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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWatching the unwatchable cruelty in Memphis - WaPo
Watching the unwatchable cruelty in Memphis - WaPoOf all the footage released Friday showing Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols, the lamppost video is the most chilling. It shows the violence from on high and at a distance, with a camera angle wide enough to capture the larger context, a quiet dark corner of the suburban everywhere. And it transpires in silence, which gives it the feel if not the substance of objectivity.
Without sound, the video eliminates the emotions of the individual actors: the officers breathless rage, alternating with almost bored indifference to the man they are beating. Lacking the frantic, jerky motion of police body-camera footage the lamppost video was recorded by an automated security camera fixed to a street pole it conceals the moment-by-moment escalation of a traffic stop into what prosecutors argue was second-degree murder by police.
By avoiding the drama, we seem to get more of the facts. But thats not true, because the sounds captured on the other videos the shouting, the contradictory orders, Nicholss calls for his mother are essential facts, too.
What the videos sterile, birds-eye view makes starkly clear is that the officers acted collectively. They rushed in to strike and kick a thin young man like a broken puppet. It reveals the cruelty as brazen, gratuitous and unnecessary. And more than anything else seen on these obscene videos of authoritarian officers recklessly abusing their power, it makes the case for radical reform of the nations police. As officers swarm around a man who can barely hold himself upright, as they join, leave and rejoin the melee they alone are perpetrating, the message is painfully clear: More cops means more chaos, more violence, more death. There is no law and order here, just cops.
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/01/28/kennicott-memphis-videos-tyre-nichols/
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Watching the unwatchable cruelty in Memphis - WaPo (Original Post)
GGoss
Jan 2023
OP
mobeau69
(11,131 posts)1. Wow. I was able to read the entire piece. Thank you.
intheflow
(28,442 posts)2. This was posted on WaPo in the Arts & Entertainment section?!
That is obscene and of itself.