Tyre Nichols~Officers Gave Tyre Nichols Impossible Orders

 

71 Commands in 13 Minutes: Officers Gave Tyre Nichols Impossible Orders

A Times analysis found that officers gave dozens of contradictory and unachievable orders to Mr. Nichols. The punishment was severe — and eventually fatal.

By Robin Stein, Alexander Cardia and Natalie Reneau

Jan. 29, 2023

Police officers unleashed a barrage of commands that were confusing, conflicting and sometimes even impossible to obey, a Times analysis of footage from Tyre Nichols’s fatal traffic stop found. When Mr. Nichols could not comply — and even when he managed to — the officers responded with escalating force.

The review of the available footage found that officers shouted at least 71 commands during the approximately 13-minute period before they reported over the radio that Mr. Nichols was officially in custody. The orders were issued at two locations, one near Mr. Nichols’s vehicle and the other in the area he had fled to and where he would be severely beaten. The orders were often simultaneous and contradictory. Officers commanded Mr. Nichols to show his hands even as they were holding his hands. They told him to get on the ground even when he was on the ground. And they ordered him to reposition himself even when they had control of his body.

Experts say the actions of the Memphis police officers were an egregious example of a longstanding problem in policing in which officers physically punish civilians for perceived disrespect or disobedience — sometimes called “contempt of cop.” The practice was notoriously prevalent decades ago.

“It was far more rampant in the ’80s, when I started doing police work, than it was in the ’90s or 2000s,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. “Even before body cams, cops were getting more professional and wouldn’t make it personal, like it seemed to be in this case. This is just — it’s so far out of the norm.”

To mitigate the potential for escalation and confusion during police encounters, today’s police training typically calls for a single officer at the scene to issue clear and specific commands. It also requires police officers to respond professionally and proportionately to any perceived act of defiance.

But The Times’s review shows that the officers did the exact opposite, over and over.

The available footage does not show any sign that the officers present intervened to stop the aggressive use of force. If anything, it shows the contrary.

At one point, footage captured an officer saying “I hope they stomp his ass” after Mr. Nichols’s attempt to flee the scene.

The Times’s analysis is based on footage from police body cams and street cameras released by the City of Memphis and synchronized by The Times.

Here are four key moments in which officers punished Mr. Nichols for not complying with flawed commands. These videos contain scenes of graphic violence.

Confusing Orders

The footage begins with a police officer driving up to the intersection where Mr. Nichols’s car had been boxed in by two unmarked police vehicles.

The officer jumps out with his firearm drawn and joins a pair of officers rushing toward the front seat.

One officer pulls Mr. Nichols out of his car, and all three officers immediately start screaming “On the ground!”

These are the first orders in the bombardment of confusing commands that confound Mr. Nichols and prompt a cascade of retribution.

Mr. Nichols points out that he is sitting on the ground, as the officers instructed him to do.

But multiple officers shout the same command over and over with intensifying frustration and physical threats.

“Get on the ground!” one orders. “I’m gonna tase your ass.”

It eventually becomes evident that the officers would like Mr. Nichols not only on the ground but also lying down.

When Mr. Nichols repositions himself, it appears to further antagonize the officers. He tries to convey that he poses no threat.

“You guys are really doing a lot right now,” he says. “I’m just trying to go home.”

With officers pinning down his arms, pressing a taser against his leg and barking intensifying verbal threats, Mr. Nichols explodes: “I am on the ground!”

Finally, one of the officers yells more specific instructions: “On your stomach.”

Three seconds later, one of the officers shoots pepper spray into Mr. Nichols’s face.

Contradictory Commands

After fleeing on foot, Mr. Nichols is seen lying on the ground a few hundred yards away from his car, flanked by officers demanding that he give them his hands. But one of them is gripping his left arm, and the other is holding his right. It’s not clear how the officers expect Mr. Nichols to move.

Then a third officer runs up with a can of pepper spray.

“You’re about to get sprayed good,” he says. The others start punching Mr. Nichols’s face.

Mr. Nichols responds by pulling his hands back to protect himself. The punching intensifies, and the pepper spray is fired.

Wiping the pepper spray from his eyes, Mr. Nichols tries assuring them that he is going to comply.

“OK,” he says. “All right. All right.”

But just as one of the officers gets hold of him, a new officer arrives and also demands that Mr. Nichols give him his hands. Again, Mr. Nichols is unable to follow the conflicting directions. He flails about, which only multiplies the police officers’ commands and the physical punishment they inflict. He is doused with pepper spray for a third time.

Orders Not Resisted

Two officers stand above Mr. Nichols, who is lying on his side and rubbing his eyes after being pepper-sprayed three times. An officer kicks Mr. Nichols in the face. Mr. Nichols appears to be barely conscious or coherent, but officers treat him as if he is resisting orders.

“Lay flat, goddamn it,” one officer commands.

Mr. Nichols moans and writhes on the ground. By this point, he has been tased, kicked in the head twice and punched and pepper-sprayed repeatedly.

“Lay flat,” another officer shouts.

Mr. Nichols is lying limp as an officer, without any apparent difficulty, snaps a pair of handcuffs to one of his wrists.

Impossible Orders

Officers continue to issue commands while simultaneously constraining, controlling and beating Mr. Nichols in ways that render it physically impossible for him to follow those commands.

One officer uses Mr. Nichols’s handcuffed arm to pull his body from the ground and into a kneeling position. Then another officer strikes him with a baton three times, yelling “Give us your hands!”

Surrounded by four officers, he tries to move away from the baton.

“Give me your fucking hands!” one officer shouts.

But Mr. Nichols — with one officer pinning his arms behind his back, another gripping his handcuffed wrist and a third punching his face — cannot comply.

Mr. Nichols doubles over and calls out for his mother. The blows continue.

Five officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder. Lawyers for two of them said in a news conference last week that their clients intended to plead not guilty.

Ishaan Jhaveri and Christoph Koettl contributed reporting.

Tyre Nichols' death 'was more than police brutality. That was a lynching,' says Rev. Danté Stewart

January 30, 2023

Scott TongGabrielle Healy

Memphis has been mourning 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, who died three days after police officers brutally beat him at a traffic stop on Jan. 7. Nichols’ funeral will be held Wednesday.

Protests erupted across the country following the senseless killing, including in Memphis, in the three weeks since. So far, six police officers have been suspended for their involvement in Nichols’ death, and five have been charged with second-degree murder. Body camera footage released last week shows officers giving Nichols’ impossible commands and kicking, punching and using a baton to beat him while he laid on the ground.

“I saw two officers kicking him the way we used to get burned and lynched,” writer and speaker Rev. Danté Stewart says. “They had no pity.”

4 questions with Rev. Danté Stewart about police brutality and Nichols’ murder

Did you watch the body camera footage?

“I believe vicarious suffering is a very real thing. We do not just suffer alone, but we see what other people go through and have to endure, and we feel that pain as well. But I also believe that vicarious love is a thing as well.

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“I've chosen to watch because, in some way, I don't think I need the video to feel the trauma, to feel the pain. But in some way, I personally have done it because I don't want him in some spiritual way to have to endure that alone.

“For me, and I'm even getting emotional even thinking about it, I don't want that to be the only eyes on him, the eyes of those officers who wanted to assault him.

“I want to be with him at every moment I possibly can, not just in that video, but also in the video of him skateboarded in a video of his mother saying, ‘That's my baby,’ and even laughing, saying, ‘My baby said he wanted to be famous. I didn't know he meant this.’ I don't want them to go through it alone.”

Your father called you after seeing the body camera footage. How do you speak with older family members about this type of violence?

“I actually write about this in my book, ‘Shoutin’ in the Fire,’ where I talk to my grandmother about what it meant to live in America, in a place that was so drunk on nostalgia, at a time where people like her or people like my father were silent and abuse continually.

“My dad said, ‘it makes me so angry.’ But then the most telling part about his anger was this: He said that when he heard Tyre cry for his mama, it made him want to cry. And he just could not do it as a parent and doesn't understand how any parent or any child or any person could see what we saw and hear what we heard and feel what we feel and not be moved to deep grief, sadness, and in some sense, rage.

“That's what I felt in my father's voice. Rage at the reality that he has to remember Rodney King, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, and now Tyree Nichols.”

Why do you describe this killing as a lynching?

“That was more than police brutality. That was a lynching. They wanted to kill him because, in some sense, lynching is about the spectacle. It's about what someone with power does to another human being to ride and rid them of every ounce of their dignity and put it in the public to show this is what we think about this person.

“When those in the past put Black people up on noose, it was a message to them: This is our estimation of your life, and much more, this is our hatred of your life. And when Tyre Nichols was beaten and the just immense disregard to him, it showed us in public once again the estimation of Black life, white racism and white supremacy.”

You write, “Just because Black people are present doesn't mean anti-Blackness is absent.” Does systemic racism exist in policing that affects all officers?

“History tells the story that it doesn't matter who has the badge. The badge has power that whiteness has given it in the world, whether one is able to stop a person because they believe that they are criminal or they believe they're in the wrong place, or they believe that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing. That is a power that has been given to them, that has been inherited from the inception of this nation.

“As a Black person, when I get the badge, or when I get the ball, my race is in some sense under the shadow and the covering of it. So it doesn't matter who it is. It is about what policing has meant and has done to us and continues to do to us. So, yes, the historical record shows that no matter who they are or where they come from, policing does something to people in this country. We know it and we better deal with it.”