My father was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee.
I’ve seen the good parts of the city: the popular March of ducks in the lobby of the famous Peabody Hotel, and the transformation of the rundown Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, into a gleaming civil rights museum.
I’ve also seen the ugly side.
It was during a visit to Memphis years ago that my brother and I witnessed a disturbing act of police misconduct at a park in the shadow of that same Peabody Hotel.
The cops were harassing a homeless man, physically tormenting him for sleeping on a park bench.
This was years before cell phone cameras could be used to record brutality from a safe distance. So, we watched helplessly as the abuse took place, ashamed of ourselves for not intervening, alive and unharmed because we didn’t.
I thought about that day when I watched the video of Memphis police officers beating a motorist, Tyre Nichols, to death after a bogus traffic stop.
I have relatives in Memphis, where my father was born and raised, who raise families, work in the community and drive along streets patrolled by abusive cops.
It could have easily been one of my relatives pulled over for no reason, pepper sprayed and pummeled by a bunch of inept police officers who couldn’t even run a half-mile without whining and wheezing.
These bumbling, stumbling Keystone Cops couldn’t even beat a man to death and violate his civil rights without stun-gunning and pepper spraying each other.
“Motherf---er made me Tase myself. "
“Damn, me too "
And don’t give me any of that he shouldn’t have resisted, or he shouldn’t have run bulls—t. He didn’t resist, and he only ran because he believed his life was in danger.
And he was right.
“I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog,” one of the officers bragged.
The five Black cops — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith — who chased Nichols, a Black man, on Jan. 7 and beat him to death after an unnecessary traffic stop were fired and charged with second-degree murder.
That’s far above anything that happened to the NYPD officers involved in the 2014 Staten Island chokehold death of Eric Garner, who was accused by cops of illegally selling cigarettes on the street.
None of the cops involved were criminally charged, and it took authorities five years to finally fire Daniel Pantaleo, the officer whose banned chokehold led to Garner’s death.
In both cases, there were police involved who have yet to face a minute of scrutiny for standing around and letting a man die.
Would authorities have been so quick to fire and charge the Memphis cops if they had been white?
I don’t know. And I don’t care.
These punks need to be punished for their crimes, and if that means locking them in a cell where they can Tase and pepper spray each other for the next 50 years, that would be OK with me.
