The beating of Tyre Nichols by Black officers shows that a police culture of racial bias is so pervasive it affects even minority officers, reform advocates say.
“I think this happens with police regardless of the color of the police officer. You have spent time in the indoctrination process, and part of that indoctrination is certain people on their face — from what some would call cultural bias, or others would call internalized white supremacy — you’re indoctrinated to believe that certain groups are more prone to criminal behavior than others,” he said. “And so you treat Black people as if they are guilty until proven innocent.
“That’s one of the most insidious characteristics of the system, because we may buy into a notion that because they’re Black means they can’t possibly have adopted the norms and values of the system,” said Enyia, policy and research manager for the Movement for Black Lives, a national advocacy coalition aligned with the broader Black Lives Matter movement.Many of the highest-profile deaths, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown, were due to the actions of white officers.
The officers charged in Nichols’ death drew condemnation for being Black men who committed fatal violence against another Black man.on Wednesday, the Rev. Al Sharpton said that while he was in Memphis for the service, he visited the site where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. He said King was in Memphis to fight for Black city workers to be able to work in sanitation and as police.
Not far away from the hotel balcony where King was fatally shot, the Black officers “beat a brother to death,” Sharpton said in a eulogy.Addressing the officers, he said: “There’s nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us that fight to open doors that you walk through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight to get you through them doors.”
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