As another Black man dies at the hands of the police, a lesson in whom the system stands up for

Five Memphis, Tenn., police officers were fired 10 days after civil rights activists say they brutalized a young Black motorist named Tyre Nichols earlier this month when he tried to run away from a car stop.

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

The swift firings were met with rumblings from academics who said that the pendulum was finally swinging toward justice — that the decisive discipline in this case would soon become the model for handling such things. For a moment, I was hopeful that the academics were right, but then I saw pictures of the officers in question. All five of them are Black, and when it comes to the calculus of punishment, Blackness matters.

The Blackness of these officers helped me make sense of the conspicuous silence of the police unions who so readily defend the indefensible in other brutality cases. Their Blackness also allowed me to better understand why politicians in Memphis condemned the officers for 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 Councilman Frank Colvett told the local CBS affiliate in the wake of the firings. “No matter how disgusting this video is, make no mistake, it does not matter what uniform you wear, what kind of shirt you wear, what job you have, you are not above the law. If these men, if this video is as disgusting as I’m told it is, then they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

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I found his words to be fascinating because such statements are rarely given so soon after an incident like this. There is normally a slow-moving investigation. The officers are well-represented by their union, and their right to due process is jealously guarded. However, in this case, the video evidence that police departments so often try to hide was the basis for a lightning-quick decision to terminate those involved.

Make no mistake: If the accused officers are indeed found guilty, I believe they should be punished accordingly. But none of us should be naive enough to ignore the double standard at work here. And acknowledging that hypocrisy need not be read as excusing police misconduct when the suspected perpetrators are Black; on the contrary, it’s meant to underscore that in our nation of inequities, justice — even when it involves those who are charged with enforcing it — is hardly ever meted out equally.

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

“The egregious nature of this incident is not a reflection of the good work that our officers perform, with integrity, every day,” the department said in a statement.

In my view, that means the five officers in question don’t represent the department. More important, the department doesn’t 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 those five Black officers believe that they could mimic the behavior of the kind of white officers who’ve long brutalized Black people without consequence? Why would those Black police officers believe they would be protected?

Perhaps, like so many who get 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 policing was blue. As this case moves forward, however, they will learn, through painful experience, what Black parents have told their children for generations: Black people cannot engage with impunity in the same kind of corruption they might see from their white counterparts. The rules are not the same for us.

Having said that, I still want justice, because these Black officers, who allegedly beat a young Black man so badly that he died three days later, were carrying out the work of a racist system. Rather than standing up against the brutalization of their own people, they engaged in it, and now, the same system they sought to uphold is going to be their undoing.

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