On January 7, five police officers, themselves African-American, wanted to control Tyre Nichols for a road offense. They were charged for murder.
MO12345LEMONDE with AFP
The American city of Memphis (Tennessee) was preparing, Friday, January 27, for demonstrations in response to the publication, scheduled for the end of the day (at night in Paris), a video showing sudden arrest By five police officers from an African-American, who died three days after being tobacco by police.
“When my husband and I arrived at the hospital and I saw my son, he was already dead. They had reduced him to porridge. He had blues everywhere, his head was swollen like a watermelon “Said RowvAaughn Wells, Tyre Nichols, in an interview broadcast Friday by the CNN channel .
The Memphis police chief, Cerelyn Davis, warned that the video showing the arrest of this 29 -year -old man was “comparable, even worse” to that showing The violent arrest of Rodney King in 1991 . The acquittal, a year later, of the four police officers involved triggered unprecedented riots in Los Angeles.
“We plan to share the video via a YouTube link so that it is accessible to everyone. It will be done at the end of the afternoon,” said M Me davis on CNN. She added that the images of the five police officers, themselves African-American, illustrated a “kind of group effect”. “The video is divided into four sequences (…): the initial [truck] control, the one near the house of Tyre and the portable camera of several people,” she said.
“It’s absolutely appalling”
On January 7, police wanted to control Tyre Nichols for a road offense. An “altercation had taken place” with the agents and “the suspect had fled”, according to the police. Caught up, Tyre Nichols had been arrested in circumstances that the authorities have so far avoided describing precisely. The precise course of the facts and their duration remain a source of questions, as is the elapsed time before the victim benefits from medical care. Tyre Nichols had complained of having trouble breathing and had been hospitalized. He died three days later.
The five police officers were charged with murder, assault and injuries. Four of them were then released on bail. What happened is “unacceptable” and “criminal”, that “should not have happened,” said David Rausch, director of the Tennessee inquiry office, who said he was “shocked” and ” disgusted “by what he saw. “In a word, it’s absolutely appalling,” he said.
This affair finds a particular echo in the country, still marked by the death of George Floyd, in May 2020, and the demonstrations against racism and police violence, with the cries of “Black Lives Matter” (“Black Lives count “) which had entered. The drama has revived the debate on police violence in the country.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, claimed in a statement a “fast, complete and transparent investigation” on this drama and called for demonstrations to be “peaceful”. “We cannot ignore the fact that deadly police interventions have touched black people more,” he said.
The Democratic president urges the congress to vote for a police reform bill, adopted in the House of Representatives in 2020 but which did not pass the obstacle of the Senate. Since the murder of George Floyd, the Congress has been unable to adopt the slightest ambitious police reform, if only that aimed at banning strangulation keys.