Repeatedly watching the monsters, the brutal hateful monsters who murdered Tyree Nichols there can be only one collection of responses-- horror, disgust, outrage and questions-- questions about how this could have happened, how cops could be so bad, so dangerous and evil.
TV pundits get it right when they say this is not a bad cop situation. This is a system problem that has allowed these kinds of horrific behavioirs to seem okay to the perpetrators.
Something is different in this situation. There's a new police chief and new district attorney in Memphis, elected because they offered transparency. That is a rare situation. Worse, when there are honest, open, police chiefs and district attorneys, they are often attacked as weak on crime or whatever. That's certainly the case here in Philadelphia where there are many Democrats who have attacked our DA, Larry Krasner, where state Republican legislators have attempted to impeach him, partly because he has gone after bad cops and bad assistant DAs.
I say this is a test of all police because ALL POLICE should come out against the cops who murdered Tyre Nichols. All police should be saying that this was horribly wrong. Police chiefs should be making statements making it clear that they will not tolerate such behavior.
Sadly, I fear that there are tens of thousands of police, among the 18,000 police departments in the US who are angry about how badly treated those monsters who managed to get jobs as police have been.
It is time for the US to pass national laws that protect citizens from such monsters. And there should be some way to identify who they are, because there are already records of the cops who have hurt and abused others, who have lost their temper and taken it out on innocent victims.
This awful event in American history has the potential to mark a turning point. Will that happen, will police departments across the country do something they can easily do, flag the bad cops who already have a history, or will this be another politicized moment of doing nothing except offering thought and prayers.
1
1
