Five black US police officers charged with beating fellow black man to death

Authorities in the United States on Thursday charged five former police officers with murder over the fatal beating of a Black man in Memphis, as the southern city braced for possible civil unrest and President Joe Biden urged demonstrators to protest peacefully.

According to CNN, Tyre Nichols, 29, was pulled over on January 7 for what the Memphis Police Department described as dangerous driving.

Following a chase, “police brutalized him to the point of being unrecognizable,” according to a statement from family lawyers Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci.

The five officers—all of whom are Black—were fired after an internal inquiry revealed that they had used excessive force and had neglected to provide aid, according to the police.

According to the police, Nichols was rushed to the hospital in severe condition, where he passed away on January 10.

Police video of the arrest, according to officials, will be made public after 6:00 pm Central time on Friday (0000 GMT Saturday).

The police assassination of Nichols immediately brought to mind the suffocation of another Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020.

The swiftly disseminated video of Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide surge of often violent protests that raised questions about racial inequality and police violence in the US.

The officers in Memphis are also accused of aggravated assault and aggravated kidnapping in addition to second-degree murder.

“After everyone sees the video, I don’t think they’ll have any questions about those charges,” District Attorney Steve Mulroy told CNN.

The second-largest city in Tennessee, Memphis, with a 65 percent African-American population.

Following their viewing of the video, the family lawyers claimed to have witnessed “the horrific way in which he lost his life at the hands of Memphis police.”

“The news today from Memphis officials that these five officers are being held criminally accountable for their deadly and brutal actions gives us hope as we continue to push for justice for Tyre,” the lawyers added.

Biden issued a calm call on Thursday, anticipating anger following the release of the footage.

The president issued a statement in which he joined Tyre’s family in calling for peaceful protest, adding that “Americans are grieving, the Department of Justice is conducting its investigation, and state authorities are doing their work.”

Nichols’ beating “shows to the need, need for change and reform to guarantee that this violence stops occurring during low-threat procedures, like in this case, a traffic check,” the family’s attorneys continued.

Despite attorneys for two of the five officers claiming their clients intended to post bail, all five of the cops charged with Nichols’s murder have been brought into custody.

Former officer Desmond Mills Jr.’s attorney Blake Ballin stated that his client and his family were experiencing “a lot of anxiety and sorrow, not only for his personal circumstances but for what this sort of accusation, this kind of occurrence is doing to our city.”

The lawyer said that he had not yet watched the incident’s video.

At a news conference on Thursday, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Inquiry, David Rausch, expressed his disgust at what he had witnessed and what the investigation had shown.

The victim’s family was inconsolable, according to district attorney Mulroy: “They described an almost ideal son, a cheery and pleasant person who adored skating and sunsets over Shelby Farms Park.”

Derrick Johnson, head of the NAACP, a civil rights organization, said: “We can identify all the victims of police violence, but we can’t name a single statute you have passed to address it.”