This tragedy almost sent me straight over the edge. The buildup of rage after countless other police contacts or stops where minorities who happened to be black, brown or Asian ultimately ended up dead.
How many times does this have to happen in the United States, and in other countries, before we finally get it? The system is broken and badly needs fixing, one police department at a time. In this instance, five Memphis African-American or other black police officers have been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression.
First off, police departments and services need to deal with The Blue Wall of Silence, where cops who denounced violent behaviour by their colleagues sometimes ended up being demoted or fired. That partially explains why officers do not stop fellow officers on the scene. They do nothing, or worse yet, get in on the retaliatory act. In this case, they were seething that Nichols had got away, and no doubt couldn't wait to catch up with him, which they quite obviously did.
All this talk about supervisory officers -- sergeants or other cool heads -- not being on the scene. Well, I would put it to you that the statistics must be interesting: what percentage follow their training and actually de-escalate and what percentage do not?
Then there are the other contributing causes such as racism, which does not seem to have played a role here as none of the fired officers seems to have been racist. Then we come to the first elephant in the room: undiagnosed and/or untreated PTSD. What role did that possibility play in connection with this traffic stop? Are police forces screening for that with great regularity, if at all? Ditto for other first responders, but I digress.
And finally, the biggest elephant: the demigod complex, where ingrained individual personality defects and complexes lead to this kind of outrageous behaviour by individual officers. All departments should require that each officer be psychologically evaluated prior to being hired and regularly thereafter while on the force. Period. That would steadily weed out the nut bars.
Ask yourselves why major reform is often blocked, and that brings you to police brotherhoods, as they used to be called. These police unions are too powerful and badly need reform so that they can no longer block reforms or individual internal police accountability.
So, that's my take on this sad waste of yet another human life. Now it's up to the courts and the jury.
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