In Tyre Nichols’ neighborhood, Black residents fear Memphis police

GARY FIELDS Associated Press

MEMPHIS — In a terrible way, the death of Tyre Nichols brings vindication to members of the Black community in Memphis who live in constant fear of the police.

The fatal beating of Nichols, 29, by five police officers tells the story many residents know by heart: any encounter can be deadly if you’re Black.

<p>Community organizer Chase Madkins poses for a portrait Jan. 30 in a Black-owned coffee shop in Memphis, Tenn.</p>

Allen G. Breed, Associated Press

Community organizer Chase Madkins poses for a portrait Jan. 30 in a Black-owned coffee shop in Memphis, Tenn.

Examples abound of Black residents, primarily young men, targeted by police.

A homeowner who called the police because a young man who had been shot was on his front porch. The responding officers ignored the gunshot victim and entered the caller’s home. The officers slammed the caller to the ground and used a chemical agent on him as they subdued him. The officers then lied about the circumstances, but there was video.

A woman who says her 18-year-old son was hogtied and pepper-sprayed by police several years ago. He became agitated after police arrived while he picked up his child from a girlfriend, triggering a mental health crisis, she said.

In police sweeps, unmarked cars roll into neighborhoods and armed plainclothes officers jump out, rushing traffic violators and issuing commands. The result is a community in fear, where people text, call and use social media to caution one another to stay inside or avoid the area when police operations are underway.

“There’s one type of law enforcement that keeps people safe, and then there’s a type of law enforcement that keeps people in check,” said Joshua Adams, 29, who grew up in south Memphis’ Whitehaven, home to Elvis Presley’s Graceland Mansion, now a mostly Black neighborhood.

If you are in the wrong neighborhood, “it really doesn’t matter whether you’re part of the violence or not,” Adams said. “I’m less likely to be shot in a gang conflict than I am to be shot by police.”

Chase Madkins was about a block from his mother’s Evergreen neighborhood home just east of downtown Memphis dropping off his 12-year-old nephew in November when the blue lights of an unmarked police car flashed behind him.

Within seconds the officer ordered him out of the car and told him he made an illegal turn, and his license plate was not properly displayed because it was bent at the corner.

Madkins said the officer, dressed in tactical gear with his face covered and no visible identification, refused to give his badge number, unless Madkins consented to a weapon search of the car.

Madkins, 34, consented but called an activist friend to the scene.

“I had to remind myself, ‘Chase, this is how people get murdered, in a traffic stop,'” he said. To this day, he does not know who the officer was.

<p>Hunter Demster, an activist, hugs a skateboard Jan. 30 outside his office in Memphis, Tenn. Demster works with the group Decarcerate Memphis and says he often gets calls for help from Black motorists, like late skateboarder Tyre Nichols, who have been stopped by police.</p>

Allen G. Breed, Associated Press

Hunter Demster, an activist, hugs a skateboard Jan. 30 outside his office in Memphis, Tenn. Demster works with the group Decarcerate Memphis and says he often gets calls for help from Black motorists, like late skateboarder Tyre Nichols, who have been stopped by police.

The random stops are meant to terrorize, said Hunter Demster, organizer for Decarcerate Memphis and the friend Madkins called.

“They go into these poor Black communities and they do mass pullover operations, terrifying everybody in that community,” Demster said. Some people might think the officers are looking for murderers or people accused of heinous crimes, or have stacks of warrants for violent criminals, he said, but “that is not the case.”

People want more police, he said, but “what they’re really trying to say is we want more detectives looking for violent criminals.”

Black residents make up about 63% of the city’s population of 628,000. In many ways it is two cities: One is Beale Street and blues, barbecue and Elvis. Then there’s the Mason Temple where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous and prophetic speech proclaiming that Black people would eventually reach a world of equality, and there is the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, less than 2 miles away, where an assassin’s bullet killed King the next day and changed the future of Black life.

What that left here is complicated, especially when it comes to policing and crime. In 2021, the year the SCORPION unit — a specialty squad that all five officers in the Nichols case were part of — was set up, homicides hit a record, breaking one set in 2020, the previous year. Homicides dropped in 2022 but high-profile cases kept crime in the news. Most of the victims those years were young Black men. The suspects were overwhelmingly Black.

“There are more officers in Black communities here because unfortunately we’ve seen a spike in crime in our communities,” Memphis NAACP President Van Turner said. Adding police without addressing the underlying issues, including poverty, won’t help, he said.

The data also shows a disparity between the city’s population and who police target with force: Black men and women accounted for anywhere from 79% to 88% of use-of-force situations. The data doesn’t show how many of those people were being sought on a warrant for violent crimes.

Some people in the community are willing to give the police a chance to reform.

Marcus Taylor, 48, who owns a janitorial business and lives in south Memphis, urged officers in the precincts to come into their communities and network, “talk to store owners, go to barbershops, come to basketball games, and do it regularly. Get to know the people you are supposed to be protecting.”

“Come out without the lights flashing,” he said. “You’re out here to protect and serve, not beat up and whip. Everybody is not that hardened criminal.”

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