Why There Was No Racial Reckoning
MEMPHIS, Tenn.—If the summer of 2020 was, for many Americans, a breaking point, then the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd presented the nation’s leadership class with a crossroads. Would they radically rethink American policing, or would they retreat to the safety of piecemeal reform, earnestly applying Band-Aids over bullet wounds? Two and a half years later, Tyre Nichols is dead, and the choice they made is clear.
It’s not that nothing was done. Some departments vowed to make more data available, and others launched exploratory efforts to let specialists respond to mental-health emergencies. Activists in a handful of cities succeeded in securing cuts to their police budgets. Some cities proposed ending armed traffic enforcement.
But there was no Great Reckoning in American policing. No sweeping act of atonement. No radical reordering. Not even, at scale, the “reimagining” championed by the moderates. In many cases, reactionary backlash has outpaced the changes that prompted it. Society’s moral vacuum had been laid open before us. Rather than plug it, the most powerful among us watched as we were sucked further into the abyss.
On January 7, the Memphis Police Department announced that during a traffic stop for “reckless driving” the night prior, “a confrontation occurred, and the suspect fled the scene on foot.” When officers caught up with the suspect, the department claimed, “another confrontation occurred” before the man was finally taken into custody. Complaining of “shortness of breath,” the 29-year-old was brought to a nearby hospital. Three days later, Tyre Nichols was dead, and a grotesque spectacle of Black death began.
[David A. Graham: How did it come to this?]
Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C. J.” Davis would later say that she immediately recognized the urgency of the situation. Within days, five officers were fired, and a federal probe was launched. Officials allowed Nichols’s family and their lawyers to watch the videos of what had happened, which they described afterward as “far worse than Rodney King.” Nichols, they said, had been savaged like “a human piñata.” The officers were charged with second-degree murder. Television journalists,
