Family photo of Tyre Nichols published in the Amsterdam News (2/14/23).
Every news outlet was talking about it. On January 7, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten by Memphis police officers, and he died three days later. The incident was captured on video, and the gruesome footage sparked nationwide outrage.
Calls for police reform were reignited (NPR, 1/31/23), echoing the uproar regarding George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Political leaders paid their respects, with Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at Nichols’ funeral, and President Joe Biden acknowledging Nichols’ parents during his State of the Union address. Biden, Harris and other Democrats pushed to revive the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has twice failed to pass in the Senate (Washington Post, 2/1/23; Guardian, 2/6/23).
The attention was warranted. And yet, in the month of January 2023, at least 17 other Black men were killed by police—with next to no media coverage.
Names rarely mentioned
A search for Tyre Nichols’ name returns 65 results at the New York Times in January. The same search returns 58 results at the Washington Post and 49 at the Wall Street Journal.
A photo of Takar Smith published by the nonprofit journalism project Knock LA (1/19/23).
Compare that with the coverage of three other Black men killed by police in January 2023—selected out of more than a dozen others because these particular police killings got more coverage than most other such deaths. A search of the Post’s archives over the same time frame returns three articles for Keenan Anderson, and none for Takar Smith or Anthony Lowe. Both the Times and the Journal were silent on these killings.
Since these major news outlets rarely if ever mentioned their names, let us tell their stories now.
On January 2–3, Los Angeles police killed three men in less than 48 hours: Takar Smith, Keenan Anderson and Oscar Leon Sanchez (Center for Policing Equity, 1/13/23). Smith and Anderson were Black, and Sanchez Latino. Note that a Washington Post report (1/13/23) obscured the timeframe of these killings: “Three men have died after encounters with Los Angeles police officers in recent days,” it said, and “the killings occurred in the first week of January.” The LAPD released body-cam footage of these separate incidents.
The first victim was Smith, who was tased and then shot by police after picking up a knife (LA Times, 2/11/13). His wife, who called to request police help due to his violent behavior,
warned that he had threatened to fight police if they were called and that there was a knife in the kitchen. But she also relayed that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was not taking his medication.
Despite the clear warnings, the LAPD failed to call the Mental Evaluation Unit, which is specifically trained to de-escalate situations like Smith’s.
Photo of Keenan Anderson that appeared in the Guardian (1/12/23).
Out of the three victims killed on January 2–3, Keenan Anderson got the most attention, as he was the cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. On the same day Sanchez was killed, Anderson, a 31-year-old high school teacher, was stopped after a traffic accident and tased repeatedly to death (Guardian, 1/12/23). Like Nichols, he was unarmed, and the chilling video showed he
was begging for help as multiple officers held him down, and at one point said, “They’re trying to George Floyd me.” One officer had his elbow on Anderson’s neck while he was lying down before another tased him for roughly 30 seconds straight before pausing and tasing him again for five more seconds.
(We focus in this article on Black victims of police violence because they are killed disproportionately; African Americans made up 26% of police killing victims in 2022, while making up only 13% of the US population. Sanchez’s story is just as horrifying and tragic, and representative of the fact that Latinos are also at heightened risk of being killed by police in the United States. People of all ethnicities are killed by police at much higher rates in the US than in other wealthy democracies. This analysis of specifically Black victims is one part of a larger conversation on police violence in the US.)
Back on agenda—but still ignored
Police killed Smith and Anderson just weeks before the news of Nichols’ killing exploded. Yet even after Nichols’ death put “police violence” in the abstract on the national agenda, more Black men were killed by police with little media attention.
Anthony Lowe, a double amputee who was shot and killed by police while attempting to flee (NBC, 2/1/23).
Anthony Lowe, who had lost both his legs, was shot and killed while attempting to flee from LAPD officers on January 26. Lowe had stabbed a person with a butcher knife, and police claim he threatened to throw the knife at them.
Police expert Ed Obayashi, according to NBC News (2/1/23), “said that to justify a shooting, officers must show they had been under immediate threat and had considered reasonable alternatives, including using a Taser.” NBC quoted Obayashi’s response to the footage of Lowe’s killing:
But here we see an individual that, by definition, appears to be physically incapable of resisting officers…. Even if he is armed with a knife, his mobility is severely restricted…. He’s an amputee. He appears to be at a distinct physical disadvantage, lessening the apparent threat to officers.
These are just a few of the Black people killed by police in January. Mapping Police Violence is a nonprofit organization that “publishes the most comprehensive and up-to-date data on police violence in America”; according to its database, 104 people were killed by police in January 2023. Of the 61 victims with race identified, 28% were Black and 20% were Latino. In all of 2022, Mapping Police Violence found that police killed at least 1,192 people.
Despite George Floyd’s death and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, police killings have generally continued to rise; the number of killings in 2022 is the highest in the 11 years for which Mapping Police Violence has data.
Sympathy for victims
An AP profile (2/3/23) that presented Tyre Nichols as a multi-dimensional human being.
What is it about Tyre Nichols’ death, unlike these other deaths of Black people killed by police, that shook the nation to the core? Why is the media contributing multiple articles per day to one person, but only a few in total for the other victims?
Of course, the video evidence of Nichols’ killing made police responsibility hard to dispute, and easy to sell in a media ecosystem that puts a premium on sensationalism. But there is video footage of Takar Smith, Keenan Anderson and Anthony Lowe. Why was the reaction not similar?
Nichols certainly comes across in coverage as a sympathetic character. The New York Times (1/26/23) described him as having
loved to photograph sunsets and to skateboard, a passion he’d had since he was a boy…. [He] worked for FedEx and had a 4-year-old son…. His mother, RowVaughn Wells, said that Mr. Nichols had her name tattooed on his arm. “That made me proud,” she said. “Most kids don’t put their mom’s name. My son was a beautiful soul.”
Smith and Lowe both wielded knives, and the latter had stabbed someone, making it easier to present these individuals in an unsympathetic light, although the crux of the problem is that their deaths, like Nichols’, appear to have been completely preventable. Smith and Lowe both had disabilities; they were at a clear disadvantage, yet police decided to shoot anyway.
In the death of Anderson, like Nichols, it’s perhaps especially difficult to blame the victim. He was also unarmed, only stopped because he got into a traffic accident. His cries of “Please help me,” and “They’re trying to kill me” (Guardian, 1/12/23), are just as heartbreaking as Nichols’ cries for his mother. One would think that Anderson, killed in similar circumstances, would have gotten similarly extensive coverage—but such was not the case.
Chart: Mapping Police Violence
A widespread systemic issue
Needless to say, the problem is not that the killing of Tyre Nichols got too much coverage. He deserves the public’s passionate anger on his behalf. The problem is that major news outlets have a bad habit of treating cases like Nichols’ as isolated incidents, lavishing short-term, specific attention that makes the chronic seem exceptional.
It’s not just Tyre Nichols. It’s George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and a depressingly long list of lesser-known names. Their killings are by no means isolated.
But news outlets look for easy clickbait—disturbing videos, viral trends on social media, humanizing backstories. These can play a role in coverage, but, without more, the template seems rehearsed and disingenuous.
Media need to do better. They should actively and urgently report the dire statistics. Every time an incident like Tyre Nichols’ killing happens, they should remind people of the big picture—that police brutality is a national, systemic issue, and Black people are disproportionately targeted and killed. Recognition of that reality and concrete plans for change should play a bigger role than performative hand-wringing.
“There have been some important advances,” the Washington Post (2/2/23) reported. “Yet at the same time, since Floyd’s death, police have also shot and killed more people than they did beforehand.”
The thing is, media have shown the ability to do better. The Washington Post (2/2/23) outlined the (lack of) progress made between the deaths of George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, where they hyperlinked to their database of police shooting deaths since 2015. (Note: The Post‘s database specifically records deaths from police shootings, not those resulting from beatings, electric shock and other forms of violence.)
Even in this example of better coverage, there are some glaring red flags. In an attempt to address both sides, the Post article tries to reason why police have killed so many people:
Most people shot and killed by police have been armed, the Post’s database shows, and the overwhelming majority of shootings are deemed justified. In many of these cases, defenders of police have said officers feared for their lives while confronting people armed with weapons, usually guns.
But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that the police kill, on average, more than 1,000 civilians every year, armed or unarmed, and they disproportionately target Black men.
Regardless, the Post at least has a limited database, and some articles addressing the trends of police killings. The Los Angeles Times maintains a database of LAPD killings, which while significant, still only covers one region. The Guardian published an investigative series covering US police killings in 2015–16, but the series has not been updated to include more recent years. USA Today responded to George Floyd’s death by creating a database of police disciplinary records, as well as a specific list of decertified police, but it added a clear disclaimer that the records are not complete.
The collection of this data is commendable, but to be valuable, this information should be foregrounded in reporting on individual incidents of racist police violence. Without continual contextualizing of the problem, it can be difficult for the average news reader to see Tyre Nichols’ killing as both a specific horrific crime, and a representation of a problem even bigger than that.
The post Tyre Nichols Was One of Too Many appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
