The disturbing videotaped beating death of Tyre Nichols has renewed the call for police reform legislation. Five Memphis police officers, all of whom were Black, have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.
Nichols’ beating has sparked new conversations about the issue of race in law enforcement. Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette, whose father was a cop, says the “blue-first” mentality that permeates the ranks of police officers was absolutely a factor in Nichols’ death.
Black Lives Matter. Hmm. Apparently the life of one Black man didn’t matter at all to five Black police officers who didn’t even call for an ambulance for nearly a half hour after the beating. Nichols, a young man who was someone’s father, someone’s son, died in a hospital bed three days later, from injuries sustained in the beating. It goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway. Nothing justifies bullies with badges and bullets preying on the weak and vulnerable to the point in some cases of actually taking people’s lives.
Nonetheless, to be fair, it turns out that sometimes people make bad decisions, to resist arrest, to fight back against officers, to flee. And some of those cases it appears that officers get amped up and take matters into their own hands. At that moment, however, they stop being lawmen and become outlaws. If people commit a crime, arrest them, and let prosecutors, juries, and judges do the rest. That’s how the system is supposed to work, isn’t it?
Actually, I know for a fact that it is. My dad is a retired cop who was on the job for 37 years. I grew up around cops and lawyers and judges. I know how to tell good cops from bad ones and I understand how bad cops can make life more difficult and more dangerous for the good ones. And no, it doesn’t all just boil down simply to skin color.
Once upon a time, some of us – and I count myself in this group – may have believed in the fairy tale that Black and Brown cops would be on those occasions when they came in contact with their own kind, more empathetic, more humane, more restrained than many white cops have been over the generations. But I don’t know any Latinos and African-Americans who still believe that folly today.
Life teaches you otherwise. In fact, we know from experience that many Black and Brown cops are blue first. And this mentality too often leads those cops of color to be overly brutal with their own people, as if to somehow overcompensate and prove to their white partners and white bosses where their true allegiance lies.
Brutality is often the order of the day, in fact, with Latino Border Patrol agents, who represent more than 50% of the ranks of the personnel in that agency. God help the poor migrant or refugee from Mexico or El Salvador or Venezuela named Sanchez or Gonzalez, who finds himself apprehended by a border patrol agent whose name tag reads Sanchez or Gonzalez. If that happens, amigos, que via con dios. Go with God.
