What are you supposed to notice? What are you supposed to ignore?

Everybody in charge has apologized. No follow-up questions, please

Top notes: I wasn’t going to write about Tyre Nichols, because there seemed to be very little to add. It was and is a terrible gut punch of a tragedy. But there’s been something about the official response to Nichols’ death that I haven’t been able to shake, so I’m going to share some thoughts in case you’ve been unsettled as well. For reasons that I hope are obvious, I’m sharing this today rather than waiting for Tuesday (when I normally publish essays).

As always, thanks to everybody who supports my work and this space. Thanks even more so for all of you who are working (or aspire to work) to build a world that is less cruel and more humane. It is never too late to get started.

Last night, the Memphis Police Department released a video showing five police officers beating Tyre Nichols to death. The fatal assault took place on January 7th. Nichols was officially declared dead three days later. In the intervening days various Memphis and Tennessee officials— the Police Chief, the Mayor, the Governor— released statements strongly condemning the five Black officers who killed Nichols.

The video of Nichols’ murder was finally released at 6:00 PM on a Friday night, at a time when schools and businesses would be closed and evening commuters would have already returned home. Earlier in the day, the President of the United States— who also put out a strongly worded statement condemning the five officers— convened a meeting with fifteen mayors across the country. They talked about how to coordinate plans for protest, how to urge protestors to remain peaceful, about what Federal resources the mayors would receive to manage dissent. Over the course of Friday afternoon and evening, statements from municipal leaders thousands of miles away from Memphis poured in. The Chief of the Idaho Police Association called the murder “a horrendous criminal act.” The mayor of Portland, Oregon “reflected” on the “tragic brutality.” The Governor of Delaware found the body camera images to be “beyond disturbing, ” the Mayor of New York was “outraged” and the Minneapolis Police Chief was “heartbroken.”

Across the country, officials agreed. Those five specific Black officers were in the wrong. Please notice our strong condemnation. Please don't protest too loudly, too visibly, or for too long. Please let us just get on with our lives. We all said we’re sorry. We found the five bad apples. We are absolved from blame.

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U.S. cops killed more people last year than at any point in the last decade. 1,176 separate human lives were lost at the hands of armed agents of the state in a single calendar year. A quarter of those were Black lives, despite the fact that Black Americans account for only 13% of the U.S. population. There were only twelve days over the course of the entire year when a U.S. resident wasn’t killed by a cop.

The President did not offer 1,176 condemnations last year. Neither did the Governor of Delaware or Chiefs of Police in Idaho and Minneapolis or the Mayors of Portland and New York or the hundreds of elected officials and law enforcement leaders who are— we are assured— feeling strongly disturbed by Nichols’ death.

There were not 1,176 major news stories in 2022 about cops killing civilians. There were, however, hundreds of news stories about a “crime wave” that we were told had its roots not in the aftershocks of a global pandemic and a recession disproportionally battering poor people, but by the “Ferguson” or “George Floyd” effect (meaning, anti-police sentiment). We have been told that just because protestors marched around chanting “Defund the Police” that somehow police departments had magically been defunded (they had not) and that as a direct result, criminals were now running amok. We have been told that we needed to be gravely concerned about the fate of the Walgreens Corporation, whose stores in San Francisco were purportedly being robbed on a nearly hourly basis by thugs operating with the explicit blessing of civilian-hating villains like former District Attorney Chesa Boudin

We have been told— both by what we are asked to pay attention to and what we are asked to ignore— that everything is basically fine, save for occasional aberrations.

We have been told that we can move forward with a system built on stolen land and lives, that those sins require mere acknowledgment rather than redistribution.

We have been told that it is inevitable that a small number of people get to be very wealthy and that a much, much larger number of people have to be poor.

We have been told that all that poverty is only a problem if poor people don’t stay in line.

We have been told that crime happens on the street and not in boardrooms.

We have been told that criminals are irrevocably bad people who are not your neighbors and that you and your more worthy neighbors will be safer with just a few more cops, just a few more jails, just a few more televised reminders of who is to be feared.

We have been told that none of this dehumanizes us— those that are surveilled, those that are loaded up with fear, and those with badges who are asked to embody an entire nation’s isolation and inhumanity.

In the logic of the system in which we live, the mistake that those five Memphis officers made wasn’t that they abused and killed a human being. It’s that they did so in a way that couldn’t be ignored. Now, instead of talking about the crucial issues that we’re supposed to focus on— like how well we can all make fun of George Santos or if the M&Ms are too woke— our nation’s leaders and media outlets have to acknowledge that yes, a bad thing happened this one time and then hope and pray that the news cycle fades away with a minimum of disruption and, ideally, no messy follow-up questions.

If history is our guide, the broader system has little to fear. We are still feeling a collective sheepishness over the fact that— for a single summer back in 2020— a larger than average number of us did try to care and then gave up. I don’t have much hope that we’ll be talking about Tyre Nichols a week from now, let alone about our collective brokenness and isolation from one another.

But we always have a choice. We do actually have agency as to where our attention does and doesn’t go, about what questions we do or don’t ask. We can choose whether we merely decry the actions of five cops, or if we merely say that the problem is cops in general, or if we ask the bigger questions.

Who is our neighbor?

To what do we owe them?

What kind of lives do we all deserve to live?

What would truly keep us all safe?

Who and what is worthy of our attention?

End notes:

Song of the week: “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil Scott-Heron (“I’m doing fine, but I could have been pulling time”).

As always, you can find the collected song of the week playlist on Apple Music or Spotify.