Tyre Nichols and Police Brutality | 5-Minute Videos

The public's reaction to the deadly beating of Tyree Nichols in Memphis in January 2023 has been virtually unanimous a clear-cut case of police brutality the cops agree police Executives Rank and file officers and Union representatives from across the country also expressed their strong disapproval the president of the Fraternal Order of Police Patrick EOS denounced the incident as a criminal assault under the pretext of law NYPD commissioner kishan Sewell described the Memphis officer's conduct as disgraceful here's why they're right after the initial encounter with Nichols body cam footage shows one officer saying to another that Nichols made me pepper spray myself a Second Officer seemed agitated at having had his glasses knocked off during the struggle later saying I hope they stomp his ass a third appeared to have hurt his leg in the melee but none of this excuses kicks to the Head punches to the face where baton strikes doled out to a man who was not resisting what it looked like was an unjustifiable beating handed out by Hot Heads though it's little consolation to Nichols family Memphis authorities didn't hesitate in punishing the offending officers all five were swiftly terminated arrested and indicted for their outrageous behavior but this isn't enough for some we need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy district attorney Steve mulroy said during the press conference in which the charges were announced perhaps the lesson is simply this policing is a human endeavor and is therefore subject to the shortcomings of inherently flawed human beings which means that some people cops included will sometimes act out of malevolence to the activists however bad police officers are not the exception they're the rule congresswoman Alexandria ocasio-cortez for example grumbled about the effort to separate the officers who murdered Tyree Nichols from the system of policing that produced them going on to assert that charges alone aren't Justice changes but there's good reason to separate the officers who beat Nichols from the institution of policing their actions constituted a sharp departure from police training and practice the available data show this to be true what activists often term police violence contrary to what you may have heard is extremely rare this becomes clear once you view use of force numbers in their proper context unjustifiable force is even rarer according to data compiled by police scorecard a website built by left-wing police critic Samuel sanyagwe Memphis Police have been involved in 25 killings between 2013 and 2021 appearing in which Memphis police officers made some 288 thousand arrests to say nothing of other encounters such as traffic and pedestrian stops now let's look at the biggest department in the country between 2017 and 2021 the NYPD fielded more than 30 million calls for service and made over 1 million arrests over that same period New York City cops fired their weapons in just 0.02 percent of arrests and use force of any kind in three and a half percent of arrests and other departments Force rates are even lower a 2018 study found that over a two-year period officers across three police departments in North Carolina Arizona and Louisiana fielded over a million calls for service they made more than a hundred and fourteen thousand arrests in use force of any kind in less than one percent of those and just one of those encounters involved a fatal police shooting the deplorable actions depicted in the Memphis videos are simply not representative of policing as an institution it's also worth noting that police reform Advocates have gotten a lot of what they wanted over the last several years between June 2020 and April 2021 30 States enacted more than 140 police reform measures according to the New York Times city councils and police departments also enacted reforms of their own that includes the Memphis PD these reforms May constitute wins for activists demanding change but have they made our streets safer the public doesn't seem to think so and in 2022 poll of likely voters across the country more than two-thirds of respondents said that they felt less safe than they did two years prior their fears are well founded in 2020 America saw a 30 percent increase in homicides the single largest one-year spike in over a hundred years the major City Chiefs Association representing 70 police departments reported that in 2022 there were roughly 36 percent more aggravated assaults than there were in 2019. the crime Spike has hit black communities the hardest a recent study found that in 2021 black men were shot to death at a rate not seen since 1990 meaning that in just a few years all of the progress that Community has seen over the past quarter century was lost as much as some might want to deny it A Thin Blue Line divides order from chaos police brutality should never be tolerated and we should work to reduce it but making good policy requires an honest look at the data and the data say that police brutality is the exception not the rule I'm Rafael mengual senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of criminal Injustice for Prager University thank you for watching this video to keep prageru videos free please consider making a tax deductible donation