President calls for ‘peaceful protest’ while Memphis police will release video of Black motorist being beaten by five officersSign up to receive First Thing – our daily briefing by emailBen Crump, an attorney for the family of Tyre Nichols, warned in an interview with ABC News this morning of the graphic content of the video of the arrest.“It is going to remind many people of Rodney King,” Crump said, referring to the motorist whose 1991 beating by Los Angeles police officers sparked unrest in the city. “Tragically, unlike Rodney King, Tyre doesn’t survive. It’s so difficult to watch the video because even while he’s being brutalized, you still see the humanity in Tyre, that he was a good kid. Even while the police are saying all kind of profane things to him, he’s still is answering in a calm voice. He’s like, ‘what did I do, and I just want to go home.’”Chelsea Glass, an organizer with Decarcerate Memphis, which advocates for reform of the criminal justice system, said Scorpion was a “rebranding” of a common police tactic: a street crime-fighting team that relied on low-level traffic stops as pretexts to find violent criminals and weapons. “They harass everyday residents, and they’re calling this high-level policing,” Glass said. “But it’s really just stop-and-frisk on wheels. It doesn’t matter what name you slap on it.” Mark LeSure, a former Memphis police sergeant who retired in 2021, said he began to see a large number of relatively inexperienced officers’ being put on specialized units as a lot of the police force started leaving in recent years. Such units did not have enough senior staff members training the new officers, he said, adding that that was concerning to him. “Rookies were getting put on specialized units where they had no business being,” he said. Continue reading...
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