Tyre Nichols and Police Brutality

The public’s reaction to the deadly beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis in January 2023 has been virtually unanimous: a clear-cut case of police brutality.

The cops agree.

Police executives, rank-and-file officers, and union representatives from across the country also expressed their strong disapproval.

The president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Patrick Yoes, denounced the incident as “a criminal assault under the pretext of law.”

NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell described the Memphis officers’ conduct as “disgraceful.”

Here’s why they’re right.

After the initial encounter with Nichols, bodycam footage shows one officer saying to another that Nichols “made me [pepper] spray myself.”

A second officer seemed agitated at having had his glasses knocked off during the struggle, later saying “I hope they stomp his ass.”

A third appeared to have hurt his leg in the melee.

None of this excuses kicks to the head, punches to the face, or baton strikes doled out to a man who was not resisting. What it looked like was an unjustifiable beating handed out by hotheads.

Though it’s little consolation to Nichols’s family, Memphis authorities didn’t hesitate in punishing the offending officers. All five were swiftly terminated, arrested, and indicted for their outrageous behavior.

But this isn’t enough for some.

“We need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy,” District Attorney Steve Mulroy said during the press conference in which the charges were announced.

Perhaps the lesson is simply this: policing is a human endeavor and is therefore subject to the shortcomings of inherently flawed human beings, which means that some people, cops included, will sometimes act out of malevolence.

To the activists, however, bad police officers are not the exception, they’re the rule.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, grumbled about “[t]he effort to separate the officers who murdered Tyre Nichols from the system of policing that produced them,” going on to assert that “Charges alone aren’t justice. Change is.”

But there’s good reason to separate the officers who beat Nichols from the institution of policing: their actions constituted a sharp departure from police training and practice. The available data show this to be true.

What activists often term “police violence”—contrary to what you may have heard—is extremely rare. This becomes clear once you view use-of-force numbers in their proper context. Unjustifiable force is even rarer.

According to data compiled by Police Scorecard—a website built by left-wing police critic Samuel Sinyangwe—Memphis police have been involved in 25 killings between 2013 and 2021, a period in which Memphis police officers made some 288,000 arrests (to say nothing of other encounters such as traffic and pedestrian stops).

Now let’s look at the biggest department in the country.

Between 2017-2021, the NYPD fielded more than 30 million calls for service and made over one million arrests. Over that same period, New York City cops fired their weapons in just 0.02% of arrests and used force of any kind in 3.5% of arrests.

In other departments, force rates are even lower.

A 2018 study found that, over a two-year period, officers across three police departments in North Carolina, Arizona, and Louisiana fielded over a million calls for service. They made more than 114,000 arrests and used force of any kind in less than one percent of those. And just one of those encounters involved a fatal police shooting.

The deplorable actions depicted in the Memphis videos are simply not representative of policing as an institution.

It’s also worth noting that police reform advocates have gotten a lot of what they wanted over the last several years.

Between June 2020 and April 2021, 30 states enacted more than 140 police reform measures, according to the New York Times. City councils and police departments also enacted reforms of their own.

That includes the Memphis PD.

These reforms may constitute “wins” for activists demanding “change.” But have they made our streets safer? The public doesn’t seem to think so. In a 2022 poll of likely voters across the country, more than two-thirds of respondents said that they felt less safe than they did two years prior. 

Their fears are well-founded. In 2020, America saw a 30% increase in homicides—the single largest one-year spike in over 100 years.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association, representing seventy police departments, reported that in 2022, there were roughly 36% more aggravated assaults than there were in 2019. 

The crime spike has hit black communities hardest. A recent study found that in 2021, black men were shot to death at a rate not seen since 1990, meaning that in just a few years, all of the progress that community has seen over the past quarter century has been lost.

As much as some might want to deny it, a thin blue line divides order from chaos. Police brutality should never be tolerated, and we should work to reduce it. But making good policy requires an honest look at the data.

And the data say that police brutality is the exception, not the rule.

I’m Rafael Mangual, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Criminal (In)Justice, for Prager University.