By making an exhibition of the footage of Tyre Nichols’s brutal beating by police officers, the City of Memphis calculatedly situated itself and its police as the conduits to truth.
constituted an event in and of itself. There was, on the part of the Memphis Police Department, an effort to foreshadow and to editorialize, to give the image of five officers beating a twenty-nine-year-old man—a beating that would kill him, three days later—a definitive meaning before it was seen. Speaking with Don Lemon on CNN, in the hours before the Memphis P.D. released the footage, Cerelyn Davis, the police chief, told the public, “You’re going to see acts that defy humanity.
The creation of this atmosphere, one of anticipatory dread, speaks to the years that have passed since the uprisings following’s murder. Before the footage was released, schoolchildren in Memphis were sent home early. Officers in the city and in other metropolitan areas around the country prepared for protests. Nichols’s family gave interviews encouraging a peaceful and polite response from the public.
The City of Memphis has made an exhibition of the footage, entering the video, and the idea of the video, into a lineage of truth-telling documentary, situating the city and its police as the conduits to truth. In the interview with Lemon, Davis did some media analysis, comparing the Memphis footage to that of the 1991 recording of L.A.P.D. officers beating—a recording that was taken by a bystander.
What is the unvarnished truth, the information, supposedly transmitted? In the footage, which was published on Vimeo, on Friday evening, in four different installments, officers descend on Nichols, under the pretense of a traffic stop. They punch him. They beat him with a baton. Nichols attempts to flee. They spray him with pepper spray. They issue, more than seventy. Nichols flees. Nichols is found, and beaten again, until he slumps next to a vehicle, unmoving. All this: data, irrefutable.
There is other information conveyed, and it is moldable. The police-brutality video, its ability to shock and to outrage, to center the ethical viewer’s reaction, can supplant the brutality itself. Theis a storytelling apparatus—a resourceful one. And the killing of Tyre Nichols produced an opportunity for a story.
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