It feels callous and opportunistic to turn a man’s death into a moment for political and social commentary. Ghoulish pundits with tendentious takes are a staple of the 24-hour social media and cable news circus. A mother has lost a son. A young man, by all accounts, wholly innocent of any crime, has lost his life in a most degrading and brutal way. The decent, immediate human response is emotional: grief, sympathy, anger.
But just as the conscience cries out for retribution, the mind calls for some understanding, some larger meaning in the anguish. We look for cause and consequence in our wider society and legitimately ask what we can learn.
One understandable but inadequate take on the killing of
Tyre Nichols
is the idea that we should feel some satisfaction that justice works. Five police officers beat a young black man to a pulp, rendering him lifeless on the street and he dies three days later. The men are all quickly fired, arrested and charged with murder. Thus, the panglossian says, the majesty of the law at work. Awful as it was, there is no larger lesson here beyond man’s unending capacity for inhumanity to man. A terrible crime is committed, quickly investigated and resolved, and the wheels of justice are swiftly set in motion.
There are so many things wrong with this take but worst of all is that it mistakes justice for right. Justice is only ever retrospective. It is the redress of a wrong. It can never right a wrong. Even if, as we hope, it can help deter future crime, it doesn’t even purport to address the causes and conditions that lead to criminal acts. For that we have to examine individual, social and institutional characteristics—and, if we can, correct them.
From what we know already of the Nichols case, graphically and painfully underscored by the hourlong video released by the Memphis Police Department, we can say, once again, that the quality of policing in some jurisdictions in this country needs reform.
The police do a courageous and indispensable job in protecting the rest of us. They deserve our unstinting support. But we also have a right to expect accountability when things go badly wrong. In Memphis, it seems many things—police recruitment, training and supervision—may have helped to produce the grotesque outcome. Memphis is unlikely to be alone.
But of course the…
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