February 10, 2023 • 45 mins
We talk about the state of street resistance against the police in the wake of the footage of police murdering Tyre Nichols.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, It's meet James, and just before we start today,
we're going to discuss in quite some detail, the being
to death of Tyree Nichols by the police in Memphis.
And if you don't want to hear that detail, that's
totally fine, but we wanted to let you know now
so that you didn't get surprised by it in your
money commute or whatever. So if you want to skip
(00:20):
this one, if you don't listen to that one, then
we are trying to give you that warning ahead of time.
Discourse Discourse. Discourse is about podcast. I don't know it
could happen. Here is the podcast that you're listening to. Uh.
(00:43):
If you came here list looking for another podcast, then
you fucked up, But you fucked up in a good
way because that podcast was trash. Thank you for being
here with us today. Who all? Who all? Who? Who?
Who's here? Who are you? People? We're in Eln? Sure? Yeah,
I'm THEA long I'm here. Wow, I'm I'm James. I'm
(01:07):
a little unsure about who I am beyond that, but
that's who I am. It's okay. I'm Garrison Davis and
I'm here to engage in discourse. I there's nothing I
love more than discourse. Um. Speaking of discourse, today we're
gonna be talking about, well, I don't know, it's not
really discourse, but today we're gonna be talking about the
(01:27):
reaction to the video of the Memphis police murdering Tyree Nichols.
In particularly, we're gonna be talking about the way in
which kind of the left responded to this, both online
and kind of public channels and actually in the streets.
Because I think there's some interesting stuff here, um, and
(01:48):
I think it's kind of worth analyzing outside of uh,
you know, the broader conversation about police violence and you know,
uh that sort of thing, because I think there's some
interesting story of tactical stuff to kind of talk about here. Um.
And yeah, that's that's that's what we're going to be
doing today. UM. In case you've been kind of stuck
(02:11):
under a rock, uh, you should probably be aware that
on January seven, three, police from the Memphis p D
Scorpion Unit, which was a unit with a very sinister
name that existed to effectively over police, um a chunk
of the city of Memphis. Uh yeah, um, pulled over
(02:32):
Tyree Nichols, a twenty nine year old black man. UH.
Tyree was an amateur photographer. UM, he liked skating. He
had Crohn's disease. UM, he was just driving around that night. UH.
And the encounter, as we would later see on the video,
went pretty much immediately violent on behalf of the police.
Nichols was beaten very badly, and he died in the
(02:54):
hospital three days later. And for the first few days
after the killing, obviously, you know this happened, the police
did this, and then rumors started kind of spreading in
the immediate wake of the beating, but very little was
known for certain about like what had happened, UM, about
you know what, why this had had gotten escalated so quickly. UM.
(03:15):
One of the first kind of signs that this was
going to become a thing on the national uh in
terms of like the national attention span, was when the
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in the U. S. Department of
Justice independently opened investigations into the beating. UM after reviewing
body camera footage from multiple officers on scene, five Memphis
(03:36):
p D officers were dismissed on January. Three days later,
an autopsy commissioned by Tyrese family found extensive bleeding caused
by a severe beating. Outrage around the killing grew rapidly,
and it was announced by the Memphis Police that body
camera footage of the stop and of the beating would
be released to the public. Uh. This started the rumor
mill really churning up. UM. There was kind of a
(03:59):
couple of leaks from people who had seen the footage
I think who were close to the case, and they
all sort of described it as uniquely bad. The term
that I heard a lot was that it's worse than
the Rodney King beating. Um. This is just the way
in which people started talking about it. And as more
details filtered out, there were conversations around the country, particularly
folks on the activists left, who started talking about the
(04:21):
need to prepare for what they suspected would be the
aftermath of the video's release. UM. And one of the
things that was kind of kind of worth discussing here
is that in the immediate, like immediately before the video
came out, a lot of the conversations that people on
the left were having and that people in law enforcement
we're having kind of focused around the same expectations, which
(04:41):
was that there would be widespread protests and rioting as
a result of the release of this video. UM, police
departments around the country entered high alert. Riot squads were
prepped UM and then kind of on the other side
of things and sort of open channels on Twitter and
massed on and in person, and a number of of
of different cases, distant people you know who claimed to
(05:02):
be that online talked about their expectations too. I heard
variations of the phrase, you know, it's going to be
a really hot year. This is going to like lead
into a particularly aggressive summer. On the ground, people are
going to make the burning of that precinct in Minneapolis
look tame. You know, get your gear together, check in
with your friends, everything's about to go off. UM. There
was a lot of chatter kind of along those lines,
(05:24):
and I don't know, I didn't really speak up too
much about this, but my kind of thinking, as folks
were sort of anticipating the reaction to this was I
suspected that the actual reaction on a mass scale to
the video's release was going to be more muted and
law abiding than than people were expecting at the time.
(05:45):
And I guess the primary reason that I felt this
way was simply that kind of the vibes were off.
It just didn't feel like folks were ready for that
kind of a response. Um, but I do kind of
have a fact based reason for why I was anticipating
that as well. UM. On January, two days before the
video's release, five Memphis p D officers were arrested and
charged with murder, kidnapping, assault, a bevy of very serious charges.
(06:08):
Immediately after that, three firefighters T. E. M. T s
and a police lieutenant who had been on scene after
the beating were fired for failing to assess and provide
emergency care to Nichols on scene. And there's a couple
of ways to view what happened here. I think the
less optimistic one is that the state simply made a
pragmatic decision to throw these guys onto the bus. That's
definitely what happened. The more optimistic way to look at
(06:31):
this is that because people had rioted so hard for
so long in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the
state felt like it had to throw these guys under
the bus rather than, you know, risk another year of rage.
And this is also correct. I think both of these
things are are pretty accurate ways to look at what happened.
The idea that the release of the footage of Tyree's
murder would lead to massive protests was not quite universal,
(06:53):
but I didn't notice that a lot of the people
who felt similarly to me expressed the belief that if
people didn't riot over what had happened to Tyree, that
was due to a mix of liberal cowardice and racism,
since most of the officers who beat Tyree to death
were themselves black. And I think this is kind of
a short sighted and unfair take, and I'll talk about
why shortly. On January Friday, the Tyree Nichols videos were
(07:16):
released by the Memphis Police Department. UM, along with a
lot of you. I watched them all immediately, UM, and
you can find there's a description on my Twitter page.
It's turned currently pinned to my profile of the video
if you haven't seen it but want to know what
happened there. UM To kind of summarize it in brief,
it's it's very ugly. Uh. Tyree is immediately calm as
he's pulled over and taken from his car. The police
(07:39):
are not calm. He attempts to de escalate them. They
accuse him falsely of resisting, then they mace him and themselves.
I think in general that the inciting incident for the
beating was the incompetent use of mace by these officers.
They hurt themselves, they got pissed, and then they beat
Tyree because they were angry at themselves for macing themselves. UM.
(08:00):
It's also kind of worth noting that a white officer
who has since been fired as well, also deployed his
taser on the young man. There's been some kind of
this was kind of left out of a lot of
the initial summaries of what had happened. Uh, that guy
has now been fired. UM. And yeah, it's it's bad.
The video is is very unpleasant and very brutal. UM.
(08:20):
Watching it, though, I think kind of the thing that
struck me most was how much like a normal traffic
stop a lot of this was. UM. I think that
if you know, they had gone a little bit less
hard and beating him a little less badly and he
had survived, they probably would have charged him with resisting
arrest and assault on a police officer. UM. And who
knows how the case would have gone. You can hear
(08:42):
the police preparing for this eventuality in the footage, one
officer claims that Tyree went for his gun. There's no
evidence of this in the footage, uh, And you can
kind of hear them all working to get their stories
straight after they beat Tyree Um for the inevitable court case.
More officers and emergency personnel arrive on scene as he's
just kind of laying there, and none of them seemed
(09:02):
to find what's happened peculiar or noteworthy, which is interesting
because immediately prior to the video's release, police departments around
the country all issued statements that were basically identical, condemning
the officers who had beaten nichols Um, saying basically, this
behavior is unacceptable. These men are bad apples. This is
like an extreme example that does not represent policing values.
(09:25):
And there's a couple of things that are are interesting
about this. One of them is that the actual way
in which emergency responders on scene treated the beating kind
of puts the lie to that, because nobody acts as
if anything outside of the normal has occurred. And the
other thing that is noteworthy is the uniformity of these
(09:45):
these messages by police departments around the country. I have
not actually seen that happen before. There was kind of
a version of this that occurred in the wake of
the George Floyd video, but it was much more cohesive
prior to the release of the Tyree Nichols video. UM.
That said, there were no widespread riots or acts of
property destruction. After the video was released. There were protests
(10:08):
in a number of cities, most notably in Memphis, UM,
but compared to things were very subdued. There was not
kind of widespread property destruction or rioting in Portland, which
was obviously the site of intense radical street actions. In
there were two fairly small marches. UM. I'm not gonna
delve into this in tremendous detail, but there were kind
(10:30):
of allegations from one of the marches that the larger
and less radical of the two was an op designed
to take numbers and energy away from the radical march.
There were confrontations between members of both groups, and while
the overall story, again is not worth spending time on,
the gist of it is that very little happened. Now
this is not kind of limited to Portland's Atlanta, Georgia
(10:52):
is probably the city in the US today that's been
the center of the most effective radical protests against law
enforcement and the history of attempts to stop and stabotage.
The construction of Cops City, which is obviously a massive
police training compound in Atlanta's largest urban forest, has been
well documented by by Garrison Davis UM as well as
a number of other reporters. UM. I do think it's
(11:12):
worth noting that days before the Nichols video was released,
Atlanta police shot and killed a forest defender, Tortu Guida,
and a moderately large protest followed, where protesters smashing windows
and lighting one cop car on fire. This was the
kind of action that I think most of the activists
I observed expected in the wake of the Nichols video
(11:32):
as well, but we simply didn't see that. I'm just
going to butt in here for a little bit and
you'll you'll you'll hear more about that riot slash protest
in Atlanta next week. UM. I'm putting together a series
on it that'll that'll be out soon. But definitely one
of the things that was talked about a lot in
Atlanta was the upcoming release of this video and the
(11:57):
potentiality of this video getting released shortly after the death
of Tortuguita at the hands of police. Kind of both
of these things feeding off each other into a into
a similar like level um uprising. And this was like
no one was like for sure about this, Like no
one was like saying, this is absolutely definitely gonna happen,
(12:19):
But it was something that was definitely thought about. UM,
it was something that was definitely considered. I think, honestly,
if the the video was set to come out originally
on like the Monday or Tuesday following the big downtown
protest in Atlanta, UM, it was supposed to come out
just a few days later, and that that didn't happen.
(12:42):
It was delayed once again for further further into the week. UM.
I think if it came out sooner, I think that
could have fed off momentum in a pretty considerable way.
I think a few things happened both in Atlanta that
in the in the next few days that kind of
stunted possible possible for their protest. UM National Guard was deployed.
(13:05):
UM police in Savannah were ordered to start arresting people
and shutting down gatherings of over fifteen uh specifically for
like including vigils, and in Atlanta, obviously there was people
getting really pretty pretty inflated, uh high level felonies and
domestic and domestic terrorism charges simply for being simply for
(13:25):
being present at a protest UM. So I think those
those things kind of all in all impacted people's ability
to like prepare for you know, a sequence of protests
which there was someone there was someone in l a
for for like a day or two. The ones in
Memphis were pretty big, but I think they the timeline
(13:49):
in which they released the video is definitely should be
considered in terms of when they chose to release it
um to like yeah, in terms of the state's goal
of preventing you know, large large scale protests. But that
was definitely something that was talked about a lot during
during like the little over a week that I was
(14:12):
that I was in Atlantis, because everyone was getting ready
for this, Like everyone heard that this is going to
be like the worst of ADEO that we've seen since
Rodney kinging like that that that that was the way
it was. It was thought up of like on the ground,
you know, just like word of mouth being being passed um,
and people were definitely like preparing, like preparing themselves for it,
(14:36):
like like like thinking, like thinking about like what's going
to happen if this is like, if this really is
the most horrific thing, what is the appropriate response to that?
And and this is kind of a lot of what
I wanted to talk around because you have sort of
Georgia law enforcement. There's this this riot, and the response
(14:56):
to that, as well as the response to the tree
set is a series of dem stick terrorism charges, um.
And then this video comes out and there's not a
mass like radical street response to it, and it it
seems to me and Garrison you can correct me if
I'm wrong that a big part of that is people
in Atlanta were kind of not willing to throw more
(15:18):
lives and bodies at the police without kind of more
of a cohesive plan of what to do given the
severity of the repression that that was being engaged in.
I mean, obviously can't comment on people's votivations or like
plans for for for stuff, because that's not something that
I would be would be privy privy to. Yeah, um,
(15:41):
so I I don't know, there's there's there's a lot
of stuff. I mean, like I think a big part
of why I heard a lot about it in Atlanta
was one because a friend of a lot of people
who were involved in the forced and the force events
got killed by police a few days earlier. And two
Memphis is only a few hours way from Atlanta, Like
(16:01):
it's it's it's not it's it's it's not that far,
and it's a big part of the stuff in Atlanta
is like solidarity with struggles that are not just in
your immediate vicinity. And you could argue that Memphis really
is in the immediate vicinity of Georgia. Um, but like
that that type of cross cross state solidarity is is
(16:24):
a big part um. But yeah, I can I I
could not comment on on on why why people did
or did not choose to do specific things. I think
that that's that's up for people themselves. Yeah, I want
to want to put words into anyone's mouth. But it
was kind of interesting because I I paid attention a
lot to the reaction, and there were a lot of
(16:45):
folks talking about how disheartening it was that there were
not more of the kind of radical actions that they
wanted to see in the wake of the video coming out,
And I'm that's kind of the thing I wanted sort
of to talk most around because I feel very mixed
around this, But broadly speaking, I guess I'm glad that
(17:05):
we didn't see a repeat of the part of that
was folks standing up in front of cop shops until
riot police came in and getting charges against them, because
I just don't think that that works right now. I
don't think it works is functional anymore. Um, I don't
think it actually hurts the state because the reaction, like
(17:28):
there was a period of time early in those first
couple of months in particular, where you could see the
police were off balance. Obviously in like Minneapolis with the
burning of the Third Precinct, was was this kind of
sea change moment um, but you could see it in
a number of cities that like they didn't really know
what was going on, and they were themselves concerned with
how out of control the situation had gotten. And then
(17:51):
it kind of morphed later in the year to I
think a situation they could control very well where there
were these acts of fairly minor property destruction and then
a bunch of people would get picked up and charged.
And I think that while I understand like the desire
to react that way and to do something, um, kind
of very firm and uh and radical in response to
(18:15):
state violence like this. I'm also like deeply concerned about
people not throwing away months and years of their lives
fighting charges. Yeah. I mean a big part of it
is is people learning that treating protesters as disposable meat
bags to throw against the wall of the state is
(18:35):
kind of a bad idea. Um. Yeah, And there's I
think this is something that that that was talked about
in conversations just just like regarding like, hey, this video
is going to come out, what do you think it's
going to happen. Like there's just a lot of the casual,
casual conversations, but like there was a lot to make happened.
(18:56):
A lot of things contributed to the intensity and the
length of those protests. I think, uh, COVID being a
pretty big part. This was a few months into the pandemic.
People have been stuck in their homes now for a
few months and not really like prepared for that. Like
at this at this point, we're kind of we're all
(19:16):
kind of used to being in our house a lot
more now, But back then it was it was new
for a lot of people. So I think the opperaty
the opportunity to get out of the house for what
seemed like an important reason. I think was a really
big part of people. People being out of a lot
of work was a really big part of because a
lot of people did did not have the types of
(19:38):
jobs that they might have now, did not have the
jobs they had like in like the months before. It's
maybe because I can't really think of another example like
this from history. Obviously a lot of uprisings occur when
people are suddenly out of work, but this was a
mix of people are suddenly out of work and they
suddenly they all have cash like that, that which contributed
(20:02):
in a lot of ways because like that, that was
I think what funded a lot of you know, people
bringing in food and people bringing in like pallets of
water and getting gas masks and stuff as they had
these sort of checks for you know, as a result
of like COVID relief, which was an interesting situation as
well that hasn't been replicated since. I think there's there's
(20:32):
another very important factor of this that doesn't get talked
about that much, which is just the weather. Like if
if you, if you, if you, if you go back
and look at when the largest police like largest anti
police protests in the US have happened, right, They either
start like late spring, early fall, or just the middle
of the summer. And there's the reason. Yeah, Like then
this is I think another this is this is the
(20:53):
thing up in Chicago, right was it was just really
fucking could and I mean this this affects actually circles too.
But it's like you can't get the critical mass, which
just regular people in the streets when it's like twenty degrees.
I think the other side of that is, um, just
summer vacation of a lot of a lot of the
people who go the hardest at these protests are people
(21:14):
in high school. UM. And during winter, fall, spring kids,
kids are in school during during summer, uh, people have
people under the age of eighteen have a lot more
free time on their hands. So I think that is
another contributing factor. UM. And I think there's there's there's
(21:34):
one other aspect which is very sinister um And but
I think is worth talking about in terms of how
of how the state may have been trying to frame
this to like to to frame the release of this
video too kind of like curtail the the the the
(21:56):
the intensity of any type of like um of a
protest revolter up racing. Now obviously that there was like
the fucked up nature of like making this feel like
a world premiere of like a snuff film was like
it was it was. It was like a weird a
weird aspect, which I think it encouraged the video to
be to be something that is consumed versus something that's
(22:18):
actually like watched and like, oh, this is a fucked
up thing that we that we need to do something about. Instead,
it turned it into this like element of consumption and
the other aspect for this in terms of a lot
of hardcore activists like like people who have thrown down
in the streets before, people who have who have who
have seen fucked up ship is that the intensity, what
(22:38):
was the violence depicted on this video was framed as
being extremely horrific, being being a very very unusual a
very um like uncommon but but but but horrifying display
of violence and display of brutality by the police. This
is this, This is what police departments were faring it as.
(22:58):
This is what the President of the United Its was
framing this as like this this is a case of
a few of a few bad actors who who did
an egregious um but you know, uncommon thing. And I
think when a lot of people who have thrown down
watched this video, it just reminded you of stuff that
you've seen before, Like, yeah, they saw a thing they
(23:19):
had seen. It wasn't It was not shocking in the
same way that it was getting framed as. Because what
separates this from most of the arrests that happened in
Portland during is very little Like one or two punches
that were that were thrown just a little bit too
hard is all that separates this from most like violent
police arrests, Like this was not an uncommon display of violence.
(23:43):
This was an ordinary, an ordinary encounter that just a
few things were pushed just barely over the edge. And
I think a lot of people watched, like my first
reaction was like, oh, like this, this is not as
bad as what I thought like this and that that
that should be a condemnation of the police's actions, Like well,
that's why I think one of the most important things
(24:05):
to watch is how the other cops who were not
present for the beating, but who show up immediately after
or at the end of because some of them did
watch the others beat him. How they react because they're
just kind of even the m T R. Oh, yeah,
this has happened, but we we we do a stand back.
When this happened, pizza people, the people on the ground
(24:27):
were not concerned. Like it was not you could you
could slowly watch because like a lot of this video
was not of the actual beating. It was it was
of the aftermath, and you you you could you could
watch these cops slowly start to realize that maybe they
went a little too hard, just very slowly over the
course of thirty minutes. But for most of the time
(24:49):
they're on the ground, they're like making jokes. They are
talking about how fun, like how fun it was to
beat up this person and there facing each other. That
is most of the video. I think it's worth noting
like a couple of things. One like it's extremely long,
Like I'm not in the in the way that the
George Floyd video like fits into the attention span of
(25:11):
stuff we consume on our telephones at a time versus
versus like an hour of footage. Right, Yeah, if Tyree
Nichols had just been seriously disabled, have life altering injuries,
been charged with disting rest all the things that very
plausibly could have happened if a couple of punches had
handed in different place, this body camera footage would have
been denied under the investigative exemption, right then have said no,
(25:35):
we're investigating his resistance of arrest. You can't you can't
see it, and none of this ship would have happened.
And like, yeah, the normalcy of so much other than
the outcome. I don't know that that stripped some of
the rage away, but it's important context. I think a
few things I mean, and this is again one of
(25:57):
the things that I think you can see from this
that is evidence is sort of a positive long term
result too, and it's it's a very mixed bag when
I say it's positive, but that is kind of a
positive sign. Is that they acted so quickly to throw
all of these guys. They are firing and charging a
(26:18):
lot of city employees over this. It's going to be
between all of the people fired and all of the
people charged, more than a dozen people by the time
this is all done, which I can't think of another
time when that has happened this quickly over an incident
of police violence. And they did that not because it's
the right thing to do, but because they were scared,
(26:39):
and again I do I want to emphasize here the
thing that they're scared of is not that like radical
left wing protesters will take to the street. It's that
liberals and more political they know that the consequence of
the cops beating someone to death is that, like someone
suck a mom will fucking abandon how many vans wing
hammer into your cops show if you don't do this,
(27:02):
do like give a scapegoat, right, like do the fair
the bad minimum? And so the positive the thing that
I can say that is probably positive about this is
that it does show there's still some fear there on
their behalf. The thing that's negative is that, like, well,
it it worked, because I will say, on a moral level,
I think a wide variety of radical actions are morally
(27:23):
justified by what was done to Tyrene Nichols. Now that said,
like back to the sort of the point we're making
the start of this, I don't particularly urge or encourage
that just because, like I don't like seeing people get
arrested and charged and spend years of their life fighting
ship in court um for the chance to like, let's say,
(27:45):
carry out minor acts of property destruction on a cop shop. Um,
I don't think like that sort of activism works right now. Um,
it certainly doesn't work without them, without the critical mass
of like liberals sort of behind it, without enough people
saying like we like again you look at like the
(28:05):
fact that the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis
is still one of the most popular things in modern
American politics. But that was the product of a fairly
unique moment, And I just don't I see some positives
in like the lingering fear of that moment, But I
also don't see the material conditions that make me think
(28:26):
it's something like that is coming again in the immediate future.
And especially because this this situation around this video demonstrates
how much more effort the state's putting into trying to
prevent things from happening before they start. Like there was
a lot of like inter agency work put into having
all of these local police departments release statements, having the
(28:48):
FBI release statements, having uh president like having having the
president release statements, and it's it is all made slightly
more bizarre considering that the contents of the video are
not the on on the level of like uncommon or
like rare, rare displays of violence that the police do,
like this is this is this is relatively standard, um
(29:10):
and that that kind of one thing I've been thinking
about is like why did they choose this video? Like
why did they why did they make this one? Like
what were they afraid of, like for this video, because
like other other other videos have come out in the
past few years, like other like other police killings have happened,
(29:31):
like the police killings all the fucking time, but they
they did a lot of work on this one specifically,
um and it it's kind of it's kind of interesting that,
like why why they chose this specific video to to
dedicate all of this work into because not not only
did they like you know, denying stuff, but they also
they like they like hyped it up. They're like you
(29:53):
using this as like an example, Yeah, like like using
this as an example, like here, this is what bad
cops look like. Watch us punish these bad cops. Well,
but I think I think I think there's a rate.
I think there's a huge racial aspect of this, right,
which is that like you know, like the cops are
getting prosecuted. Are only the black cops who are involved
in this right, and I think that's a huge part
of this entire strategy. I think that's why they framed
(30:15):
this as exceptional violence, is to play on people's racism, right.
I think I think that's why I think person why
this is allowed to happen, which was that yeah you
can it is. It's like even inside the police it
is a lot easier to throw black cops under the
bus that it is that throw white cops under the bus.
That's just how the system works, and it doesn't trigger
that same like visceral response right that that we all
(30:36):
had to seeing the George Floyd video. I don't think
quite like like there is age old tradition of white
men doing violent to black men on behalf of the state.
And I think also it's it's also easier politically inside
of the police departments because I think I think there
would have been a lot more pushback from like the
police part Like there hasn't been much that I've seen
like internal pushback like from inside and police partments, because
(30:59):
I I think if ituld have been five white cops,
I think this would have been a huge fight, and
I think you would have had like the fucking police
union like calling Biden like an anti cop, like whatever.
But I I think I think these were people who
they were, Like we could tell these people onto the
bus and doesn't looking matter because who cares Yaity isn't
there for him? I think those are I mean, that's
(31:20):
certainly like a significant aspect of why like this was
the one they focused on. But I also think a
major aspect of it is that it shows and records
the reaction of other city employees to this, and you
can see in real time the police putting together um
story like it's it. There's I think a few things
(31:43):
about this that are are really unique, but even I
don't know the it's relatively unusual to have an angle
which is not like the body camera, right, which really
I think the violence in this was was captured and
depicted in a way which was more or explicit than
you would get many individual cops body camera. And like
(32:04):
the fact that they most of the time when cops
kill people, they do it with guns, right or maybe
to taste sera or something like that. The fact that
they took minutes, you know, like several minutes to be
a man to death. It's it is just it should
We've we've said like how this isn't unusual, and it's not,
But it doesn't mean it's not repulsive. No, no, no,
it's sucking disgusted by it. It's it's nightmarish. Yeah, the
(32:28):
point is that, yeah, it's it's it's it's even more
nightmarish considering how common this is, because yes, they did
spend a few minutes doing this, but it was really
only I think one or two punches that threw it
right over the edge, Like it wasn't just a punch.
Is the thing that I think one of the things
that I saw that I think was probably critical and
why he died. No, it was when they tackled him.
(32:51):
His head bounced against the ground with a significant amount
of force. There's a number of like a perfect store
and the factors, right that went into making this the
incident that they talked about, and like this the incident
that didn't start two. I guess it's no one particular thing,
it's all these things that led to it. And I
do think also, like we have Joe Biden as president, right,
(33:14):
like a lot of the same bullshit it's still happening
that we've covered, right, like talking about the cops, talking
about the border talking about all this stuff, but it's
not being shoved in people's faces by legacy media outlets.
Liberal folks have not been getting gradually angry or more
upset at like the appearance of vulgarity from the White House.
And and that's also a big aspect of why things
(33:36):
went the way they did in is you have four
years of pent up frustration on behalf of the a
large group of liberals as well. Although I do again,
I don't like pushing kind of the simple narrative here
because I see that on the left a lot that like, oh,
the Libs they stopped coming out because Biden one and
(33:57):
they never really care. And I think that like that's
there's certainly like a decent chunk of people who who
showed up because it was the thing to do and
we're not committed. But I also think the folks who
are just like, um, you know, people stopped coming out
because they suck. That's a that's a little bit of
a reductive summary of the take. But I think that
(34:20):
that that broad idea leaves out a lot. One of
the things that leaves out is that a lot of
those those Libs and moderates who showed up in got
the ship beaten out of them and got pretty traumatized,
and are probably would be willing to get back out again,
but are going to need to feel like there's a
an actual chance of doing something because they understand the
(34:41):
consequences of showing up in the street better. Um, and
they're like, well, I don't want to do the same
thing that I just got my ass kicked and there's
still cops. Um, there is a decent amount of evidence
that for kind of the long term positive impact of
getting all those people out in the street and of
the fact that so many more people in witnessed police
(35:03):
violence with their own eyes. Um. There's a couple of
places you can go to look at this, But I
was I was watching going through a recent ABC News
Washington Post poll that showed that from twenty three confidence
that police treat black and white people equally fell from
fifty two percent where it was inten to thirty nine
percent among Americans. UM and confidence that yeah, and confidence
(35:26):
that police like it's too it's certainly too high, but
that's a significant change. And confidence that police were adequately
trained to avoid use of excessive force fell from fifty
percent to um like and confidence in both of these
things fell twice as fast from twenty three as it
(35:47):
did from and that like thirty something percent number is
just that is also just like close to like the
number of people who are like active, like like actively
hardcore racist yeah about the country are biggest. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't think the election was real. Think that I
(36:16):
want to quickly mention that, like some of those liberal
folks as well, like like like this is not we
don't do like shipping on the lips or whatever. It's
useless and it doesn't help. But like a lot of
those folks have been out doing other ship too, Like
I've seen folks so I haven't seen since twenty like
trying to protect trans kids, trying trying to stop biggest
shout and get little children going to the pantomime or
some ship. Like they've been doing stuff, and that contributes
(36:38):
of course to people being you know, fatigued from other actions.
A large part of what I'm seeing people not being
willing to do anymore is like the same ship that
they did in twenty that stopped working, right, it didn't
continue to be effective. Yeah yeah, And I think also
like this this also, you know there's something actors like
the weather, like the stuff that was happening in the
(37:00):
very very like the first week where like I don't know,
like the cops lost control of like the sid at
the center of Chicago, right like that. The kind of
people who did that stuff like aren't really like that.
Those those those are those those that was not being
done by people who were sort of like political liberals
or whatever. That was being done by people who like
(37:20):
had like very various tenues, very tenuous connection to politics
at all under normal circumstances. And you know, like eventually
eventually you'll get will see something like that again. I
don't know, I mean it took like six six five
or six years between like Ferguson and like that. That
will happen again. But there's that kind of that that
(37:41):
kind of stuff doesn't happen that Like those those like
the kind of people who actually riot very significantly, who
are not in the sort of like cadra of like
hardcore left or organizers, like, they don't throw in that often.
And a lot of political conditions have to like converge
exactly correctly for it to happen, and it's just not
going to happen most of the time. And that's a
(38:03):
lot of ways, but like you like, that's just that's
just what reality is. Yeah, I don't think there's been
enough time between cycles in order for things to really
pick up, because yeah, it does require a lot of
people to forget, to forget the brutality of what the
corps did to people, and like and and and and
and just like material conditions and like recovering from burnout,
(38:25):
and it creates it. Like one thing that's been so
incredible about Atlanta is the level of resiliency because they've
not they've not really stopped since they like they've they've
kind of they they've they've kept going in a very
particular way that both like encourages people to take care
of themselves and not to be treated as disposable. And
(38:45):
I think a big part of that is having like
a multi pronct movement, Like the movement isn't it's not
built around a singular thing like going out and breaking
windows or even even just like camping in the forest. Like,
the movement isn't just those things. There's a lot of
other various aspects. So when you're exhausted from one single thing,
you can move on to one of the other many
(39:06):
aspects and like do that as like as your recovery,
um and and having having that, I think it's contributed
to the level of resiliency that we've seen. UM, But
I don't think the rest of the States has those
types of practices. Like people in Portland are definitely still
extremely burnt out from from Jesus, and I assume a
(39:27):
lot of a lot of other cities are dealing with
similar levels of fatigue. One thing I do want to
address really quickly is the horseshit framing of this by
legacy media. Again, like the very fucking people who, like
on the day that Derek Shovin went to Joe retweeted
that initial statement where Minneapolis p D basically said George
Floyd died of a heart attack. I think we had
(39:48):
a cardiac condition or something. Um, the very same people
who retweeted that statement said never again are we going
to be calmed by this ship and now out there
fucking just carrying water for the cops, like CNN saying
that Tyree Nichols had an encounter with the police, Like
I don't understand what it fucking takes for these people
to understand, Like, and I've been like I was on
NBC this year trying to persuade other NBC journalists too
(40:12):
maybe critically assess the claim to the police and like,
here we are again doing the same ship again, and
we should we should probably close out here soon. But
one kind of final thought that I've had is the
other another kind of crucial difference between how this was
treated as opposed to the George Floyd video is that
the person who recorded the George Floyd video was like
(40:34):
a bystander, Like they were just there and they posted
that on their own accord and it was able to grow.
It was able to grow traction over the course of
a few weeks, kind of slowly in like underground um
like in like underground communities, you know, people who are
much more aware of police violence, and then that's the
(40:56):
least seeped out into the mainstream. I think there's a
difference in having that type of actual growth of people
learning about like hey, did you see this fucked up
thing that my friends sent me, or like did you
like like there's that level of like, oh, we found
this thing that is really fucked up and people need
to care about this, versus the framing of the police
and how they used this as like a world premiere
(41:18):
of this, like of this of this like snuff film.
It's it's like that there was like a fucking countdown
to to to to to watch the video and that
that immediately frames this as something to be consumed. That
immediately frames this is something like the way to engage
with this is to sit down and watch it and
then you're done. Like that that that that is the
(41:40):
like they're they're they're framing this the same way that
you would watch like a movie or like a music
video drop like that is that is the style of engagement.
Because this video is being published by the police like
they are. They are they are from from the very start,
they're controlling the way that information is distributed. They're controlling
what information is distribute. Did it like creates this scenario
(42:03):
where the consumption of the video itself like is the
event as opposed to any type of like follow up
action or protest or direct action that instead of that
being like the action event, the action event is just
the consumption of the video based on how it was
hyped up as as this thing that was to be
(42:25):
like officially released and you like count down for it
and then you watch it and you're like, Okay, that
was it, that was the thing. Um, and I think
that does just really impact it when it's like this,
like sanctioned premier versus this thing that's spread by regular people. UM. Yeah,
I think you're right. I think it kind of became
the act of penance. Like you watch the video, you say,
(42:46):
holy funk, that's disgusting, and then like the thing is
already done right like that, the cops are already fired,
so you just do your penants. You go through the
painful thing, rather than the George Floyd thing, which was
like nothing has been done about this. I've got this
organically from a friend. I'm fucking furious. Yeah. Yeah, I
think you're right. I think it's very different. Yeah alright,
(43:07):
well I think that's probably going to do it for
us today. Um until next time. Uh, I don't know.
Don't don't let your city name a police elite unit,
scorpion or anything else. Uh yeah you can tell yeah yeah,
(43:32):
I don't have special police if. Yeah, I would prefer
no cops. If you're going to have a special police unit,
maybe call it like the Barney Fife Battalion or something
like that. Um, at least at least try not to
hype them up to be scorpions. Yeah. Um, anyway, that
that that that that the fuck. Hi, everyone's James again
(43:59):
bookend in the episode, and I'm just here to ask
you again to donate if you have the means, if
you're able to, to relief for people in Syria who
are obviously experiencing terrible conser quotation from this earthquake. The
news cycle kind of moves on, but people's lives don't,
and they still need your help. So a couple of
places you can donate. The White Helmets, that's White Helmets
(44:21):
dot org, slash e N for English Syrian American Medical
Society Foundation, that's s A M S hyphen USA dot
net Medsan San Fantier, Doctors Without Borders and that's Doctors
Without Borders dot org. And the Kurdish Re Question h
E y V A S O r U K dot
(44:42):
r G. Those were all great places and we'd love
it if you could spare little money to help people out.
Thanks by It could happen here as a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources
(45:04):
for It could happen here, Updated monthly at cool Zone
Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Hi everyone, It's meet James, and just before we start today,
we're going to discuss in quite some detail, the being
to death of Tyree Nichols by the police in Memphis.
And if you don't want to hear that detail, that's
totally fine, but we wanted to let you know now
so that you didn't get surprised by it in your
money commute or whatever. So if you want to skip
(00:20):
this one, if you don't listen to that one, then
we are trying to give you that warning ahead of time.
Discourse Discourse. Discourse is about podcast. I don't know it
could happen. Here is the podcast that you're listening to. Uh.
(00:43):
If you came here list looking for another podcast, then
you fucked up, But you fucked up in a good
way because that podcast was trash. Thank you for being
here with us today. Who all? Who all? Who? Who?
Who's here? Who are you? People? We're in Eln? Sure? Yeah,
I'm THEA long I'm here. Wow, I'm I'm James. I'm
(01:07):
a little unsure about who I am beyond that, but
that's who I am. It's okay. I'm Garrison Davis and
I'm here to engage in discourse. I there's nothing I
love more than discourse. Um. Speaking of discourse, today we're
gonna be talking about, well, I don't know, it's not
really discourse, but today we're gonna be talking about the
(01:27):
reaction to the video of the Memphis police murdering Tyree Nichols.
In particularly, we're gonna be talking about the way in
which kind of the left responded to this, both online
and kind of public channels and actually in the streets.
Because I think there's some interesting stuff here, um, and
(01:48):
I think it's kind of worth analyzing outside of uh,
you know, the broader conversation about police violence and you know,
uh that sort of thing, because I think there's some
interesting story of tactical stuff to kind of talk about here. Um.
And yeah, that's that's that's what we're going to be
doing today. UM. In case you've been kind of stuck
(02:11):
under a rock, uh, you should probably be aware that
on January seven, three, police from the Memphis p D
Scorpion Unit, which was a unit with a very sinister
name that existed to effectively over police, um a chunk
of the city of Memphis. Uh yeah, um, pulled over
(02:32):
Tyree Nichols, a twenty nine year old black man. UH.
Tyree was an amateur photographer. UM, he liked skating. He
had Crohn's disease. UM, he was just driving around that night. UH.
And the encounter, as we would later see on the video,
went pretty much immediately violent on behalf of the police.
Nichols was beaten very badly, and he died in the
(02:54):
hospital three days later. And for the first few days
after the killing, obviously, you know this happened, the police
did this, and then rumors started kind of spreading in
the immediate wake of the beating, but very little was
known for certain about like what had happened, UM, about
you know what, why this had had gotten escalated so quickly. UM.
(03:15):
One of the first kind of signs that this was
going to become a thing on the national uh in
terms of like the national attention span, was when the
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in the U. S. Department of
Justice independently opened investigations into the beating. UM after reviewing
body camera footage from multiple officers on scene, five Memphis
(03:36):
p D officers were dismissed on January. Three days later,
an autopsy commissioned by Tyrese family found extensive bleeding caused
by a severe beating. Outrage around the killing grew rapidly,
and it was announced by the Memphis Police that body
camera footage of the stop and of the beating would
be released to the public. Uh. This started the rumor
mill really churning up. UM. There was kind of a
(03:59):
couple of leaks from people who had seen the footage
I think who were close to the case, and they
all sort of described it as uniquely bad. The term
that I heard a lot was that it's worse than
the Rodney King beating. Um. This is just the way
in which people started talking about it. And as more
details filtered out, there were conversations around the country, particularly
folks on the activists left, who started talking about the
(04:21):
need to prepare for what they suspected would be the
aftermath of the video's release. UM. And one of the
things that was kind of kind of worth discussing here
is that in the immediate, like immediately before the video
came out, a lot of the conversations that people on
the left were having and that people in law enforcement
we're having kind of focused around the same expectations, which
(04:41):
was that there would be widespread protests and rioting as
a result of the release of this video. UM, police
departments around the country entered high alert. Riot squads were
prepped UM and then kind of on the other side
of things and sort of open channels on Twitter and
massed on and in person, and a number of of
of different cases, distant people you know who claimed to
(05:02):
be that online talked about their expectations too. I heard
variations of the phrase, you know, it's going to be
a really hot year. This is going to like lead
into a particularly aggressive summer. On the ground, people are
going to make the burning of that precinct in Minneapolis
look tame. You know, get your gear together, check in
with your friends, everything's about to go off. UM. There
was a lot of chatter kind of along those lines,
(05:24):
and I don't know, I didn't really speak up too
much about this, but my kind of thinking, as folks
were sort of anticipating the reaction to this was I
suspected that the actual reaction on a mass scale to
the video's release was going to be more muted and
law abiding than than people were expecting at the time.
(05:45):
And I guess the primary reason that I felt this
way was simply that kind of the vibes were off.
It just didn't feel like folks were ready for that
kind of a response. Um, but I do kind of
have a fact based reason for why I was anticipating
that as well. UM. On January, two days before the
video's release, five Memphis p D officers were arrested and
charged with murder, kidnapping, assault, a bevy of very serious charges.
(06:08):
Immediately after that, three firefighters T. E. M. T s
and a police lieutenant who had been on scene after
the beating were fired for failing to assess and provide
emergency care to Nichols on scene. And there's a couple
of ways to view what happened here. I think the
less optimistic one is that the state simply made a
pragmatic decision to throw these guys onto the bus. That's
definitely what happened. The more optimistic way to look at
(06:31):
this is that because people had rioted so hard for
so long in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the
state felt like it had to throw these guys under
the bus rather than, you know, risk another year of rage.
And this is also correct. I think both of these
things are are pretty accurate ways to look at what happened.
The idea that the release of the footage of Tyree's
murder would lead to massive protests was not quite universal,
(06:53):
but I didn't notice that a lot of the people
who felt similarly to me expressed the belief that if
people didn't riot over what had happened to Tyree, that
was due to a mix of liberal cowardice and racism,
since most of the officers who beat Tyree to death
were themselves black. And I think this is kind of
a short sighted and unfair take, and I'll talk about
why shortly. On January Friday, the Tyree Nichols videos were
(07:16):
released by the Memphis Police Department. UM, along with a
lot of you. I watched them all immediately, UM, and
you can find there's a description on my Twitter page.
It's turned currently pinned to my profile of the video
if you haven't seen it but want to know what
happened there. UM To kind of summarize it in brief,
it's it's very ugly. Uh. Tyree is immediately calm as
he's pulled over and taken from his car. The police
(07:39):
are not calm. He attempts to de escalate them. They
accuse him falsely of resisting, then they mace him and themselves.
I think in general that the inciting incident for the
beating was the incompetent use of mace by these officers.
They hurt themselves, they got pissed, and then they beat
Tyree because they were angry at themselves for macing themselves. UM.
(08:00):
It's also kind of worth noting that a white officer
who has since been fired as well, also deployed his
taser on the young man. There's been some kind of
this was kind of left out of a lot of
the initial summaries of what had happened. Uh, that guy
has now been fired. UM. And yeah, it's it's bad.
The video is is very unpleasant and very brutal. UM.
(08:20):
Watching it, though, I think kind of the thing that
struck me most was how much like a normal traffic
stop a lot of this was. UM. I think that
if you know, they had gone a little bit less
hard and beating him a little less badly and he
had survived, they probably would have charged him with resisting
arrest and assault on a police officer. UM. And who
knows how the case would have gone. You can hear
(08:42):
the police preparing for this eventuality in the footage, one
officer claims that Tyree went for his gun. There's no
evidence of this in the footage, uh, And you can
kind of hear them all working to get their stories
straight after they beat Tyree Um for the inevitable court case.
More officers and emergency personnel arrive on scene as he's
just kind of laying there, and none of them seemed
(09:02):
to find what's happened peculiar or noteworthy, which is interesting
because immediately prior to the video's release, police departments around
the country all issued statements that were basically identical, condemning
the officers who had beaten nichols Um, saying basically, this
behavior is unacceptable. These men are bad apples. This is
like an extreme example that does not represent policing values.
(09:25):
And there's a couple of things that are are interesting
about this. One of them is that the actual way
in which emergency responders on scene treated the beating kind
of puts the lie to that, because nobody acts as
if anything outside of the normal has occurred. And the
other thing that is noteworthy is the uniformity of these
(09:45):
these messages by police departments around the country. I have
not actually seen that happen before. There was kind of
a version of this that occurred in the wake of
the George Floyd video, but it was much more cohesive
prior to the release of the Tyree Nichols video. UM.
That said, there were no widespread riots or acts of
property destruction. After the video was released. There were protests
(10:08):
in a number of cities, most notably in Memphis, UM,
but compared to things were very subdued. There was not
kind of widespread property destruction or rioting in Portland, which
was obviously the site of intense radical street actions. In
there were two fairly small marches. UM. I'm not gonna
delve into this in tremendous detail, but there were kind
(10:30):
of allegations from one of the marches that the larger
and less radical of the two was an op designed
to take numbers and energy away from the radical march.
There were confrontations between members of both groups, and while
the overall story, again is not worth spending time on,
the gist of it is that very little happened. Now
this is not kind of limited to Portland's Atlanta, Georgia
(10:52):
is probably the city in the US today that's been
the center of the most effective radical protests against law
enforcement and the history of attempts to stop and stabotage.
The construction of Cops City, which is obviously a massive
police training compound in Atlanta's largest urban forest, has been
well documented by by Garrison Davis UM as well as
a number of other reporters. UM. I do think it's
(11:12):
worth noting that days before the Nichols video was released,
Atlanta police shot and killed a forest defender, Tortu Guida,
and a moderately large protest followed, where protesters smashing windows
and lighting one cop car on fire. This was the
kind of action that I think most of the activists
I observed expected in the wake of the Nichols video
(11:32):
as well, but we simply didn't see that. I'm just
going to butt in here for a little bit and
you'll you'll you'll hear more about that riot slash protest
in Atlanta next week. UM. I'm putting together a series
on it that'll that'll be out soon. But definitely one
of the things that was talked about a lot in
Atlanta was the upcoming release of this video and the
(11:57):
potentiality of this video getting released shortly after the death
of Tortuguita at the hands of police. Kind of both
of these things feeding off each other into a into
a similar like level um uprising. And this was like
no one was like for sure about this, Like no
one was like saying, this is absolutely definitely gonna happen,
(12:19):
But it was something that was definitely thought about. UM,
it was something that was definitely considered. I think, honestly,
if the the video was set to come out originally
on like the Monday or Tuesday following the big downtown
protest in Atlanta, UM, it was supposed to come out
just a few days later, and that that didn't happen.
(12:42):
It was delayed once again for further further into the week. UM.
I think if it came out sooner, I think that
could have fed off momentum in a pretty considerable way.
I think a few things happened both in Atlanta that
in the in the next few days that kind of
stunted possible possible for their protest. UM National Guard was deployed.
(13:05):
UM police in Savannah were ordered to start arresting people
and shutting down gatherings of over fifteen uh specifically for
like including vigils, and in Atlanta, obviously there was people
getting really pretty pretty inflated, uh high level felonies and
domestic and domestic terrorism charges simply for being simply for
(13:25):
being present at a protest UM. So I think those
those things kind of all in all impacted people's ability
to like prepare for you know, a sequence of protests
which there was someone there was someone in l a
for for like a day or two. The ones in
Memphis were pretty big, but I think they the timeline
(13:49):
in which they released the video is definitely should be
considered in terms of when they chose to release it
um to like yeah, in terms of the state's goal
of preventing you know, large large scale protests. But that
was definitely something that was talked about a lot during
during like the little over a week that I was
(14:12):
that I was in Atlantis, because everyone was getting ready
for this, Like everyone heard that this is going to
be like the worst of ADEO that we've seen since
Rodney kinging like that that that that was the way
it was. It was thought up of like on the ground,
you know, just like word of mouth being being passed um,
and people were definitely like preparing, like preparing themselves for it,
(14:36):
like like like thinking, like thinking about like what's going
to happen if this is like, if this really is
the most horrific thing, what is the appropriate response to that?
And and this is kind of a lot of what
I wanted to talk around because you have sort of
Georgia law enforcement. There's this this riot, and the response
(14:56):
to that, as well as the response to the tree
set is a series of dem stick terrorism charges, um.
And then this video comes out and there's not a
mass like radical street response to it, and it it
seems to me and Garrison you can correct me if
I'm wrong that a big part of that is people
in Atlanta were kind of not willing to throw more
(15:18):
lives and bodies at the police without kind of more
of a cohesive plan of what to do given the
severity of the repression that that was being engaged in.
I mean, obviously can't comment on people's votivations or like
plans for for for stuff, because that's not something that
I would be would be privy privy to. Yeah, um,
(15:41):
so I I don't know, there's there's there's a lot
of stuff. I mean, like I think a big part
of why I heard a lot about it in Atlanta
was one because a friend of a lot of people
who were involved in the forced and the force events
got killed by police a few days earlier. And two
Memphis is only a few hours way from Atlanta, Like
(16:01):
it's it's it's not it's it's it's not that far,
and it's a big part of the stuff in Atlanta
is like solidarity with struggles that are not just in
your immediate vicinity. And you could argue that Memphis really
is in the immediate vicinity of Georgia. Um, but like
that that type of cross cross state solidarity is is
(16:24):
a big part um. But yeah, I can I I
could not comment on on on why why people did
or did not choose to do specific things. I think
that that's that's up for people themselves. Yeah, I want
to want to put words into anyone's mouth. But it
was kind of interesting because I I paid attention a
lot to the reaction, and there were a lot of
(16:45):
folks talking about how disheartening it was that there were
not more of the kind of radical actions that they
wanted to see in the wake of the video coming out,
And I'm that's kind of the thing I wanted sort
of to talk most around because I feel very mixed
around this, But broadly speaking, I guess I'm glad that
(17:05):
we didn't see a repeat of the part of that
was folks standing up in front of cop shops until
riot police came in and getting charges against them, because
I just don't think that that works right now. I
don't think it works is functional anymore. Um, I don't
think it actually hurts the state because the reaction, like
(17:28):
there was a period of time early in those first
couple of months in particular, where you could see the
police were off balance. Obviously in like Minneapolis with the
burning of the Third Precinct, was was this kind of
sea change moment um, but you could see it in
a number of cities that like they didn't really know
what was going on, and they were themselves concerned with
how out of control the situation had gotten. And then
(17:51):
it kind of morphed later in the year to I
think a situation they could control very well where there
were these acts of fairly minor property destruction and then
a bunch of people would get picked up and charged.
And I think that while I understand like the desire
to react that way and to do something, um, kind
of very firm and uh and radical in response to
(18:15):
state violence like this. I'm also like deeply concerned about
people not throwing away months and years of their lives
fighting charges. Yeah. I mean a big part of it
is is people learning that treating protesters as disposable meat
bags to throw against the wall of the state is
(18:35):
kind of a bad idea. Um. Yeah, And there's I
think this is something that that that was talked about
in conversations just just like regarding like, hey, this video
is going to come out, what do you think it's
going to happen. Like there's just a lot of the casual,
casual conversations, but like there was a lot to make happened.
(18:56):
A lot of things contributed to the intensity and the
length of those protests. I think, uh, COVID being a
pretty big part. This was a few months into the pandemic.
People have been stuck in their homes now for a
few months and not really like prepared for that. Like
at this at this point, we're kind of we're all
(19:16):
kind of used to being in our house a lot
more now, But back then it was it was new
for a lot of people. So I think the opperaty
the opportunity to get out of the house for what
seemed like an important reason. I think was a really
big part of people. People being out of a lot
of work was a really big part of because a
lot of people did did not have the types of
(19:38):
jobs that they might have now, did not have the
jobs they had like in like the months before. It's
maybe because I can't really think of another example like
this from history. Obviously a lot of uprisings occur when
people are suddenly out of work, but this was a
mix of people are suddenly out of work and they
suddenly they all have cash like that, that which contributed
(20:02):
in a lot of ways because like that, that was
I think what funded a lot of you know, people
bringing in food and people bringing in like pallets of
water and getting gas masks and stuff as they had
these sort of checks for you know, as a result
of like COVID relief, which was an interesting situation as
well that hasn't been replicated since. I think there's there's
(20:32):
another very important factor of this that doesn't get talked
about that much, which is just the weather. Like if
if you, if you, if you, if you go back
and look at when the largest police like largest anti
police protests in the US have happened, right, They either
start like late spring, early fall, or just the middle
of the summer. And there's the reason. Yeah, Like then
this is I think another this is this is the
(20:53):
thing up in Chicago, right was it was just really
fucking could and I mean this this affects actually circles too.
But it's like you can't get the critical mass, which
just regular people in the streets when it's like twenty degrees.
I think the other side of that is, um, just
summer vacation of a lot of a lot of the
people who go the hardest at these protests are people
(21:14):
in high school. UM. And during winter, fall, spring kids,
kids are in school during during summer, uh, people have
people under the age of eighteen have a lot more
free time on their hands. So I think that is
another contributing factor. UM. And I think there's there's there's
(21:34):
one other aspect which is very sinister um And but
I think is worth talking about in terms of how
of how the state may have been trying to frame
this to like to to frame the release of this
video too kind of like curtail the the the the
(21:56):
the intensity of any type of like um of a
protest revolter up racing. Now obviously that there was like
the fucked up nature of like making this feel like
a world premiere of like a snuff film was like
it was it was. It was like a weird a
weird aspect, which I think it encouraged the video to
be to be something that is consumed versus something that's
(22:18):
actually like watched and like, oh, this is a fucked
up thing that we that we need to do something about. Instead,
it turned it into this like element of consumption and
the other aspect for this in terms of a lot
of hardcore activists like like people who have thrown down
in the streets before, people who have who have who
have seen fucked up ship is that the intensity, what
(22:38):
was the violence depicted on this video was framed as
being extremely horrific, being being a very very unusual a
very um like uncommon but but but but horrifying display
of violence and display of brutality by the police. This
is this, This is what police departments were faring it as.
(22:58):
This is what the President of the United Its was
framing this as like this this is a case of
a few of a few bad actors who who did
an egregious um but you know, uncommon thing. And I
think when a lot of people who have thrown down
watched this video, it just reminded you of stuff that
you've seen before, Like, yeah, they saw a thing they
(23:19):
had seen. It wasn't It was not shocking in the
same way that it was getting framed as. Because what
separates this from most of the arrests that happened in
Portland during is very little Like one or two punches
that were that were thrown just a little bit too
hard is all that separates this from most like violent
police arrests, Like this was not an uncommon display of violence.
(23:43):
This was an ordinary, an ordinary encounter that just a
few things were pushed just barely over the edge. And
I think a lot of people watched, like my first
reaction was like, oh, like this, this is not as
bad as what I thought like this and that that
that should be a condemnation of the police's actions, Like well,
that's why I think one of the most important things
(24:05):
to watch is how the other cops who were not
present for the beating, but who show up immediately after
or at the end of because some of them did
watch the others beat him. How they react because they're
just kind of even the m T R. Oh, yeah,
this has happened, but we we we do a stand back.
When this happened, pizza people, the people on the ground
(24:27):
were not concerned. Like it was not you could you
could slowly watch because like a lot of this video
was not of the actual beating. It was it was
of the aftermath, and you you you could you could
watch these cops slowly start to realize that maybe they
went a little too hard, just very slowly over the
course of thirty minutes. But for most of the time
(24:49):
they're on the ground, they're like making jokes. They are
talking about how fun, like how fun it was to
beat up this person and there facing each other. That
is most of the video. I think it's worth noting
like a couple of things. One like it's extremely long,
Like I'm not in the in the way that the
George Floyd video like fits into the attention span of
(25:11):
stuff we consume on our telephones at a time versus
versus like an hour of footage. Right, Yeah, if Tyree
Nichols had just been seriously disabled, have life altering injuries,
been charged with disting rest all the things that very
plausibly could have happened if a couple of punches had
handed in different place, this body camera footage would have
been denied under the investigative exemption, right then have said no,
(25:35):
we're investigating his resistance of arrest. You can't you can't
see it, and none of this ship would have happened.
And like, yeah, the normalcy of so much other than
the outcome. I don't know that that stripped some of
the rage away, but it's important context. I think a
few things I mean, and this is again one of
(25:57):
the things that I think you can see from this
that is evidence is sort of a positive long term
result too, and it's it's a very mixed bag when
I say it's positive, but that is kind of a
positive sign. Is that they acted so quickly to throw
all of these guys. They are firing and charging a
(26:18):
lot of city employees over this. It's going to be
between all of the people fired and all of the
people charged, more than a dozen people by the time
this is all done, which I can't think of another
time when that has happened this quickly over an incident
of police violence. And they did that not because it's
the right thing to do, but because they were scared,
(26:39):
and again I do I want to emphasize here the
thing that they're scared of is not that like radical
left wing protesters will take to the street. It's that
liberals and more political they know that the consequence of
the cops beating someone to death is that, like someone
suck a mom will fucking abandon how many vans wing
hammer into your cops show if you don't do this,
(27:02):
do like give a scapegoat, right, like do the fair
the bad minimum? And so the positive the thing that
I can say that is probably positive about this is
that it does show there's still some fear there on
their behalf. The thing that's negative is that, like, well,
it it worked, because I will say, on a moral level,
I think a wide variety of radical actions are morally
(27:23):
justified by what was done to Tyrene Nichols. Now that said,
like back to the sort of the point we're making
the start of this, I don't particularly urge or encourage
that just because, like I don't like seeing people get
arrested and charged and spend years of their life fighting
ship in court um for the chance to like, let's say,
(27:45):
carry out minor acts of property destruction on a cop shop. Um,
I don't think like that sort of activism works right now. Um,
it certainly doesn't work without them, without the critical mass
of like liberals sort of behind it, without enough people
saying like we like again you look at like the
(28:05):
fact that the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis
is still one of the most popular things in modern
American politics. But that was the product of a fairly
unique moment, And I just don't I see some positives
in like the lingering fear of that moment, But I
also don't see the material conditions that make me think
(28:26):
it's something like that is coming again in the immediate future.
And especially because this this situation around this video demonstrates
how much more effort the state's putting into trying to
prevent things from happening before they start. Like there was
a lot of like inter agency work put into having
all of these local police departments release statements, having the
(28:48):
FBI release statements, having uh president like having having the
president release statements, and it's it is all made slightly
more bizarre considering that the contents of the video are
not the on on the level of like uncommon or
like rare, rare displays of violence that the police do,
like this is this is this is relatively standard, um
(29:10):
and that that kind of one thing I've been thinking
about is like why did they choose this video? Like
why did they why did they make this one? Like
what were they afraid of, like for this video, because
like other other other videos have come out in the
past few years, like other like other police killings have happened,
(29:31):
like the police killings all the fucking time, but they
they did a lot of work on this one specifically,
um and it it's kind of it's kind of interesting that,
like why why they chose this specific video to to
dedicate all of this work into because not not only
did they like you know, denying stuff, but they also
they like they like hyped it up. They're like you
(29:53):
using this as like an example, Yeah, like like using
this as an example, like here, this is what bad
cops look like. Watch us punish these bad cops. Well,
but I think I think I think there's a rate.
I think there's a huge racial aspect of this, right,
which is that like you know, like the cops are
getting prosecuted. Are only the black cops who are involved
in this right, and I think that's a huge part
of this entire strategy. I think that's why they framed
(30:15):
this as exceptional violence, is to play on people's racism, right.
I think I think that's why I think person why
this is allowed to happen, which was that yeah you
can it is. It's like even inside the police it
is a lot easier to throw black cops under the
bus that it is that throw white cops under the bus.
That's just how the system works, and it doesn't trigger
that same like visceral response right that that we all
(30:36):
had to seeing the George Floyd video. I don't think
quite like like there is age old tradition of white
men doing violent to black men on behalf of the state.
And I think also it's it's also easier politically inside
of the police departments because I think I think there
would have been a lot more pushback from like the
police part Like there hasn't been much that I've seen
like internal pushback like from inside and police partments, because
(30:59):
I I think if ituld have been five white cops,
I think this would have been a huge fight, and
I think you would have had like the fucking police
union like calling Biden like an anti cop, like whatever.
But I I think I think these were people who
they were, Like we could tell these people onto the
bus and doesn't looking matter because who cares Yaity isn't
there for him? I think those are I mean, that's
(31:20):
certainly like a significant aspect of why like this was
the one they focused on. But I also think a
major aspect of it is that it shows and records
the reaction of other city employees to this, and you
can see in real time the police putting together um
story like it's it. There's I think a few things
(31:43):
about this that are are really unique, but even I
don't know the it's relatively unusual to have an angle
which is not like the body camera, right, which really
I think the violence in this was was captured and
depicted in a way which was more or explicit than
you would get many individual cops body camera. And like
(32:04):
the fact that they most of the time when cops
kill people, they do it with guns, right or maybe
to taste sera or something like that. The fact that
they took minutes, you know, like several minutes to be
a man to death. It's it is just it should
We've we've said like how this isn't unusual, and it's not,
But it doesn't mean it's not repulsive. No, no, no,
it's sucking disgusted by it. It's it's nightmarish. Yeah, the
(32:28):
point is that, yeah, it's it's it's it's even more
nightmarish considering how common this is, because yes, they did
spend a few minutes doing this, but it was really
only I think one or two punches that threw it
right over the edge, Like it wasn't just a punch.
Is the thing that I think one of the things
that I saw that I think was probably critical and
why he died. No, it was when they tackled him.
(32:51):
His head bounced against the ground with a significant amount
of force. There's a number of like a perfect store
and the factors, right that went into making this the
incident that they talked about, and like this the incident
that didn't start two. I guess it's no one particular thing,
it's all these things that led to it. And I
do think also, like we have Joe Biden as president, right,
(33:14):
like a lot of the same bullshit it's still happening
that we've covered, right, like talking about the cops, talking
about the border talking about all this stuff, but it's
not being shoved in people's faces by legacy media outlets.
Liberal folks have not been getting gradually angry or more
upset at like the appearance of vulgarity from the White House.
And and that's also a big aspect of why things
(33:36):
went the way they did in is you have four
years of pent up frustration on behalf of the a
large group of liberals as well. Although I do again,
I don't like pushing kind of the simple narrative here
because I see that on the left a lot that like, oh,
the Libs they stopped coming out because Biden one and
(33:57):
they never really care. And I think that like that's
there's certainly like a decent chunk of people who who
showed up because it was the thing to do and
we're not committed. But I also think the folks who
are just like, um, you know, people stopped coming out
because they suck. That's a that's a little bit of
a reductive summary of the take. But I think that
(34:20):
that that broad idea leaves out a lot. One of
the things that leaves out is that a lot of
those those Libs and moderates who showed up in got
the ship beaten out of them and got pretty traumatized,
and are probably would be willing to get back out again,
but are going to need to feel like there's a
an actual chance of doing something because they understand the
(34:41):
consequences of showing up in the street better. Um, and
they're like, well, I don't want to do the same
thing that I just got my ass kicked and there's
still cops. Um, there is a decent amount of evidence
that for kind of the long term positive impact of
getting all those people out in the street and of
the fact that so many more people in witnessed police
(35:03):
violence with their own eyes. Um. There's a couple of
places you can go to look at this, But I
was I was watching going through a recent ABC News
Washington Post poll that showed that from twenty three confidence
that police treat black and white people equally fell from
fifty two percent where it was inten to thirty nine
percent among Americans. UM and confidence that yeah, and confidence
(35:26):
that police like it's too it's certainly too high, but
that's a significant change. And confidence that police were adequately
trained to avoid use of excessive force fell from fifty
percent to um like and confidence in both of these
things fell twice as fast from twenty three as it
(35:47):
did from and that like thirty something percent number is
just that is also just like close to like the
number of people who are like active, like like actively
hardcore racist yeah about the country are biggest. Yeah. Yeah,
I don't think the election was real. Think that I
(36:16):
want to quickly mention that, like some of those liberal
folks as well, like like like this is not we
don't do like shipping on the lips or whatever. It's
useless and it doesn't help. But like a lot of
those folks have been out doing other ship too, Like
I've seen folks so I haven't seen since twenty like
trying to protect trans kids, trying trying to stop biggest
shout and get little children going to the pantomime or
some ship. Like they've been doing stuff, and that contributes
(36:38):
of course to people being you know, fatigued from other actions.
A large part of what I'm seeing people not being
willing to do anymore is like the same ship that
they did in twenty that stopped working, right, it didn't
continue to be effective. Yeah yeah, And I think also
like this this also, you know there's something actors like
the weather, like the stuff that was happening in the
(37:00):
very very like the first week where like I don't know,
like the cops lost control of like the sid at
the center of Chicago, right like that. The kind of
people who did that stuff like aren't really like that.
Those those those are those those that was not being
done by people who were sort of like political liberals
or whatever. That was being done by people who like
(37:20):
had like very various tenues, very tenuous connection to politics
at all under normal circumstances. And you know, like eventually
eventually you'll get will see something like that again. I
don't know, I mean it took like six six five
or six years between like Ferguson and like that. That
will happen again. But there's that kind of that that
(37:41):
kind of stuff doesn't happen that Like those those like
the kind of people who actually riot very significantly, who
are not in the sort of like cadra of like
hardcore left or organizers, like, they don't throw in that often.
And a lot of political conditions have to like converge
exactly correctly for it to happen, and it's just not
going to happen most of the time. And that's a
(38:03):
lot of ways, but like you like, that's just that's
just what reality is. Yeah, I don't think there's been
enough time between cycles in order for things to really
pick up, because yeah, it does require a lot of
people to forget, to forget the brutality of what the
corps did to people, and like and and and and
and just like material conditions and like recovering from burnout,
(38:25):
and it creates it. Like one thing that's been so
incredible about Atlanta is the level of resiliency because they've
not they've not really stopped since they like they've they've
kind of they they've they've kept going in a very
particular way that both like encourages people to take care
of themselves and not to be treated as disposable. And
(38:45):
I think a big part of that is having like
a multi pronct movement, Like the movement isn't it's not
built around a singular thing like going out and breaking
windows or even even just like camping in the forest. Like,
the movement isn't just those things. There's a lot of
other various aspects. So when you're exhausted from one single thing,
you can move on to one of the other many
(39:06):
aspects and like do that as like as your recovery,
um and and having having that, I think it's contributed
to the level of resiliency that we've seen. UM, But
I don't think the rest of the States has those
types of practices. Like people in Portland are definitely still
extremely burnt out from from Jesus, and I assume a
(39:27):
lot of a lot of other cities are dealing with
similar levels of fatigue. One thing I do want to
address really quickly is the horseshit framing of this by
legacy media. Again, like the very fucking people who, like
on the day that Derek Shovin went to Joe retweeted
that initial statement where Minneapolis p D basically said George
Floyd died of a heart attack. I think we had
(39:48):
a cardiac condition or something. Um, the very same people
who retweeted that statement said never again are we going
to be calmed by this ship and now out there
fucking just carrying water for the cops, like CNN saying
that Tyree Nichols had an encounter with the police, Like
I don't understand what it fucking takes for these people
to understand, Like, and I've been like I was on
NBC this year trying to persuade other NBC journalists too
(40:12):
maybe critically assess the claim to the police and like,
here we are again doing the same ship again, and
we should we should probably close out here soon. But
one kind of final thought that I've had is the
other another kind of crucial difference between how this was
treated as opposed to the George Floyd video is that
the person who recorded the George Floyd video was like
(40:34):
a bystander, Like they were just there and they posted
that on their own accord and it was able to grow.
It was able to grow traction over the course of
a few weeks, kind of slowly in like underground um
like in like underground communities, you know, people who are
much more aware of police violence, and then that's the
(40:56):
least seeped out into the mainstream. I think there's a
difference in having that type of actual growth of people
learning about like hey, did you see this fucked up
thing that my friends sent me, or like did you
like like there's that level of like, oh, we found
this thing that is really fucked up and people need
to care about this, versus the framing of the police
and how they used this as like a world premiere
(41:18):
of this, like of this of this like snuff film.
It's it's like that there was like a fucking countdown
to to to to to watch the video and that
that immediately frames this as something to be consumed. That
immediately frames this is something like the way to engage
with this is to sit down and watch it and
then you're done. Like that that that that is the
(41:40):
like they're they're they're framing this the same way that
you would watch like a movie or like a music
video drop like that is that is the style of engagement.
Because this video is being published by the police like
they are. They are they are from from the very start,
they're controlling the way that information is distributed. They're controlling
what information is distribute. Did it like creates this scenario
(42:03):
where the consumption of the video itself like is the
event as opposed to any type of like follow up
action or protest or direct action that instead of that
being like the action event, the action event is just
the consumption of the video based on how it was
hyped up as as this thing that was to be
(42:25):
like officially released and you like count down for it
and then you watch it and you're like, Okay, that
was it, that was the thing. Um, and I think
that does just really impact it when it's like this,
like sanctioned premier versus this thing that's spread by regular people. UM. Yeah,
I think you're right. I think it kind of became
the act of penance. Like you watch the video, you say,
(42:46):
holy funk, that's disgusting, and then like the thing is
already done right like that, the cops are already fired,
so you just do your penants. You go through the
painful thing, rather than the George Floyd thing, which was
like nothing has been done about this. I've got this
organically from a friend. I'm fucking furious. Yeah. Yeah, I
think you're right. I think it's very different. Yeah alright,
(43:07):
well I think that's probably going to do it for
us today. Um until next time. Uh, I don't know.
Don't don't let your city name a police elite unit,
scorpion or anything else. Uh yeah you can tell yeah yeah,
(43:32):
I don't have special police if. Yeah, I would prefer
no cops. If you're going to have a special police unit,
maybe call it like the Barney Fife Battalion or something
like that. Um, at least at least try not to
hype them up to be scorpions. Yeah. Um, anyway, that
that that that that the fuck. Hi, everyone's James again
(43:59):
bookend in the episode, and I'm just here to ask
you again to donate if you have the means, if
you're able to, to relief for people in Syria who
are obviously experiencing terrible conser quotation from this earthquake. The
news cycle kind of moves on, but people's lives don't,
and they still need your help. So a couple of
places you can donate. The White Helmets, that's White Helmets
(44:21):
dot org, slash e N for English Syrian American Medical
Society Foundation, that's s A M S hyphen USA dot
net Medsan San Fantier, Doctors Without Borders and that's Doctors
Without Borders dot org. And the Kurdish Re Question h
E y V A S O r U K dot
(44:42):
r G. Those were all great places and we'd love
it if you could spare little money to help people out.
Thanks by It could happen here as a production of
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(45:04):
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It Could Happen Here News
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James Stout
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.