Posted on January 30, 2023

Black Cops Beat Black Perp to Death. Do We Riot or Not?

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, January 29, 2023

On January 7, as the whole world now knows, Memphis police pulled over a 29-year-old black man, Tyre Nichols, and gave him a beating. He looked pretty banged up in this photo taken by his family in the hospital, where he died on January 10.

There was rising black anger — reported nationally and even internationally — with calls for officers to be fired and charged with murder. Everyone assumed the cops were white. On January 17, the Nichols family reported that professional racism-chaser Benjamin Crump would represent them. On January 18, the US Department of Justice announced it was joining the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) on the case, and would sniff out civil rights violations. This was shaping up to be the next great “white supremacy” scandal, but on January 20, the Memphis PD dropped a bomb: All the officers — who had just been fired — were black.

What would happen now, with the racial angle turned upside down? The story was much too big to be brushed aside. The Memphis PD, the TBI, and the Justice Department must have known all along that the officers were black but withheld that detail.

On Thursday, January 26, the men were charged with second-degree murder and aggravated assault. Two Memphis Fire Department employees (race unspecified) were suspended on suspicion they didn’t give Nichols first aid quickly enough. Two county deputies (also race unspecified) were put on leave. It would be hard to expect the authorities to act more quickly and decisively. What more did the people yelling “Justice for Tyre” want?

There was bodycam video of the arrest, and those who had seen it privately said it was awful. With typical restraint, Benjamin Crump called the beating “appalling, heinous, violent.” His co-counsel said the police treated Nichols like “a human piñata.”

The Memphis PD promised to release the videos on Friday, January 27, at 6:00 p.m. Many cities — including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Oakland, Dallas — feared there would be rioting as soon as the clips went public. Storefronts in several cities were boarded up.

This was very strange. First, everyone knew what the videos would show: Black cops beating a black man. Why wait to see them if you want to riot? Second, if police across the country were calling for all hands on deck, what more idiotic time to release videos than Friday evening? Rowdies could already have guzzled a couple of Colt 45s, and had a whole weekend to howl and prance and loot shoe stores.

I predicted no riots. What always brought out the really big, vicious crowds was racism. Throughout the 2020 BLM mayhem, there had always been an element of antifa anarchy and “defund the police,” but the real draw was the thrilling idea of a white cop crushing the life out of a helpless black man in broad daylight. The “racism” angle in this case was muddy — at least to most people.

And by comparison with the glory days of 2020, Friday’s frolics were squibs: small bands of political crazies, not masses of furious blacks and self-righteous white “anti-racists.” In Memphis, which some had feared would go up in flames, the worst that 200 marchers could do was block an interstate for a few hours.

In New York City, a lively crowd gathered in Times Square, and what looks like a white man or a Hispanic jumped on a police cruiser and broke the windshield.

Cops immediately arrested him. There was a crowd around the officers, but unlike in the high, heady days of BLM, they didn’t attack the police and free the jumper.

In Chicago, Ana Santoyo, an anti-police candidate for alderman, led a protest. “It’s not just bad apples. It’s the whole bunch,” she told reporters. She had maybe two dozen supporters.

In New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Boston, meager demonstrations were led by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PLS), without a single BLM banner to be seen. Photos show nutty PLS slogans: “Bosses’ courts. Bosses’ ‘Justice.’ Bosses’ state.” “We need a workers’ Government. Class struggle.” “Smash the racist capitalist state through workers revolution.” It’s mostly deranged white people who swallow that stale Marxism. And, as usual, antifa in New York City issued its invitation:

There were more small-scale demonstrations on Saturday.

Commentary on the case has been predictably brainless. Everyone from the President on down is clearly frustrated by the all-black cast and is straining to work out the racial angle. After watching the video, Joe Biden said, “It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day.” (Everyone, including Benjamin Crump, goes on about police thrashing “black and brown” people, but when’s the last time a Hispanic thug made the news because he got a shiner?)

The New York Times was determined to have us think the problem — even in black-dominated Memphis — is racism, and put out an infographic, which Twitter user @SirSardonic helpfully supplemented in black.

MSNBC got out in front with an article by NyRee Auster: “The racial identity of Tyre Nichols’ killers is irrelevant — white supremacy is still to blame.” That’s because those five black officers “were trained in a system rooted in anti-Blackness,” which means they were “operating in the same racist system with the same racist ideals as their white counterparts.” And best of all: “[They] wrongly believed that their white adjacency gave them the license to do what they did. They were wrong.”

Does Miss Auster really think black cops sit around the station saying, “We as good as white folks now. Less go out and whup some black ass”?

TV commentator Van Jones also had it figured out. Black people “are not immune to anti-Black messages.” “At the end of the day, it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”

Jemele Hill, who boasts on her twitter profile that she is a “contributing writer for The ATLANTIC,” full-caps and all, explained it to her 1,400,000 followers: “The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence. We see people under the boot of oppression carry its water all the time.”

She was quote-tweeting another wise black lady with half a million followers: “Diversifying the police force doesn’t end racism because racism is inherent to the organization of the institution & its daily operation. Racism is what policing is.”

Miss Hill went on: “Policing has everything to do with white supremacy. . . . [It’s] about protecting white folks’ property and shielding them from us.”

Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said, “[It] doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.” There was plenty more of this guff.

These people seem to think black cops are puppets, slaves to the invisible but “entrenched” white supremacy libs see everywhere. It’s much simpler. These men were probably impulsive, low-IQ blacks who should never have gotten a badge and a gun.

First, my police sources agree: The videos show that they were pathetically incompetent. Five big guys couldn’t get cuffs on one perp. They used pepper spray in such a tight knot of people, they were sure to spray each other. They had Nichols on the ground, but he got up and ran away! When they finally caught him again, these bunglers probably wanted to beat him bloody just for making fools of them.

Let’s go back to the notice of their arrests and look when they were hired: One in 2017, two in 2018, and two in 2020.

These were black cops hired by a black-run department to increase “diversity” at a time when veteran officers were streaming out of the city. Even in 2019, before the 2020 George Floyd madness, police departments had a recruiting “crisis,” and no one wants to work in a hive of black crime like Memphis. I have been saying for years that in an era of “all cops are bastards” — and when black officers are called “Uncle Toms” and worse — only thugs, morons, and psychopaths want to wear the uniform.

In 2021, Memphis was so desperate to hire cops it would accept high-school graduates with two years of work experience doing anything. Recruits had to run 1.5 miles in a laughable 17 minutes, 38 seconds. And they collected a $15,000 starting bonus and up to $10,000 in moving expenses.

Here is a story from exactly one year ago that shows how bad things are now. The physical fitness test is “no longer pass or fail . . . just an assessment.” And the department could “waive pre-employment requirements for a person who has been convicted of, pleaded guilty to, or entered a plea of nolo contendere to any felony charge of any violation of federal or state laws or city ordinances relating to force, violence (excluding domestic violence) . . . .” [emphasis added]

That’s right: The rooky Memphis cop who stops you could be a convicted violent felon. Granted, Demetrius and Tadarrius were hired before that official rule change, but I wouldn’t trust young Memphis officers whatever their race.

According to a story just out, the London Metropolitan Police are just like every American police force: desperate for non-whites. So desperate that His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has found Scotland Yard BIPOC officers who are “functionally illiterate.” Is Britain ahead of us, or are we ahead of Britain?

After all the whooping about them, those Memphis officers will have to face the music. The videos look bad, but you never know. One Fox commentator noted the absence of anything that looked like a “death blow,” and wondered what the toxicology report on Nichols would find. And why did Nichols fight the police and run away? I guess his parents never gave him “the talk.” However, the public mood is so ugly that these officers may take stiff plea deals and quietly go to jail. I’d rather they went on trial so we can learn all about their backgrounds and training records. I suspect it wouldn’t be pretty.

Whatever happens, what those officers did to Tyre Nichols looks a lot worse than anything Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd. Mr. Chauvin got 22.5 years on state murder charges, and 21 years on federal charges of depriving Floyd of civil rights. Let’s see what Demetrius and Tadarrius get, and whether black people can be guilty of depriving a black man of civil rights. And if, as Jemele Hill and Congressman Frost have explained, those cops were brutalized by white supremacy, let’s be sure to slap them with hate-crime charges.

The city of Minneapolis coughed up $27 million for the family of George Floyd, a career petty criminal, drug addict, occasional porn actor, and father of five illegitimate children he left scattered around the country. Nichols does not appear to have had a criminal record, had a full-time job with FedEx, and was living at home with his mother and stepfather, rearing a four-year-old son. It’s going to be another fat contingency-fee pay day for Ben Crump.

Of course, our leaders are all shrieking for yet more “police reform.” What fools they are. Memphis will now permanently disband the specialized, high-crime-patrol unit the five officers were in — as if it was the unit’s fault the department hires from the bottom of the barrel. Here’s a reform: Bring back the Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint, incorrectly called the “choke hold.” You don’t cut off the windpipe. You squeeze the side of the neck and cut off blood to the brain. You see it in cage fighting all the time. Memphis, like most departments, probably bans the one technique that would have finished the fight — with no damage to Nichols — in five seconds.

It’s the delirium about “racism” that needs reform. The country is still chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of “white supremacy” when the real problem is the opposite: “Anti-racist” hysteria that drives out good officers and leaves us with the dregs. This problem will be solved only when cities ruthlessly weed out “diversity” incompetents, the profession gets the respect it deserves, and can again attract outstanding, idealistic young men. In other words, at this rate, never.