MEMPHIS—On Friday, officials released video of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, by local cops earlier this month. Even by the standards of a country with a long legacy of police violence, the footage was breathtaking in its brutality.
The redacted clips provide at least some detail on the events leading up to Nichols’ tragic death, which quickly led to the firing of five cops—all Black men—who attacked him. The officers were arrested and charged with murder on Thursday. Two deputies from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office have also been relieved of duty pending an investigation after body-camera footage showed them at the scene, the sheriff announced late Friday.
The video shows that what began as a traffic stop quickly became a violent assault. Then, within minutes, a large group of officers—far more than the five facing charges—were taking part in a sort of mass viewing of an unarmed Black man writhing in pain.
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The cops who beat Nichols got extremely aggressive with someone who was clearly nonviolent—and compliant—almost immediately. When viewing the footage, their own confusion and ineptitude are virtually inescapable.
Dr. Ian Adams, a policing expert and assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, called their behavior “criminal.”
“It’s not clear why they’re screaming expletives, why they have their guns drawn and pointed at him. None of this makes any sense, and none of it represents common, everyday, generally accepted policing practice,” Adams told The Daily Beast. “It’s hard to explain the unexplainable, you know, it’s hard to come up with, like, a rational reason something like this happened other than it’s clear that some of these officers have all completely lost control.”
After removing him from his car, officers quickly have Nichols on the pavement—and beyond pacified. Still, one officer yells, “Bitch, put your hands behind your back,” and warns, “I’ll knock your ass the fuck out.”
Nichols tries around this time the first of what would be many attempts to appeal to their humanity: “You guys are really doing a lot right now. I’m just trying to go home!”
Pepper spray and a taser are very quickly unleashed on Nichols, who flees.
Another body-camera video later shows cops pummeling Nichols’ head as he screams for his mom, before pausing to pepper spray him. In one video, the body-camera lens is obscured but Nichols can be heard calling for his mother over five times, as police yell, “Give me your fucking hands!” One officer screams, “I’m going to baton the fuck out of you!”
Another particularly galling moment captured on a stationary camera features two cops holding Nichols down while a third walks up to deliver a massive kick to his head. About two minutes later, even as more than five cops are present, at least one officer continues to assault Nichols. (The local chief of police has indicated that additional officers beyond those charged with murder may face discipline.)
Police can later be seen crowding together to discuss the incident, with several of them claiming without evidence that Nichols was “on something” and “high” because, as one of them put it, he was “strong as a motherfucker.” After the beating, multiple police officers are seen on pole-camera footage milling around, and appear to be smoking as Nichols remains on the ground in handcuffs.
At one point, an officer seems to blame Nichols for their burning eyes while he lay helpless: “Motherfucker made me spray myself!” Another officer also characterized Nichols as the aggressor: “Motherfucker swung. Bow!” Another claims that Nichols reached for his gun.
Along with the violence, a desperate Nichols screaming for his mother and the amount of time he is left on the ground in pain while surrounded by cops are perhaps the defining elements of the footage.
For weeks, Memphis officials declined to disclose details of the incident. But as information began to leak out through family members and others, officials—from the local chief of police to President Joe Biden—have scrambled to call for calm as they braced for public outcry on par with the George Floyd protests of 2020.
“When that tape comes out tomorrow, it’s gonna be horrific, but I want each and every one of you to protest in peace,” Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, told the crowd at a prayer vigil Thursday night. “And if you guys are here for me and Tyre, then you will protest peacefully.”
By 6:30 p.m. local time, a throng of dozens of protesters who gathered at Martyrs Park in downtown Memphis were walking south to block Interstate 55. Many had not yet seen the video; some felt they didn’t need to.
Others were aghast—even after so much pained anticipation.
“It was disgusting,” Dawn Murphy, 46, told The Daily Beast. “The police treated him like a ragdoll.”
“I’m here because I’m a mother of five sons, one deceased, and also here in support because that could’ve very well been one of my sons,” said Memphis resident Melissa Harwell.
Harwell said she plans to keep the protest going “until we get justice, until they meet our demands.”
The demands include an end to the use of unmarked police cars and plain-clothes officers, the dissolution of the task force which the officers involved belonged to, and the removal of police “from traffic enforcement entirely.”
Kim Jackson, 53, said she came to the protest because she wanted to channel her anger into positive action.
“I was so angry. I wanted to do something about it and I decided, because I’m not a negative person, that I needed to come down here. I have two sons and I have two grandsons,” she said.
“It was horrible,” she said of the video. “I wouldn’t treat a rabid dog the way they treated him.”
Nichols—who had moved to Tennessee from California—has been described by friends as a goofy, optimistic and “deeply loving” father who cared about social-justice issues and had even pondered entering the police force himself to make a change.
So when some of his friends heard initial reports from Memphis police that he had been involved in two “confrontations” with cops and was hospitalized after a traffic stop on Jan. 7, they were shocked.
“He’s not confrontational in that sense. He cries, like, when he gets upset. He may get mad, he wants to be tough, but he starts tearin’ up,” said Kristopher Volker, a longtime friend, calling him a “lover” not a “fighter.”
“What happened was he was just trying to go to his mom,” Volker told The Daily Beast on Tuesday night. “And he, you know, that’s all he was trying to do even, like, 80 meters from his mom’s house.”
Former Memphis cops Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith were arrested and charged on Thursday for murder and kidnapping, with the local district attorney indicating they were responsible for Nichols’ death. At least one officer, Haley, had been previously accused of excessive force while he worked as a corrections officer in 2016.
The officers were part of the fairly new, so-called SCORPION unit of the police department meant to crack down on violence in the city. But since Nichols’ death, the units have been inactive, according to reporting by Fox 13. And in a taped message on Wednesday night, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis called for an independent review of the units.
Two unnamed fire department personnel involved have also been relieved of duty in connection with the tragedy. In addition, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner Jr. said in a statement late Friday that after seeing footage of the incident for the first time, he had “concerns” about two deputies who appeared at the scene after the “physical confrontation” with Nichols. He said an internal investigation was underway into the deputies’ conduct, and they have been relieved of duty for the time being.
In Nichols’ hometown of Sacramento, the founder of the local Black Lives Matter chapter, Tanya Faison, said there were no firm plans for protests yet, noting her phones were quiet as people took in the horrific footage.
“It’s hard watching people that look like you get beaten or killed on a regular basis and… keeping your sanity with that,” she told The Daily Beast. “And then you’ve got people that have experienced it firsthand and lost family members and they can’t watch it at all, and you’ve got people that are angry about it.
“But right now, what we’re seeing the most is people processing.”
