As another black man dies at the hands of police, a lesson in which the system defends

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Five Memphis police officers were fired 10 days after civil rights activists said they brutalized a young black motorist named Tire Nichols earlier this month as he tried to flee from a car stop.

Nichols, a 29-year-old father, was hospitalized after being confronted by police on January 10 and died three days later.

The swift dismissals were met with rumblings from academics who said the pendulum was finally swinging towards justice and decisive discipline in this case would soon become the model for handling such things. For a moment I hoped the academics were right, but then I saw pictures of the officers in question. All five are black, and when it comes to calculating punishment, blackness matters.

The blackness of these officers helped me make sense of the blatant silence of police unions that so readily defend the indefensible in other cases of brutality. Their blackness also gave me insight into why Memphis politicians convicted the officers of a beating that Nichols family attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci described as violent and savage after reviewing video evidence.

We are a city of laws, Memphis City Councilman Frank Colvett told the local CBS affiliate following the layoffs. No matter how disgusting this video is, make no mistake, no matter what uniform you wear, what kind of shirt you wear, what job you do, you are not above the law . If these men, if this video is as disgusting as I said, then they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

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I found his words fascinating, as such statements are rarely made so soon after an incident like this. There is normally a slow investigation. Officers are well represented by their union and their right to due process is jealously protected. However, in this case, the video evidence that police departments so often try to hide served as the basis for a lightning-fast decision to fire those involved.

Don’t get me wrong: if the accused officers are indeed found guilty, I think they should be punished accordingly. But none of us should be naive enough to ignore that there is a double standard here. And acknowledging that hypocrisy should not be construed as condoning police misconduct when the alleged perpetrators are black; on the contrary, it aims to highlight that in our nation of iniquities, justice, even when it involves those who are responsible for applying it, is almost never done in the same way.

According to the Memphis Police Department, Constables Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith were fired for violating departmental policies on the use of force, duty to intervene and duty to help.

The egregious nature of this incident does not reflect the good work our officers do, with integrity, every day, the department said in a statement.

In my view, this means that the five officers in question do not represent the department. More importantly, the department does not represent them.

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That’s what those black officers should have understood. While working in the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, in a profession whose origins are rooted in slave patrols, why would these five black officers believe they could mimic the behavior of the gender of white officers who have long brutalized black people without consequence? Why would these black policemen believe that they would be protected?

Perhaps, like so many others who are caught up in racist systems, they believed it when they were told they were part of a team. Maybe they internalized the rhetoric when they were told that the only color that mattered in the font was blue. As this case progresses, however, they will learn, through painful experience, what black parents have told their children for generations: black people cannot engage in the same type of corruption that their white counterparts might see. The rules are not the same for us.

That said, I still want justice because these black officers, who allegedly beat a young black man so badly that he died three days later, were doing the work of a racist system. Rather than stand against the brutalization of their own people, they committed to it, and now the same system they sought to uphold is going to be their downfall.

This should be a lesson for every black person working in a system steeped in racism. Do what you can to stand up against the system, because when you’re in trouble, that system won’t defend you.

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