When 29-year-old Tyre Nichols was stopped by police in Memphis, Tennessee, on Jan. 7 over what police said was suspicion of reckless driving, he was beaten so badly that three days later he was dead. A single statistic from an excellent New York Times video investigation helps illuminate how that happened.
According to the Times, several police officers gave Nichols 71 commands in 13 minutes — many of which were "confusing, conflicting and sometimes even impossible to obey" because of how police were pinning him down.
If you watch the disturbing video of the exchange, you can see how the instructions weren't meant to help Nichols cooperate with the police. Instead, they provided the police with a pretext to further escalate violence. This is a preview of Zeeshan Aleem's latest article. Read their full column here. |
