If the Memphis Cops Were White

By Rich Lowry

Monday, January 30, 2023

 

There were some “mostly peaceful” protests in the wake of the release of video of the police beating of Tyre Nichols, but the violence was pretty limited.

 

The situation would have been entirely different, of course, if a few of the cops who brutalized Nichols had been white, or even if the cop who repeatedly punched him had been white.

 

The race of the cops shouldn’t make a difference. Nothing that happened that night is better because the cops were black instead of white — Nichols is still dead.

 

Unfortunately, though, the accident of the officers’ race matters profoundly in terms of the narrative and the nation’s reaction to the incident.

 

If the cops were white, cities around the country would experience serious violence and people would get hurt and perhaps killed; major institutions around the country would find ways to signal their assent to the proposition that America is fundamentally racist; DEI efforts would get another boost in funding and mainstream appeal; the players in the NFL title games would insist on making some statement before playing on Sunday; and on and on.

 

Just as happened after the killing of George Floyd, there would be a spasm of cultural revolution.

 

Although there are attempts to save the police-racism narrative in Memphis, it simply doesn’t have the same resonance in a case involving cops, all of whom are black, mistreating a black arrestee. Indeed, Memphis should be yet another blow to the simplistic, dishonest idea that it is racial animus that accounts for white police misconduct.

 

If you, for good reason, are unwilling to believe that the black cops in this case are self-loathing black men who hate young black men and wish to harm them for racial reasons, then their behavior becomes a function of poor training and supervision, abysmal decision-making, anger in the moment, enjoyment of their feeling of power, free-floating cruelty, or some combination of these things, or all of them.

 

These are obviously attributes that influence the conduct of white cops, too — they are all cops and, more important, all human beings, who are prone to error of all kinds.

 

If the reductive racial critique were correct, it would mean that white cops never mistreat white arrestees or suspects, and that there’s never police brutality in a black society like, say, Haiti.

 

Both these propositions are, of course, preposterous.

 

The Left has elevated race above all the other factors that might play into a police encounter gone horribly wrong. The racial interpretation allows the Left to make a broader critique of American society and force wide-ranging political and social changes.

 

It isn’t very satisfying or consequential to say that a majority-black city with a black police chief has a police unit that was running out of control or that maybe just had some bad cops, certainly not compared with saying that America has been corrupt since 1619 and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up on equity and “anti-racist” principles — have at it, Ibram X. Kendi.

 

The former is what we’ll mostly hear after Memphis, but only because the cops happened to be black.

 

That this is the difference between relative peace and the pavement stones getting ripped up and used as projectile weapons in cities across America is another symptom of the perversity of our debate on policing in particular and race in general.