yamiche: the video of the police killing of tyre nichols shocks the nation. ♪ >> this is "washington week." corporate funding is provided by -- >> for 25 years, consumer cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service that helps people communicate and connect. we oer a variety of no-contract plans, and our u.s.-based customer service team can find one the fits you. to learn more, visit consumercellular.tv. >> additional funding is provided by -- koo and patricia yuen through the yuen foundation -- committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. sandra and carl delay-magnuson. rose hirschel and andy shreeves. robert and susan rosenbaum. the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you.

thank you. >> once again from washington, moderator yamiche alcindor. yamiche: good evening and welcome. the nation is processing the disturbing video released from the city of memphis tonight that shows the death of tyre nichols. he was a father, fedex worker, photographer and skateboarding enthusiast. he died three days after a police traffic stop. we will play a portion of the video released. the first part was taken as tyre nichols was arrested. the second part of the video shows after they apprehended him of imputing we want to warn you, this video is disturbing and contains graphic material. [shouting]

[screaming] [screaming "mom!"] yamiche: that is so hard to watch. this is what we know so far -- earlier this week, five black methods police officers were fired, arrested and charged with murder in connection with this death. police claimed tyre nichols was driving recklessly and was injured when they try to detain him. according to the shall be kenny district attorney, all five

officers are charged with second your -- second degree murder, second degree assault, and official oppression. attorneys for two of the indicted police officers said their clients will plead not guilty. all five officers have since been released on bond. nichols's family is reeling from the death. here is his mother on cnn today. >> i don't have my baby. they had him --beat him to a pulp. he had bruises all over him, his head was swollen like a watermelon. they broke his neck. yamiche: it is just incredible and sad to hear her talk about her son's injuries. the police chief and fbi director described the video. >> a disregard for life.

>> i have seen the video and i will tell you i was appalled. i am struggling to find a stronger word but i will tell you i was appalled. yamiche: law-enforcement agencies around the country are on high alert, bracing themselves for reaction to the video. some protests are already underway. joining me to discuss this and more, julia baker, wesley lowery , and in studio, claudia grisales, and ed o'keefe. wesley, i want to start with you. i almost don't have the words after watching the video to talk about this but i am going to try. i'm sure we are all watching this with heavy hearts. what sticks out to you as someone who unfortunately along

with me has watched videos like this where we have seen people get by the police? wesley: a lot of things stick out to me as i watch this video. you and i have been on the ground in many cities after the release of videos like this and spent time with a lot of families like tyre nichols's, so it is understanding that emotion is evoked. it is important underscore that as horrific as this video is, we have seen many like this. not to take away from the horrific images. these videos, captured by body camera and a surveillance camera, what was a traffic stop quickly escalated. we saw tyre get pulled from his car, multiple officers pepper spraying him and teasing him at he attempts to say he is already on the ground, they can have his

hands. there is a struggle. we hear repeated escalations from the officers, threats of physical violence if he doesn't comply. contradictory instructions -- lay down, roll over, put your hands up, put them down. eventually tyre nichols gets away and that's where the surveillance camera comes in, where we see from above images of tyre nichols appearing to be handcuffed, held by multiple officers as other officers kick him it seems in the head and throw wild punches as he is standing. this does seem extremely excessive. that's probably an understatement. i think at no point, i've obviously goto see the video once or twice because it just came out, but it is hard to point to any moment where tyre nichols represents a threat to

these officers. he does not appear to be fighting them in any active way. he was not armed with anything. the point at which he is handcuffed and being held by multiple officers, we see kicks to his head and haymaker punches and i think those are clearly the reason these officers have been fired and charged with serious crimes. yamiche: wesley, there is something people have been talking about all week, the fact that the officers are black. we know as people who cover policing, racial bias doesn't mean you can't have bias if you are an african-american officer. for people who are wondering how black officers do this, and what is this culture of policing that ben crum, the lawyer for the family, is talking about, is the reason why tyre nichols is not with his family tonight? wesley: obviously this is early and there will be more

reporting, but this was officers from the scorpion unit, a specialized unit started recently in memphis. memphis has seen an uptick of violence in recent years and there is concern about crime and this is one of the units set up to target -- they call it hotspot policing. we seehis in cities across the country, where they say we can focus heavily on certain places. what we see often with these specialty units is this type of impunity. it is notable, frankly -- and i've only seen the video once or twice, the primary officer is wearing a hoodie, not even a full uniform. it appears he is in an unmarked car that looks like a dodge charger or some other car like that. we also see this hyper aggression from these officers. it is unsurprising to me that the officers involved are black. what we know is that policing,

the weight it trains and staffs and resources, very often structures a dynamic where it is us versus them. as we see, right? there is very little in this video that leads us to believe that the men out there that night were concerned about public safety, a threat the public safety. it's very hard to point to a moment in the video and go this is the point where the rest of us are safe, tyre nichols needed to be trted that way. this was a traffic stop for i believe reckless driving, that city officials don't know if they can even substantiate there was a valid reason to stop him in the first place we see us gliding violence time and time again. i am not surprised the officers were black. when we talk about race and policing, we talk about the way black men, black women, black people are perceived and perceived by all of us. the idea of thinking of like men

and women as prone to violence, as dangerous, as bigger or stronger or more insidious than they are, something can affect all of our minds, and black people are not immune from that as well. what we see very often and i have friends who say this to their kids when they have the talk, when you see a police officer, they are not white or black, they are blue. police say that themselves, meaning something different. what we saw here were agents of the state enacting severe violence against a man who, again, from what we can tell, was not posing much of a threat to them. yamiche: such an important point. julia, you are in memphis, you've been covering ts case. tell me about your reaction to seeing the video and if you gained insight into why the case move so quickly. it's been less than a month, these officers have been fired and charged with murder. julia: you don't see these cases

move this quickly very often. you can certainly see why. he was pulled out of a police car and he did not seem to pose a violent threat to these officers. one thing that popped out to me was for somebody who was just reckless driving, why did you need so many police officer and toward the end, he is laying there, you can see his face and it is obviously not good, and these officers don't seem to have much of a reaction and neither do the paramedics. the paramedics are also under investigation, and the fire department right now. people in memphis are upset about it.

it doesn't matter the color of the oicer. what matters is we don't need police tally. -- police brutality. do we really need this hotspot policing? that is something our local government is considering right now. the scorpion unit is currently inactive since this incident happened. we don't know if it will come back but we know it is inactive right now. i think that's an indication that we are kind of reconsidering these hotspot policingethods. yamiche: a lot of questions in memphis. i also want to point out that the mayor -- that president biden called the family and said he will be pushing the george ford policing act. >> what's at stake is first of

all innocent people's lives, number one. number two, it has a lot to say and do with the image of america. it has a lot to do with whether or not the are the country we say we are, that we are a country of law and order. yamiche: you heard the president talking about this. tell me a bit about what you think and hear from the white house. ed: what i was struck by is i think a lot of us who cover these issues learned that on enforcement at all levels across the country started getting the details of this a few days ago as a heads up. it has been compared at least in my shop to the way governors and mayors and emergency management officials prepare and sometimes over prepare for natural

sasters in the wake of hurricane patrina -- hurricane katrina and hurricane sandy. the call went out, this is bad, it will cause problems and you need to prepare. federal authorities began getting briefings yesterday. the white house held a meeting on thursday to talk about this. the president was told about it. after the video was released he released another statement ying he is outraged and he knows how exhausting a terrible this is, especially for black and brown americans. but there are various roles a president plays, your commander-in-chief, legislative developer and comforter in chief. i was struck that he said h told to the mother that is very little i can do other than push congress on this. he may be limited to being the comforter in chief and a guy who can call out what the video shows is really bad policing.

cops who seemed totally incapable of doing the job come up from the basic task of going to arrest somebody and hold them in place, to chasing them down and just the way they treated this guy. he was treated n better than an animal and it is terrible to watch. we were paid to watch it and we have to process it. the viewers don't have to if they don't want to, but you need to know it is terrible. it will cause yet another debate in this country about how policing should be conducted and the footage is indisputable. the fact that they have that overhead surveillance shot, that is the clearest example, and all i felt when i saw it was the contrast between that and what happened to rodney king all those years ago, there's a most no difference. that's what is so troubling to police officers who have seen this earlier this week and began warnin the reaction. yamiche: this is troubling, and

these debates will come to the halls of congress, claudia, where you are reporting. what are you hearing, is there any potential, especially with republicans controlling the house and democrats controlling the senate, if there could be a move on policing in terms of legislation? claudia: i think ed raises a really good point in terms of president biden perhaps being in a position of just being comforter in chief on this. congress is in a very difficult position right now in terms of divided government and trying to address legislation at the scale that would go into policing. we saw the george floyd justice and policing act only get through the house last year. there was too narrow margin in the senate to get it through there. we saw tim scott tried to push through his legislation, to incentivize police departments to do better, to train better,

and avoid these kind of tragic situations, but when we come back to the george floyd legislation, president biden said he will ask congress to revisit. this is an issue i get see coming up at the state of the union next month where he can plead with members, please re-think, is there a bipartisan path? one key detail to remember, one of the key architects of that is karen bass, now the mayor of los angeles. a reminder of folks who are missing who could help push this legislation. even so, we have house republicans in charge in the chamber and it will take a lot of work to get on the same page and it comes to reaching some sort of consensus to address this horrific video. yamiche: it will sternly take a lot of work. julia, i want to come back to you because i almost want to go back to memphis to talk about who these police officers were, there is some reporting that one

of them might have been involved in another possible troubling incident. talk to us about what you are reporting. julia: one of the officers, demetrius haley, was formerly a county division of corrections, and 2015 he and two other corrections officers allegedly did something similar with an inmate and t inmate filed a lawsuit alleging the officers punched him in the face, and the other officer slammed his head into a sink. he went unconscious after that. it is interesting that this is the same. as far as the other officers, i'm not really sure if they have any past brutality. local law enforcement hasn't heard of it.

the lawsuit got dismissed, so haley was able to get hired by the police department and this is happening. yamiche: as soon as this happened and i started doing a deep dive, i thought about you reporting on the fact that police officers often ove to different agencies, if a bad cop gets fired, he can get hired somewhere else. how does this play into the culture of policing and frankly bad policing? ed: it's very difficult to fire or get rid of a police officer. we talk about the difficulty in charging a police officer, but police hr is very complicated and messy. what we see often is in cases where officers are fired, they were able to successfully get the job back. a few years ago we looked at major cities and what we found is something like six out of 10

fired police officers, they were so bad that the police don't think they should be policed, six out of 10 of them are able to get their jobs back, not even going to another department. that's going back to the place that has fired them. beyond that we see often fired police officers getting hired in other departments. this happens frequently. i think one thing that is notable here is the speed with which of these officers were fired and charged. some of this is due to the specific way laws work in tennessee and the union contracts governing memphis. there are some departments where they wouldn't have even been able to take statements from the officers. in some cases you have 30 days until you can even speak to an officer who is involved in an incident like this. i think some of the speed we are seeing, i certainly understand why people want to give credit to the elected officials for what they are doing, and i think there are reasonable points to

be made where it is not an day from the way things were handled by local governments not even that long ago. but when we compare case to case, the officials in shelley county, tennessee and memphis have a totally different set of tools at their disposal than the officials in baltimore after freddie gray's death. i think that something to keep in mind as well, that everything that governs how this stuff plays out his local police union contracts, local collective bargaining agreements, local and state laws and city ordinances. it all factors in two how any of these cases will be handled. what we are seeing now has empowered and enabled and is a specifically retrofitted to rules and memphis. there are some things people might perceive as working in the favor of accountability, as the trial progresses there might be a co people things works in the opposite direction. yamiche: i want to ask you a

question, we don't know howany other tyre nichols there are officially, you won a pulitzer for making a database at the washington post, but we don't know. explain to people that we don't know officially from the government how many people could be out there and have had the same fate. wesley: of course, we have no real idea that -- we have no real idea. the best information is kept by journalist and even then, the work has to be done to compile it, and most of those might not. our database at the post would not include tyre nichols because we are looking at people tha shop you the second thing on the data, let's think for a moment about how we would have perceived this incident if there was no video. if all we had was the police account of what happened.

think for a second moment how we would perceive it if we only had the body camera video. now think about what we can see because of the surveillance video. we ask the question about how many more tyre nichols are out there, so many police encounters , all we have is the police version of what happened and we know in a case like this, listening to the police version of what happened, just for an idea, rather than our own eyes. ed: in addition to the wide angle we get from the surveillance camera, these guys in essence are showing us their work, and part of what we hear is after they beat him, they start comparing notes. he tried taking my gun. more than one of them felt compelled to use pepper spray and tasers. why? you could almost see them bragging. also maybe fabricating elements

of what had just transpired on the videos we now see. the evidence laid out against these officers is so clear things to this footage. it is a reminder that there are so many other incidents we don't see. claudia: there's a moment where we see an officer tying his shoe, and he should brendering aid. we can't tell what is going on. as you say, the tone, as if they are bragging. it is utterly tragic but something we all need to know about. yamiche: a reminder we are living in a country where this can happen. claudia: exactly. yamiche: we have to leave it there, but thank you to our panel for joining us. don't forget to watch pbs news week and on saturday for the latest on the death of tyre nichols. i have to say this, my heart goes out to the family of tyre nichols and those who loved him. god bless you. find peace. my heart also goes out to anyone

across the nation who has watched this video or will watch this video. it is important to watch it, brace yourself. i am yamiche alcindor. good night from washington. >> corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by -- >> for 25 years, consumer cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service to help people do what they like. our u.s.-based customer service team can find one the fits you. to learn more, visit consumercellular.tv. >> additional funding is provided by -- koo and patricia yuen through the yuen foundation -- committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. sandra and carl delay-magnuson. rose hirschel and andy shreeves. robert and susan rosenbaum. the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute,

which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy.]

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