The homicidal beating of Tyre Nichols by five cops made the news, the reels and the opinion columns, quickly and “bigly.” You know that the first reaction was to cry Racism!, and that then, after it came out that the policemen charged with his murder were all black . . . it was still Racism!
You might have laughed. If bitterly.
Van Jones’s headline seems, on the face of it, ridiculous: “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism” (January 27, 2023).
Yet, the actual arguments aren’t completely absurd.
Just the big picture is.
Today, we’ve been given a new set of definitions. Racism is no longer prejudiced discrimination against individuals based on antipathy against a hated group, now it’s “prejudice plus power,” and . . . somehow the new anti-racists don’t realize that power isn’t just about race.
It wasn’t likely internalized hatred for blacks that these black policemen exhibited. Far more likely it was exasperation and contempt for a man who wouldn’t submit to their control.
Police have a job, and are given a lot of license and leeway to take away our liberty after a suspected crime. Tyre Nichols did not readily submit to an arrest for reckless driving, but bolted, running away. When the cops caught up with him, they gave him a beating. Was it because he was black? Not likely, or at least not primarily. It was most likely because he wouldn’t obey.
This old police attitude is more understandable than racism, no?
But “understandable” isn’t excuse.
We can meaningfully talk about reforms — such as getting rid of qualified immunity — but first, let’s stop calling it racism and “white supremacy.” The issue is cop supremacy, and it’s not really a mystery.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Police Supremacy”
Part of the problem is that the left has adopted a belief system that acknowledges only confirmation, and that belief system has racism pervasively intense. But part of the problem is that the left-wing project requires the state to use policing powers even more than would the political right, and far more than would the original liberal vision.
Sometimes the left speaks and writes ostensibly of defunding the police, but under examination we find them imagining armed social workers, who would really be a new and even more intrusive police force.
So, in effect, the left demands that police brutality be regulated by racial sensitivity, rather than ended.
Almost every report on a police encounter that results in injury or death should be preceded by the words … He resisted arrest.
Newsweek is investigating the suggestion that Nichols was involved with the ex-wife (or ex-girlfriend) of one of the officers who beat him. Instead of racism or police supremacy or whatever, this may have been a case of score-settling. It’s still a case of illegal behavior by the officers, but it might be personal, rather than systemic.
Only within a system in while police believe that they can get away with such torture could this beating have occurred on so many cameræ.