Yes, these police videos are awful to watch — but we must not look away
Memphis releases footage showing arrest of Tyre Nichols who died days after being pulled over by police
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The video showing George Floyd being choked to death by police in Minneapolis in 2020 lasts an excruciating nine-and-a-half minutes.
The cell phone footage captured by a passer-by of Eric Garner being wrestled to the ground in Staten Island in 2014, placed in an illegal chokehold and heard to gasp “I can’t breathe” eleven times before he loses consciousness, is of a similar length.
Despite their different geographic location, and the angles at which the incidents were filmed, both pieces of footage revealed the same truth - that an unarmed Black man was being killed by the police, even as he begged for help.
And now we have seen the video of the arrest of Tyre Nichols, beaten, kicked in the head, struck by a baton and pepper-sprayed, by officers who detained him in what should have been a simpe traffic stop. He is heard calling for his mother.
Lawyers for the man’s family said the footage called to mind the savage 1991 beating of Rodney King by officers in Los Angeles.
The chief of the Memphis Police Department, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, told CNN that was “about the same if not worse”.
The videos are ghastly, horrendous. It is impossible to watch them, or any of those like it, without feeling sick to the stomach. For when you click play, you’re essentially signing up to watch a fellow human being killed.
Moreover, it is someone being killed brutally, oftentimes asking for their mother, or proclaiming their innocence. Watching these videos is not something undertaken lightly, because the scenes can be hard to remove from your memory. They are not there for our entertainment. Yet it is essential that people do watch these videos, or at least enough of us to share what has taken place.
On Friday, the city of Memphis released footage showing five officers arrest Nichols, a 29-year-old father who died after being detained during a traffic stop. His family said he was beaten, and treated like a human “piñata”. Five officers, all of them African American, have been charged with murder.
After Ben Crump, the civil rights lawyer working for the young man’s family, said when he saw the footage it reminded him of the 1991 beating of Rodney King by officers in Los Angeles, the city has been bracing itself for protest and further anger.
Tyre’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, said she had not watched the video, but others in her family who had told her that it was “very horrific, very horrific”.
“And if any of you who have children, please don’t let him see it,” she implored.
That is her choice, of course. Nobody should be forced to experience the last anguished moments of their child, as happened to the mother of Daunte Wright who called his mother after being pulled over for a traffic stop in the Minneapolis suburbs and sought her comfort.
“Am I in trouble,” he asked her.
Moments later he would be shot dead by police officer Kim Potter who thought she was pulling her Taser on him but instead withdrew and fired her service handgun.
“Taser, Taser, Taser,” we hear her yell. Then, moments later, she says: “S***. I just shot him.”
That video footage is also horrific. And yet it was critical to charging Potter with manslaughter, a crime for which she was convicted and in February 2022 sentenced to two years in jail.
Other footage, which, as in the case of George Floyd, was filmed by a member of the public, was crucial to the conviction of Michael Slager, for the 2015 shooting of another unarmed Black man. Walter Scott, 50, was shot eight times in Charleston, South Carolina, as he ran away from the officer after another traffic stop turned into needless tragedy. Slager would be sentenced to 20 years.
The truth is that cell phone footage has become a crucial evidentiary tool put in the hands of lawyers such as Crump and others, a powerful element of the fight for racial justice. And as the prevalence of filming on phones has grown, it has helped activists and communities demand that police forces also equip their officers with cameras and that the public gets to see it.
The cell phone footage does not actually tell us anything new. Communities of colour have long complained about being brutalised by the police. Yet, for the police, and for many among the public, it was too easy to dismiss such claims. Now we have the evidence, provided to us by traumatised members of the public - some of them teenagers - who film these terrible crimes and share them.
And so we owe to those selfless citizens, and to the families, and to society as a whole, two things. Firstly we need to watch that footage, no matter how distressing it is. And then we must act on it.