A group of protesters gathered in Cal Anderson Park and marched to the Space Needle and back Friday night in a demonstration against police as video of the deadly beating of Tyre Nichols by officers in Memphis was released.
The protest was announced via social media and a television news helicopter circled above the Capitol Hill park to cover the small demonstration involving a few dozen participants. No significant property damage was reported on Capitol HIll during the march which ended with the group gathering for a short time outside the East Precinct where Black Lives Matter protests stretched out during and after CHOP, replaced by months of anti-police protests through 2020 and into 2021.
Larger, more organized efforts could follow. The video released Friday showed “a brutal beating in which a group of Memphis police officers repeatedly kicked and punched Tyre Nichols after they yanked him from his car, shouted a series of threats and orders, and then pushed him to the ground while he pleaded for them to stop,” images that contradict the Memphis Police Department’s statements on the incident and once again have thrown policing and racism into the national spotlight.
Many Seattle officials responded to the video with shock and outrage including Mayor Bruce Harrell who called the beating “appalling, egregious,” and “heinous” while pledging his city’s “commitment to equitable and constitutional policing and diversified responses, along with showcasing how deliberative legislative action and community engagement can advance those goals.”
SPD Chief Adrian Diaz, meanwhile, said he is “100% focused on providing equitable public safety services for all people” and said his department’s use of force incidents decreased 48% in 2021 compared to 2015 while complaints to the Office of Police Accountability fell by 50% in 2022 compared to 2019.
The same city press release included a statement from Seattle Police Officers Guild President Mike Solan saying “this incident is in complete opposition to everything we stand for.” But Solan also appeared Friday on conservative radio station KTHH to warn “activists” that “good career police are ready” to meet them in the street while also clouding the descriptions of progress put forth by Diaz and Harrell.
No additional demonstrations have been announced in Seattle.
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I’ll probably get vilified for this, but I think there is an obvious but ignored factor in this incident and many others like it: Often, early-on, the detained person refuses to comply with reasonable police commands, and becomes belligerent (verbally and/or physically). Sometimes they run away. Then, the police respond by getting more aggressive in an effort to get the person under control, and things escalate into violence. If the detained person would just stay still and follow police requests, he (and it’s almost always a he) would be very unlikely to become injured.
I am NOT saying that the detained person is at fault or deserves to be physically abused. If the police act inappropriately or illegally in any way, they should be brought to justice.
Zach, it’s not a factor, it’s copaganda you’re falling for. Police are literally trained to shoot first then shout “Drop the weapon” “Stop Resisting” knowing that any witnesses will reverse that order misrepresenting it when asked what happened later.
Even criminals shouldn’t be killed or abused by the police either. We have a whole court system for determining punishment. It should never be at the hands of the enforcement wing incentivized to only go after the poor criminals while the rich criminals rob this country blind, who’s military like training has convinced them any movement by anyone is a threat to their cops lives.
If you truly believed that detained people shouldn’t be abused, you’d back that up with statements that don’t immediately cast blame on the detained like you did here.
spoken like someone who’s never been hunted for sport
A video analysis by the NY Times found that many of the commands given to Nichols were contradictory. There’s no way to “follow police requests” when one cop is ordering you stand still and not move, at the same time another is ordering you to lie down on the ground.