George Floyd’s death was a missed opportunity to drastically reduce the footprint of American policing. Tyre Nichols’s is on its way to becoming the same. zakcheneyrice writes
,” as one local organizer characterized it. Davis’s decision to disband the unit suggests the department has been chastened by its excess. The immediate result, though, will be a return to the excesses that persisted before SCORPION, which included a use-of-force rate against Black MemphiansA more dramatic vision of progress is seemingly materializing at the federal level.
It’s an acrobatic stretch to assume the bill’s outlook will be any better in the next few months, now that Democrats enjoy a one-vote Senate majority and the House is controlled by Republicans. And that’s besides what’s actually in the bill. The biggest swing in a legally enshrined George Floyd Act would be placing limits on qualified immunity, an untested but potentially useful bid to make cops vulnerable to civil suits.
Most of these conditions had been met in Memphis long before Nichols died. The federal government touting them as its big legislative response to his death amounts to doubling down on the city’s deadly status quo. And that’s being optimistic — the more likely outcome is that the bill doesn’t make it out of either chamber and nothing changes at all.
We’d be back at square one with one substantive exception: Officials have gotten more savvy at preempting public outrage. Open condemnation of the cops’ behavior, the expedient publication of visual evidence, swift criminal charges, somber displays of official mourning — all seem to have a pacifying effect. But as far as actual police violence goes, the outcome so far is shaping up to be less a results-oriented reduction than a public-relations strategy to give the impression of progress.
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