What Have We Done
January 28 at 9AM is showing 19 degrees F outside and snow is coming. Starbucks is filled with the “Saturday crowd,” the atmosphere infused with the babble of voices. Life goes on — until it doesn’t. I read this in the New York Times summary of the news which is received by email daily:
Four videos
Memphis police officers held down Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, and took turns punching and kicking him as he pleaded for them to stop, according to video footage released by officials yesterday. Nichols died in the hospital three days after the Jan. 7 traffic stop.
I have not watched the full video of the killing as I understand well enough what is meant when a human being is killed adventitiously, by the agents of state authority. Whether the event happens due to a Russian missile falling onto an apartment building in Ukraine, or due to a police traffic stop in Memphis, — it is a killing.
It’s a matter of location and time whether one, by fated misfortune, belongs to a designated victim category of homo sapiens, — a citizen of Ukraine under assault by Putin’s army or a Black young man living in Memphis.
The officers caught Nichols and then held him down as they punched and kicked him, hit him with a baton and pepper-sprayed him while he grew increasingly incapacitated. He did not appear to fight back or resist. He yelled for his mother at one point.
Afterward, Nichols sat propped up against a car as police officers surrounded him. Medics arrived on the scene, but they did not attend to Nichols for 16 minutes. He was taken to the hospital nearly an hour after the initial traffic stop.
According to news reports the five officers involved have been charged with second degree murder. Seems to me that the paramedics on the scene ought to be charged too as accessories to the murder. The sixteen minutes observing the spectacle of the dying man might have made the difference. They withheld aid for sixteen minutes.
“No one out there that night intended for Tyre Nichols to die,” a lawyer for one of the officers said. All five posted bail and have been released from jail.
The statement offered by the hired mouthpiece is disingenuous. The actions of the five in uniform make the point. It is likely they had intent of nothing-in-particular. The “victim” was disposable.
The anger, the despair I now feel — because life in 21st century America is a zero-sum game.
Do you remember the old mythic tale from Genesis chapter 4?
8 Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
10 The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.
3 thoughts on “What Have We Done”
Praises be to the engineers who invented body cameras, plus whoever was wise enough to mandate that police officers wear them and record such situations. Otherwise the guilty officers self-servingly would have shrugged off their actions as “He attacked us and we had to defend ourselves,” as so many others historically have.
I never fail to be astounded that so many people are willing to commit criminal acts WHILE KNOWING that a video record is being made; sometimes they document their lawbreaking themselves! Does Homo sapiens crave his fellows’ attention so much that it’s worth surrendering his own freedom in order to “star” in an incriminating video?
Since video proof doesn’t seem to deter police (or other) violence as one rationally would expect, what would? It is tempting to fantasize putting each of those officers, one at a time and unarmed as Tyre Nichols was, in a room with the young man’s angry relatives fitted with police gear, and let the chips fall where they may. But such deliberate, non-defensive violence would be just as wrong and morally corrupting no matter who committed it. How can a state authorize one set of people to do exactly what another set is punished for doing? Humans brutalize each other enough without officially sanctioning more of it.
Although … what if it were a robot? It seems likely from current progress in robotics that, now or soon, enough data could be collected from the videos and Tyre Nichols’ injuries to calculate the force and direction of each blow he received. If five robots then could be programmed to beat up each offending officer exactly as he beat Tyre Nichols, and then medical care were delayed for the same length of time — would that achieve a more complete and moral justice than will happen otherwise? Would it evade the moral damage that would accrue to a human licensed to inflict pain?
Moreover, would knowledge of such a possibility finally deter police (or any potential inflictor of violence) from following through on their vicious impulses? Obviously being caught on camera often is insufficient deterrence — how about reaping precisely what one sows?
In the past I have reflected upon the impression that punishment does not deter crime. When we are so riled up, or filled with avarice, or jealousy, or ___ we do not calculate possible consequences. We simply want what we want, as if overcome, possessed by a fever.
I dissent. Many — most? — crimes are not committed in the heat of irresistible passion, but because 1) the transgressor believes the potential payoff is greater than the potential loss, and 2) the transgressor believes the likelihood of getting caught (and thus having to endure that loss) is low and/or can be reduced by the transgressor.
Every time you dutifully obey a STOP sign at an empty intersection that would have been served just as well by a YIELD sign because you’re the only car in sight, you are demonstrating that threat of punishment keeps people in line, because you’re unwilling to risk a ticket despite that a rolling stop would have been just as safe.
Punishment indeed does deter crime, especially when potential criminals perceive a high probability that they will be caught and punished. You may have been thinking of studies showing that capital punishment does not deter capital crime better than long prison sentences — mostly for the reasons you listed. That fact, I believe, is pretty settled, but it does not satisfy those who viscerally crave execution of the most heinous criminals.