Tyre Nichols

[Dill]

(01-28-2023, 04:03 AM)guyofthetiger Wrote: This guy was killed by 5 police officers in Memphis. All are black including the police chief. The officers were arrested and charged with second degree murder. I watched the video and they beat him to death. This makes the police look bad and there will be protests. Some are claiming it was racist even though only blacks were involved. IMO the officers violated many protocols and let anger supersede reality. This will take a while for police to overcome.

Yeah, Guy, the news media are treating us to a range of responses and diagnosis to this.

On the liberal side many, like Van Jones and Al Sharpton, see this as a problem of police culture informed by racism. But the response by Memphis' black female police chief looks decisive--fire the officers involved immediately and arrest them for manslaughter. Release the video as soon as possible, if that is what the family wants. Such action, signaling justice might be trending in this case, may prevent the kind of rioting which followed Rodney King, George Floyd, and others. We'll see.

On the right, diagnosis runs quite a different direction.

On Tucker last night a black conservative blames the whole mess on black men raised without fatherly authority and a police department run by a woman. Tucker thinks there is obviously no racism involved because it was blacks killing a black. 

Hannity sees it otherwise. Racism IS the cause, he says, but by that be means "REAL" racism--i.e., Blacks and liberal civil rights activists who still "see racism everywhere." 

Both Tucker and Hannity showed segments of the beating, but spent most of their time on impending protests and an Antifa flyer calling for people to gather and attack police buildings in New York. "Who is behind Antifa?" Tucker asks. "Why don't we know?" A Hannity guest laments the difficulty of hiring police officers now days, given the public criticism of police for killing unarmed men and women. An ex-policeman, his focus was mainly on flagging the lack of leadership on the site of the beating, and raised questions about the wisdom of a "scorpion squad."

Unarmed Ashli Babbit was "murdered" by Capitol police (as she was breaking through a door at the head of a violent mob in the Capitol seeking to execute Pelosi and Pence) and no one suspended the killer or released his name. Double standards and liberal hypocrisy.

It will be interesting to see how these narratives develop, complicate, and conflict in the wake of the video release and, eventually, the trial of the killers.