, crime, terrorists or whatever has led to the empowerment of the police and loss of Fourth Amendment Right protection against illegal searches arrests and the like.
Society’s Solutions to their problems
There thus seems to be an underlying desire to rid society of abstract ill defined problems and profiling the group or race who are the alleged perpetrators In this instance those who are making the streets unsafe are the African Americans. This construct quickly catapults everyday Joes into colluding with the idolatry to stamp out the perpetrators. There is a pattern in this type of scenario. It can escalate into the unbridled abuse of authority with the power of government behind it.
This phenomenon of unthinking collusion, whether written small or written large has the same etiology. There needs to be a a societal ill perpetrated by an entity who are victimizing society. There needs to be a response by those in power, whether it is the mullahs of Iran via the Morality Police combating sin by arresting and raping the Godless hijabless women or the Nazis claiming that their WWI defeat and subsequent economic depression was because of the Jewish vermin. it is the same old same old…..
The problem is failure to think - Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil, Eichman and the Mystic Chassidim
The Chassidic mystics made the pertinent observation as to the origins of behavior - the way you think of a problem results in the way you feel about it and that consequently dictates the actions taken. So if you think society has a problem such as crime and the criminals are predominantly black you can feel justified in taking any action that will solve the problem. The agents carrying out the deeds feel no guilt or remorse as their action is carrying out societal needs.
Hannah Arendt, who is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth Century reported on Eichman’s trial in Israel in 1961, fifteen years after the Nuremberg trials - the same Nuremberg where Hitler had held his rallies. Those trials saw high ranking Nazis tried, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Those trials took place as an extension of the allied fight against fascism and Nazism. Those charged sat in the dock in their blood soaked garb and were not regarded as ordinary individuals. They were regarded as monsters
Eichman’s trial took place away from the stench of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in the sanitized environment of an Israeli courtroom. Germany had long repented, paid reparations and had once again become a respected democratic nation. Eichman did not appear at the trial in his Fascist uniform. Gone was the large cap and the collar with its buttons and Nazi insignia which had served as a frame for his angular evil looking sneering face. The 1961 Eichman was stripped of the trappings of his evil persona. He was balding with his head bare. He was a crumpled aging man in a suit, an ordinary citizen who had been kidnapped from his mundane life in the Argentine. It was surreal to watch the prosecution try him for genocide of six million souls, He claimed matter of a factly that he hadn’t killed one jew. It seemed incongruous that someone who appeared to be a mediocre civil servant was being blamed for mankind’s greatest atrocity.
However surreal and ridiculous his trial was, he maintained he was just carrying out orders. Innocuous as the accused appeared he was the organizer and executioner of six million jews. And there he was looking like everyday you and me. Probably he was living the life of a citizen making ends meet, going to work daily at the Mercedes Benz factory in Buenos Aires. He was indistinguishable from those Germans who voluntarily joined in Hitler’s slaughter while going about their day to day living. One had to assume that he had bought the big lie and any action to eradicate the problem was justified.
Arendt to cope with these paradoxes coined the term the “Banality of Evil”. At its very core it is non thinking mindless, senseless and evil behavior. Arendt concluded that ideologies deaden thought as to what is good and evil. This latter process making society or groups to become easier prey in participating in brutalities. All this is made possible by the massive concentration of bureaucratic and technocratic power in the nations state.
So ordinary folk who live otherwise ordinary lives join in and become numbed to their own thoughtless evil.
The positive legal outcome arising out of the Nuremberg trials was that the defense “just following orders” was no longer accepted in crimes against humanity.
Once "the black male suspect” was subdued……
Once Nichols was senseless and handcuffed and The Five had thoughtlessly and illegally executed the State’s objective, with their flimsy rarely challenged narrative intact, what did The Five talk about? Did they discuss the Super Bowl, their children or what they were going to do off duty when they had shed their resplendent uniforms which confirmed their status and power? Were they off the next day? Would they do do gardening or shopping while dressed in the civilian garb blending in with all around them?
Then The Five had company. What passed between them and the EMT’s in the twenty minutes from the latter’s arrival and Tyre being carted off to the hospital? In all likelihood they had met before. Did they all enquire about each others’ families? - the trivia of daily life intermingled seamlessly with the trivia of evil. All because nobody did any thinking about what was happening in Memphis. As the ex Boston police commissioner observed the sheer volume of arrests was a red flag in and of itself……
Then no one thought and nobody still does that crime is associated with poverty and poor education. Not that that absolves the criminal nor will, even if societal ills somehow are addressed, would crime be eliminated.
Here we go again
So we are in for another trial. The accused will be in their suits and respectfully stand as the Judge enters. Members of their families may be present because they have to have those who love them. Also fresh from interminable interviews the family of Tyre will attend in the hope that justice will be served and some sort of closure to their unspeakable loss will begin. We have already heard all the pious talk by the leaders of society who unthinkingly assume no responsibility for the tragedy. Finally for the gawking public there was the televised church service with the singing, the sermons and the eulogies. The trial itself as the hours of tape unrolls with its brutality will leave unthinking society confused that such barbarism can take place in cold blood.
So before we educate the next generation to think, what can be done? How about "The George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill"?
The underlying psychodynamics have been identified.- the unthinking powerful bureaucratic state and its unthinking soldiers with the unthinking society’s buy in, BUT can anything legislatively be done now to address the problem.
For those who respect the mass of law enforcement officers who risk their lives daily as they did on January 6 surely they are owed legislation that would separate them from these bad apples.
There is on record The George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill, so named after an earlier grotesque incident where a conscientious thinking young bystander recorded on her cell phone the systematic shameless mindless abuse of force resulting in the death of George Floyd. The Bill increases accountability and establishes best practices. The proposed legislation lowers the criminal standard for guilt to “willful or knowing” that their actions were illegal. It limits the immunity that police have from their actions and allows for them to be sued, Also mechanisms for recording and researching complaints against police are put in place. It also bans lethal actions that are known to occur such as choke and carotid holds and racial profiling.
Needless to say the Bill did not receive a vote in the Senate because ten “GOP” members would not break the filibuster. In fact not even two would vote to just have it passed by a majority vote. The Democrats could have prevailed if Senators Sinema and Manchin believed that this was important enough to pass with a simple majority. In the House one “GOP” member voted for it.
The presence of Tyre's parents as guests of President Biden for the State of the Union address served as a stark reminder of the toll that the unthinking "culture" has on African American parents. Biden's gift of empathy removed any hint of the phoniness that some of the State of the Union guests engender, appearing as mere props
Governor Ron Desantis will tell you why he doesn’t support the Bill - because it is WOKE and makes white people feel guilty even though many of the police offenders are black.
AT THE END OF THE DAY
So you have the ideology, the powerful state, the leaders who mandate the soldiers with unthinking society acquiescing to this banality of evil…. until there is a corpse which precipitates an outcry, but no rethink of how this could happen again and again.
Perhaps there should be rethink about who should be issuing citations for speeding and what the job definition of those policing traffic violations should be. Why on earth should those enforcing the law against those with a non functioning taillight be armed to the teeth? Why if someone is pulled over for not stopping dead at a stop sign, if they are black, have to see to it that their hands are visible and not make any jerky movements?
A traffic officer's job definition should just be enforcing the law relating to traffic violations. It should be separated from conventional police activity.
Those in authority must surely wonder why so many who have have broken taillights, allegedly ride recklessly or speed in built up areas seem to resist arrest as well? And the fact that they also happen to be usually not white.
And knowing what we already know it is going to get worse..
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