News

May 11, 2023

Tyre Nichols Death: Video Captures Brutal Beating of Tyre Nichols

The footage shows the Memphis police kicking, punching and using a baton on the

The footage shows the Memphis police kicking, punching and using a baton on the 29-year-old Black man, who died days later. Five officers were fired and charged with murder.

Rick Rojas and Jessica Jaglois

America was shocked anew on Friday by a display of police violence caught on video, as Memphis released body camera and surveillance footage of police officers kicking and punching a 29-year-old Black man who later died. The man, Tyre Nichols, ran after being pepper sprayed by officers, but shows no signs of fighting back as the police beat him with a baton. "To me, that's worse than Rodney King," said Ed Obayashi, a police training expert and use-of-force expert, after watching the video.Here are the details:

A New York Times analysis of the video footage found that police officers deployed an escalating spiral of physical force and gave conflicting orders, repeatedly demanding that Mr. Nichols show his hands, even as other officers held his arms behind his back while another punched him. After officers pepper sprayed and beat Mr. Nichols, they left him sitting on the ground unattended and handcuffed, and once the medics were on the scene, they stood by for more than 16 minutes without administering treatment. Here is a timeline of the lethal encounter.

Mr. Nichols, who was pulled out of his car by officers, can be heard saying, "I’m just trying to go home," and at one point repeatedly screams, "Mom, Mom, Mom" as he is clubbed. Lawyers have said that his mother's home was about 100 yards away from where he was beaten. Here is what we know about Mr. Nichols.

Five Memphis police officers accused of causing Mr. Nichols's death — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith — were fired last week and charged on Thursday with murder and other crimes. The officers, who are all Black, posted bail on Friday and were released from jail. Here are the charges they face.

The sheriff of Shelby County, which includes Memphis, said that two of his deputies who were on the scene after the beating had been "relieved of duty" on Friday night, pending an investigation, after he watched the video. Earlier this week, the Memphis Fire Department said two of its employees had been relieved of duty pending an internal investigation.

Despite concern in many big cities, there was little sign of protests turning violent in Memphis or across America. Officials and the Nichols family had pleaded with the public not to let outrage spill into unrest. Here is the scene from New York.

An earlier version of this briefing misquoted a remark by a Memphis police officer at the scene of the Tyre Nichols beating, as recorded on video. The officer did not say Mr. Nichols "had his hand on my gun"; he said Mr. Nichols "had his hand on" another officer's gun.

How we handle corrections

Mike Ives

There was some minor vandalism committed during a protest outside the Los Angeles Police Department's headquarters on Friday night, said Officer Drake Madison, a police spokesman. The crowd was dispersing and there had been no arrests, he added. NBC News released footage on Twitter late Friday night that it said showed a smoke bomb that had been thrown at a police unit in the city's downtown.

#BREAKING #LA: Smokebomb tossed at #LAPD unit in #DTLA. View from NewsChopper4 and @elianamoreno. #Memphis #MemphisPolice pic.twitter.com/vEEqgviDiH

Colin Miner

At a Portland skate park memorial for Tyre Nichols, who was passionate about skateboarding, people stood with candles and signs, shouting chants including, "How many more?" The city has been the site of several anti-police protests in recent years.

Shawn Hubler

In Sacramento, where Tyre Nichols grew up before moving to Memphis, family members planned a candlelight vigil for Monday and local authorities urged protesters to demonstrate peacefully. Mayor Darrell Steinberg said the video filled him with "anger, sorrow and revulsion," Police Chief Kathy Lester called the actions of the Memphis officers "inhumane and inexcusable" and Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper, said the "horrendous acts displayed by these few officers do not reflect the values of this office or law enforcement as a whole."

Wesley Parnell, Douglas Morino, Vik Jolly and Robert Chiarito

Faced with witnessing another death of a Black man at the hands of the police, people from New York to Los Angeles expressed sorrow, anger and exhaustion on Friday evening at watching the video images of Tyre Nichols being beaten by Memphis police officers.

In Downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., stores closed early and the police presence was heavier than normal. Outside a Target, Janay Maxwell, 32, said that in watching the video, she had transitioned from fear to disgust.

"I’m thinking of my cousins, my brother, my family," said Ms. Maxwell, who works as a home health aide. "You’re driving down the street and people break traffic violations. But death? I’m going to lose my life because of that?"

In the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, a group of residents and community leaders watched the videos, taken from police body cameras and street cameras. Among the group was Lora Dene King, a daughter of Rodney King, who was brutally beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991.

She shook her head and wiped away tears. "I’m lost, I don't know what to feel," Ms. King said. "I’m sorry that we’re still in the same place, more than 30 years later."

Law enforcement units were on high alert across the country, and in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp issued an emergency order activating up to 1,000 National Guard troops. In Memphis, protesters walked onto Interstate 55, southwest of downtown. Several vehicles were stopped on the on-ramp.

In Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, about 20 people who had just watched the videos gathered for a vigil. Nino Brown, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, said he found the images "inhuman and upsetting."

Mr. Brown, who is Black, said he was upset that some people considered the incident not to be racial because the accused officers were also Black. "They are Black, but what they do as members of the police department has historically been against Black people."

At St. Sabina Academy in Chicago's Auburn Gresham neighborhood, officials wrestled with whether to show the videos during a game night for the after-school basketball program. The students — elementary through high school — had not been aware of the situation, said Lamar Johnson, 32, the violence prevention coordinator.

He gathered with a small group to watch after they ultimately decided it was better to watch it with the students than for them see it on their own. "This is the TikTok generation. They’re going to see it anyway," Mr. Johnson said.

Among the children who watched the video was R.J. Dorns, 15, who said he was disappointed to learn that the five officers charged in the case were Black. Mr. Dorns, who is Black, said his parents talked to him about interacting with police, starting when he was about 6 years old.

"They always told me to follow directions, don't show attitude and don't let the situation get worse," he said. "I try not to be afraid when I see the police because I know they are not all bad, but this makes it hard."

Near Barclay's Center in Brooklyn, where police had prepared for potential protests with barricades, Tanya Mosely, 41, who works for a special education program in New York City, said she didn't want to watch the videos.

"My husband is Black; my son is 7 years old. I get emotional just thinking about it," said Ms. Mosely, who is Black and Latina. She said she had seen similar video of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by the police in Minneapolis 2020.

"After seeing the videos of George Floyd and to have to see it again — I don't know if I’ll be able to watch it," she said.

Colin Miner

A memorial was set up at the Burnside Skate Park in Portland where approximately 300 protesters marched to honor Tyre Nichols, for whom skateboarding was a passion.

Jesus Jimenez

A protest in Memphis that started at a park and then shut down traffic on Interstate 55 has come to an end. There did not appear to be any confrontations between protestors and the police through the duration of the protest. A speaker is calling on protestors to "bring the same energy" to demonstrations on Saturday.

Neelam Bohra

Experts in police training who reviewed videos released on Friday of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis said they believed there was no justification for the actions of the police officers involved, who have been charged with crimes including second-degree murder in his death.

The footage, which amounts to almost an hour from both police body cameras and street cameras, shows officers beating, kicking and using a baton against Mr. Nichols after he fled a traffic stop.

"In my career, I’ve never seen — I mean, you see it in the movies — but I’ve never seen an individual deliberately being propped up to be beaten," said Ed Obayashi, a police training expert and lawyer who conducts use-of-force investigations for state law enforcement across the country.

"To me, that's worse than Rodney King," added Mr. Obayashi, who is also a deputy sheriff and policy adviser in the Plumas County Sheriff's Office in California.

In police training, it is emphasized repeatedly to officers that they need to be aware of their physical surroundings, Mr. Obayashi said, but the same stress should be placed on awareness of their own emotions. If officers’ tempers run high, he said, they are bound to make mistakes.

In the Nichols confrontation, it is possible the officers felt disrespected when their directions weren't followed, he said.

"This appears to be a case of classic contempt of cop," he said, "for them to catch up with him later and then exact their revenge on the poor individual."

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization of current and former law enforcement officials that studies the improvement of policing, said the officers’ behavior also fell short in other ways.

In modern policing, officers are usually trained to communicate clearly to an individual and respond proportionally to their actions, he said. These officers did neither, he said.

The beating is "the definition of excessive force," Mr. Wexler said. In his view, Mr. Nichols did not present a danger that matched the force the officers used, beyond appearing to not want to be arrested.

Even when Mr. Nichols was lying on the ground, none of the officers attempted to help him, which Mr. Wexler said was a violation of their duty to render aid.

"This person was not treated as a human being," he said.

Christoph Koettl

Two medics arrived at the scene of the beating within minutes of the police officers handcuffing a heavily injured Tyre Nichols. Nichols is injured and in distress, at times unable to sit up. None of the medics provided first aid. It took 16 minutes for one of them to open his medical bag and start to help Nichols. (Earlier this week, the Memphis Fire Department said two of its employees had been relieved of duty pending an internal investigation.)

Kim Barker and Steve Eder

Tyre Nichols's death fits a pattern of seemingly avoidable killings involving police vehicle stops. In 2021, a Times investigation found that over the previous five years, police officers had killed more than 400 motorists who were not wielding a gun or knife, or being pursued for a violent crime. That's a rate of more than one a week.

Mr. Nichols, authorities have said, was pulled over by Memphis police on suspicion of reckless driving on Jan. 7, but, in an interview with NBC News on Friday, Chief Cerelyn Davis of the Memphis police said that her department has been unable to find evidence for why he was stopped. There's been no report that he had any weapon, nor has any emerged in the videos of the confrontation released on Friday evening.

The videos shared some elements with many recordings of the killings examined by The Times. Police officers used aggressive language — angrily cursing and threatening Mr. Nichols as they pulled him from the driver's seat. That language escalated almost immediately. The officers used pepper spray on Mr. Nichols, and fired a Taser at him. When he ran away seconds later, the officers decided to chase him.

Policing experts have told The Times that officers often react more aggressively to drivers who don't obey commands — punishing anyone who exhibits what's called "contempt of cop." Mr. Nichols was polite when he was initially being yelled at by the officers, before he ran.

Some police-reform advocates also told The Times that if someone who is pulled over for a minor reason tries to run or drive away, the best police response is let them go, and then track them down later. While some jurisdictions have tried to ban police chases, they still happen often. In this case, the police had Mr. Nichols's car, and most likely could have used that to find him.

When the police officers caught Mr. Nichols, the episode escalated into violence, with the officers punching, kicking and using a baton on him.

Alexander Cardia

After Tyre Nichols was beaten by police officers, they sat him on the ground in handcuffs with his back against a police car. At one point while officers were conferring, Nichols slumped over onto his left side. He remained there for at least 26 seconds until an officer noticed and propped him back up, telling him to sit up. Nichols then slumped to the ground again.

Hurubie Meko

Protests were muted in New York City late Friday after the release of video footage showing five Memphis police officers kicking and punching Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who later died of his injuries.

One crowd of about 50 protesters marched through Times Square shortly after the video was released at 7 p.m. Footage from Grand Central Terminal showed several dozen people with signs demonstrating there. Near Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, the police set up barricades, but no protest materialized.

In Times Square, the windshield of a police cruiser was smashed when a demonstrator jumped on top of the car, and three demonstrators there were seen being detained by police officers.

Janay Maxwell, a health home aide, who watched the video while standing outside of the arena in Brooklyn, said she was "very upset."

"I’m watching that video and I’m thinking of my cousins, my brother, my family," Ms. Maxwell, 32, said.

At Union Square, Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of the Greater New York chapter of Black Lives Matter, said the videos showed an "absolute disregard for human life, because in this country a Black man is not human."

Mayor Eric Adams, in live-streamed remarks before the Memphis footage was released, said that "as a human being, I’m devastated."

"As a man, I’m outraged," he added. "And as someone who spent decades fighting for police diversity and against police abuse, I feel betrayed by these officers."

Mr. Adams commended Memphis officials for acting "quickly and decisively" to charge the five officers accused in the fatal beating of Mr. Nichols with murder.

The mayor urged New Yorkers to demonstrate their "anger and outrage peacefully," saying that his message to the Police Department had been to "exercise restraint."

Keechant L. Sewell, the New York police commissioner, said in a statement Friday night that the videos showed an "unequivocal violation of our oath to protect those we serve, and a failure of basic human decency."

Commissioner Sewell said the Police Department would have an increased presence over the weekend to ensure that people can express themselves "freely and safely."

New York was one of a number of cities across the country bracing for protests once the video Friday was released. The New York Police Department said in a statement that it had adapted its response to protests and was "prepared to protect the constitutional right to peaceful protest" and "ensure public safety for every New Yorker exercising their First Amendment rights."

The release on Friday of the videos showing the police encounter that resulted in Mr. Nichols's death come less than three years after demonstrators took to the streets of New York and other cities to protest the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man whose neck was pinned to the ground by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in Minneapolis in May 2020.

In the months after Mr. Floyd's death, over a dozen reviews of how police handled protests found that departments were heavily militarized, poorly trained and unprepared to handle the large number of people who took part in demonstrations across the country.

The New York Police Department faced lawsuits, including one filed by the state's attorney general, Letitia James, in the aftermath of the protests. Ms. James wanted a court-appointed monitor to oversee the department's policing tactics at future protests, and a court order declaring that the policies and practices used by officers during the protest were unlawful.

In May, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent oversight agency, found that 145 city police officers should be disciplined for misconduct during the Black Lives Matter protests. The agency said it found evidence to support 267 accusations of misconduct against the officers.

Liset Cruz, Wesley Parnell and Michael D. Regan contributed reporting.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

The sheriff of Shelby County, Tenn., which includes Memphis, said that two of his deputies who were on the scene after the beating of Tyre Nichols had been "relieved of duty," pending an investigation. The sheriff, Floyd Bonner Jr., said that he had watched the video of the arrest for the first time Friday night after it was released by Memphis officials, and he had "concerns" about the deputies, but did not describe their actions.

Michael Regan

Police in New York arrested at least one person after protesters smashed the window of a police vehicle in Times Square. About 200 protestors are now gathered in the middle of 46th Street, blocking traffic. Dozens of officers are standing nearby.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

As they conferred at the scene after the beating of Tyre Nichols, two Memphis police officers claimed that he had grabbed for one of their weapons, with one saying he "had his hand on" an officer's gun. That was not visible on any of the four videos released by the city on Friday night.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

One of those two officers also describes the encounter by saying the police took Nichols out of his car and asked him, "Hey bruh, you good?" The officer followed by saying that Nichols "almost hit me." In fact, a video shows the officers approaching the car with their guns raised, yelling and threatening Nichols.

Douglas Morino

Lora Dene King, a daughter of Rodney King, who was brutally beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, shook her head and wiped away tears as she watched the video with residents and community leaders in the Leimert Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. "I’m lost, I don't know what to feel," she said. "I’m sorry that we’re still in the same place, more than 30 years later."

Robin Stein

The videos released on Friday show that when a Memphis police officer pepper sprayed Tyre Nichols, some of the spray drifted back on the officers. Nichols then ran, and some of the officers quickly gave up chasing him, unable to catch their breath. One of the officers poured water over his face multiple times. Another said repeatedly that he couldn't see.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

MEMPHIS — Video footage released on Friday night shows Memphis Police officers punching, kicking and using a baton to beat Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man whose death has rocked the city and led to murder charges against five Black officers.

The Jan. 7 encounter begins with a traffic stop at an intersection, during which the police approach Mr. Nichols's car, yelling and threatening him with their guns raised. An officer yanks open the driver's side door and pulls Mr. Nichols out of the car as he protests that he "did not do anything."

He drops to the ground and lies on his side, imploring the officers to stop and saying, "I’m just trying to get home," as they hold down different parts of his body. Though he appears to show no resistance, the police threaten to hurt him further and continue to order him to get on the ground, apparently wanting him to roll onto his stomach. One officer tells Mr. Nichols that he will "knock his ass out" and "break" his hands.

About two minutes into the encounter, an officer directs pepper spray into his face. At that point, Mr. Nichols gets up from the ground and runs from the officers, one of whom fires a Taser at him.

Roughly eight minutes later, after a pursuit, officers locate Mr. Nichols in a suburban neighborhood, not far from his home, and tackle him to the ground. A severe beating ensues as Mr. Nichols cries out in pain and yells repeatedly for his mother. A body-worn camera and a surveillance camera capture police officers continuing their assault on Mr. Nichols, with one kicking him so hard in the face that the officer nearly falls down.

Throughout the beating, which lasts about three minutes, Mr. Nichols does not appear to ever strike back. Several times, he moves his hands to cover his face, seeming to cower from the officers’ blows.

As an officer hits him from behind with a baton, Mr. Nichols stands up and staggers while officers hang on to his arms. As two officers hold his arms behind his back, a third officer delivers a series of powerful punches. Finally, after that officer hits Mr. Nichols three times in the head while standing behind him, Mr. Nichols collapses to the ground.

Back at the scene of the traffic stop, body camera video from an officer who did not join the chase captures his reaction around the time that he learns that his colleagues have caught up with Mr. Nichols. "I hope they stomp his ass," he says, twice.

By the end of the pummeling, Mr. Nichols is lying on his back, appearing dizzy. The officers drag him over to a police car and sit him up against it. The video images do not show him receiving any serious medical attention for several minutes.

Mr. Nichols, who worked at a FedEx facility and was the father of a 4-year-old boy, died in a hospital three days later.

Five police officers were fired last week and charged on Thursday with seven felony counts each, the most serious being second-degree murder, as Memphis and other cities braced for protests. The Memphis police chief, Cerelyn Davis, told NBC News that the department had been unable to find evidence for why Mr. Nichols was stopped in the first place. The police initially said the episode began as a traffic stop on suspicion of reckless driving.

Jacey Fortin, Richard Fausset, Stephanie Saul, Mitch Smith, Patrick J. Lyons and Eliza Fawcett contributed reporting.

Sean Keenan

A crowd of protesters that had gathered at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta has left, and police officers say they are not aware of any other demonstrations happening tonight, though protests are planned in the city tomorrow.

transcript

1 00:00:00,000 —> 00:00:02,020 "Black lives are under attack. 2 00:00:02,020 —> 00:00:03,130 What do we do?" 3 00:00:03,130 —> 00:00:04,375 Crowd: "Stand up, fight back." 4 00:00:04,375 —> 00:00:06,680 "When Black lives are under attack, 5 00:00:06,680 —> 00:00:07,550 what do we do?" 6 00:00:07,550 —> 00:00:08,820 Crowd: "Stand up, fight back." 7 00:00:08,820 —> 00:00:09,942 "Stand up, fight back." 8 00:00:09,942 —> 00:00:10,981 Crowd: "Stand up, fight back." 9 00:00:10,981 —> 00:00:12,123 "Stand up, fight back." 10 00:00:12,123 —> 00:00:13,150 Crowd: "Stand up, fight back." 11 00:00:13,150 —> 00:00:15,790 "If Black lives are under attack, 12 00:00:15,790 —> 00:00:16,388 what do we do?" 13 00:00:16,388 —> 00:00:20,940 Crowd: "Stand up, fight back."

Jill Cowan

LOS ANGELES — Video images of Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols have drawn comparisons to shocking footage of a watershed episode more than three decades ago, in which a group of officers repeatedly struck a Black motorist as he lay on the street.

"It is going to remind many people of Rodney King," Ben Crump, a lawyer for Mr. Nichols's family, told ABC News on Thursday, referring to the 1991 beating of Mr. King by Los Angeles Police Department officers.

Videos released on Friday showed a disturbing sequence in which Memphis officers on Jan. 7 repeatedly struck Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who police said ran away after he was pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving. As two officers held Mr. Nichols, a third officer appeared to kick him in the head. Shortly after, an officer beat him with a baton. Later, an officer punched Mr. Nichols at least five times while another officer held Mr. Nichols's hands behind his back.

In the 1991 encounter, Mr. King was pulled over by Los Angeles police officers after driving about 100 miles per hour. He attempted to escape on foot, but officers caught him and violently struck him with batons, used Tasers on him and kicked him in an encounter that was captured by a neighbor who happened to have a new camcorder. The episode quickly made its way to a local TV station and was then broadcast around the world, jarring viewers in an era before police body camera footage and cellphone video became common.

Unlike Mr. Nichols, Mr. King survived his beating. Bearing scars and a limp, he became a reluctant cultural figure. He drowned in a backyard pool in 2012, at the age of 47.

Mr. Crump and the Memphis police chief, Cerelyn Davis, made comparisons this week between the beatings of Mr. King and Mr. Nichols, with videos of both showing graphic footage of multiple officers repeatedly striking Black men.

The comparisons are apt in some ways, experts on racial justice in Los Angeles said on Friday. But they said the differences in the cases reflect how the nation has changed over three decades.

"I don't know if there's a comparison as much as there's a continuum," said Todd Boyd, chair for the study of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.

For many Americans in California and beyond, the footage of Mr. King's beating exposed for the first time the kinds of routine abuses suffered by communities of color at the hands of law enforcement officers. "Rodney King is in many ways the first chapter," Dr. Boyd said.

The officers who attacked Mr. King were acquitted the next year in state court by a mostly white jury, which touched off deadly riots that first devastated and ultimately reshaped Los Angeles.

Five officers in the Memphis case were fired 13 days after the confrontation with Mr. Nichols. They were arrested six days after that and charged with second-degree murder. All of the officers are Black.

In the years since Mr. King's beating, the rise of cellphone video and body-worn cameras have made it possible for Americans to see a grim procession of police shootings, beatings and chokings. Black people have died at a disproportionately high rate in police killings, which have spurred protests in cities across the nation. It was a bystander video of an officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, who was pronounced dead at a hospital, that sparked a nationwide uprising in 2020.

"It's unfortunate this has happened so many times that we have the option of picking what to compare it to," Dr. Boyd said.

Dr. Boyd noted that in the case of Mr. Nichols, there are two significant differences from Mr. King's beating: First, all of the officers charged with murdering Mr. Nichols are Black, while none of the officers in the attack on Mr. King were. And, second, there is the speed with which the Memphis officers were fired and charged with murder.

Taken together, Dr. Boyd said it might suggest that officials are quicker to prosecute police officers who aren't white. But, he said, it could suggest that "we’ve learned from these previous incidents."

Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a co-founder of the city's chapter of Black Lives Matter, said she believed it was the latter.

"We’ve done a good job amplifying what's happening, giving light to what's happening, and organizing a response," Dr. Abdullah said. She said she saw the relatively swift charges for the Memphis officers as a sign that the names of Black people who have died following encounters with police have become "more than a hashtag."

Still, Dr. Abdullah and other experts emphasized that the similarities between Mr. Nichols's death and a beating caught on camera more than 30 years ago demonstrated fundamental realities about policing and racial inequity that have persisted.

After watching the video, she said: "It didn't feel just like Rodney King to me. It felt like when you see photos of enslaved people being beaten by overseers."

Brenda Stevenson, a history professor at Oxford University and the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied the 1992 riots, said that "the system itself" had not changed enough.

Dr. Stevenson recalled moving to Los Angeles from Virginia in January of 1991, just two months before Mr. King was beaten.

She thought she was heading to a city much more diverse and progressive than those she had experienced in the South. But as she watched the footage of Mr. King's beating, she realized her new home wasn't so different.

Everywhere in the country, both then and now, Dr. Stevenson said, Black lives are not valued as much as those of other Americans — and that devaluation is perpetuated across society, including by police officers who are themselves Black.

"It's a racialized issue — it's also an issue of violence," she said. "The lack of respect for human life: That's a broader problem."

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting from Memphis.

Wesley Parnell

Janay Maxwell, 32, a health home aide in Brooklyn, said she transitioned from fear to disgust to anger as she watched the video of Tyre Nichols being beaten by the Memphis police. "I’m thinking of my cousins, my brother, my family," said Maxwell, who is Black. "You’re driving down the street and people break traffic violations. But death? I’m going to lose my life because of that?"

Aishvarya Kavi

President Biden has watched the video of Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols, and said in a statement on Friday night that it left him "outraged." Nichols's death is "yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and brown Americans experience every single day," he said. The president added that his heart went out to Nichols's mother and stepfather, with whom he spoke earlier on Friday, adding that they "deserve a swift, full and transparent investigation."

Jill Cowan

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California reacted to the release of the footage of the beating of Tyre Nichols, who grew up in Sacramento. In a statement, he said that the video shows "abhorrent behavior, and these officers must be held accountable for their deadly actions and clear abuse of power."

Jill Cowan

After watching the videos of Tyre Nichols being beaten by the police in Memphis, Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a co-founder of the city's chapter of Black Lives Matter, said she became most emotional as she heard Nichols call for his mother. "He was just trying to make it to his mom," she said.

Jacey Fortin

The four videos released on Friday did not show what prompted police officers to perform a traffic stop on Tyre Nichols in the first place. Each piece of footage begins after his car has already been stopped in an intersection.

Mitch Smith

At one point in the video, before an ambulance is shown, at least 10 people can be seen standing on the street near Nichols.

Jacey Fortin

After Tyre Nichols fled the intersection where he had been pulled out of his vehicle, police officers chased him. On body camera footage, one officer could be heard saying: "I hope they stomp his ass. I hope they stomp his ass."

Jesus Jimenez and Kassie Bracken

About 30 protesters are blocking the Arkansas-Mississippi Bridge in both directions. Dozens of vehicles, including 18-wheelers, are stalled on Interstate 55. There is little apparent law enforcement in the area.

Jacey Fortin

The video from one body camera shows a police officer approaching Tyre Nichols while he is on the ground, while other officers restrain him and shout, threatening to baton him. The officer then strikes Nichols with a baton multiple times.

Jacey Fortin

At another point, while Nichols was being held down on the street by two officers, a third officer kicked him in the head at least twice, the video showed.

Joseph Goldstein and Matthew Rosenberg

The story of policing in Memphis has often mirrored in miniature the story of policing across America over the last decade.

In 2015, an officer shot and killed a 19-year old Black man after a traffic stop. The following year, Black Lives Matter protesters occupied a major bridge over the Mississippi River, leading to an impasse that the police chief helped break by linking arms with the protesters. The next year, the police squared off with protesters seeking the removal of statues of Confederate generals. And in 2018, the Memphis Police Department was found to have been spying on activists.

Yet after all those conflicts, the city had largely kept tensions from spilling onto the national stage.

There were several reasons for this. Its police force was less wedded to stop-and-frisk tactics than the New York Police Department, or to pretextual traffic stops than the police in Ferguson, Mo. Memphis, a predominately Black city, has a long tradition of Black police chiefs. And in a city with one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, the police have a deep reservoir of support.

But Memphis is now the flash point in the country's ongoing saga over policing, after five police officers were charged with beating to death a man who had tried to run away from them. Police footage of the fatal beating — described by the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation as "absolutely appalling" — was released Friday evening. The city was bracing for protests.

The man who died after being beaten by the officers, Tyre Nichols, was reed-thin and 29 years old. He worked at FedEx, had a 4-year-old son and still skateboarded when he could. On Jan. 7, Mr. Nichols ran from the police after being pulled over for a traffic stop. While it is not uncommon, following a chase, for officers to punch or kick someone after catching them, the violence that ensued once officers caught Mr. Nichols was so shocking that Memphians said one needed to reach back to 1971 to find a parallel.

Mr. Nichols called out for his mother in what are believed to be his final words.

The five officers, who were indicted on second-degree murder charges Thursday, had been assigned to a new unit with an acronym that emphasizes subdual: Scorpion. It stands for "Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods."

Commissioned in late 2021, the roughly 40-person unit was modeled after the aggressive anti-crime squads that in many big cities patrol neighborhoods deemed to be high-crime in unmarked cars, on the lookout for gang members or any sign of criminal activity. Such units typically rely heavily on car stops and stop-and-frisk tactics. In Memphis, city officials were eager to tout the unit, claiming it was racking up arrests. The very day after Mr. Nichols died as a result of his injuries, the mayor publicly credited Scorpion with helping bring about a slight drop in the city's homicide rate in 2022.

But with Mr. Nichols's death, it has already come at a cost, said Earle Fisher, a Memphis pastor and community activist who was among those caught up in the earlier surveillance by the Memphis police.

"The mayor and police director put that unit together in the fall of 2021, and you don't even have a year-and-a-half go by before there's at least one dead body," Mr. Fisher said.

The fact that five officers stand accused, he said, meant that the incident reflected the culture of policing within the unit.

"This doesn't fall in the bad apples category," he said. "If two is company, and three is a crowd, then five is a system and a structure."

Little has yet emerged about the five officers. One of them, Desmond Mills, went to high school in Connecticut and played football at West Virginia State University, according to news reports.

Another, Demetrius Haley, appears to have been a correctional officer before joining the police force.

In 2016, a lawsuit by an inmate at the Shelby County Division of Corrections claims that three guards, including one by the name Demetrius Haley, had beaten him up. The inmate, Cordarlrius Sledge, told NBC News that he had been trying to hide a contraband phone in the moments before officers strip-searched him. Two officers, including Mr. Haley, began punching Mr. Sledge and a third officer picked him up and slammed him down, according to the handwritten complaint Mr. Sledge filed in federal court. As he came down, Mr. Sledge's head hit the sink and he was knocked unconscious, Mr. Sledge claimed. The guards denied hurting Mr. Sledge in a brief answer filed in court.

The lawsuit was later dismissed on procedural grounds.

By Friday, the five ex-officers in Memphis — they were fired following Mr. Nichols's death — had been released on bail from Shelby County jail within a day of being booked.

Mr. Fisher, the pastor, noted what many Memphians have been discussing in recent days: All five of the officers charged in Mr. Nichols death are Black. To Mr. Fisher, the race of the officers was only evidence that the entire system of policing needed drastic reform. "All are indoctrinated one way or another," he said.

But it was a shocking fact to others in the city.

"Here you have five African American men who know the plight of African American men," Jopie Merriweather, 57, said during a midafternoon coffee break. She has lived in Memphis her whole life and described the killing as shocking, in part because the community's relationship with the police department is not as bad as it is in other cities. "How dare you do that to one of your own?" she said.

Others expressed surprise that their police force was now at the center of the national reckoning over race and policing. To find another incident with clear parallels, a number of civic leaders and pastors cited a 1971 case: law enforcement officers, all but one of them white, were involved in the fatal beating of a Black teenager in a ditch following a car chase. The killing set off days of protests and clashes.

That occurred some two generations ago, some three years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis.

And many civic figures said they thought the police were doing a relatively decent job of navigating the tumult of the last decade, and were slowly making necessary changes.

"For the last few years, we’ve been quite quiet, and dormant, and proud of the fact that we haven't had any serious situations," said Pastor Bill Adkins of the Greater Imani Church, and a member of a recent mayor-appointed panel on "reimagining policing" to help push forward the changes. When it came to relations between the community and police, he said, "we’d been doing pretty well in Memphis in recent years."

Dr. Adkins noted that the Police Department had in the last two years instituted a number of reforms, ranging from a ban on chokeholds to de-escalation training. "We got all these things instituted and were satisfied that had been done," he said. "This comes as a huge shock to us that these five would perpetrate this."

Van D. Turner, Jr., a mayoral candidate and former Shelby County commissioner who is president of Memphis's N.A.A.C.P. branch, said he believes the city had navigated police-community relations better than many places in the years following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. He noted that the majority of the nearly 2,000-strong force is Black, as is the city's population. "It hadn't been really bad," he said of police-community relations. "Obviously this" — Mr. Nichols's death — "is a strain on the relationship and I think this is something that can be healed and get better over time."

The five officers charged with Mr. Nichols's murder had all been hired in recent years — between 2017 and 2020.

When the city scaled back the pension plan for the police in the middle of the last decade, officers left in droves. Mark LeSure, a former Memphis police sergeant who retired in 2021, said pay cuts and other bureaucratic issues had driven many of the force's veterans into retirement, leaving the ranks to be filled with inexperienced officers. Officers landed in specialized outfits, like the Scorpion unit, far earlier in their careers than had been typical in the past.

Adding to the potential peril is the nature of a specialized team like the Scorpion unit. It was launched after Mr. LeSure had left the force, but he had been told by former colleagues that it had a mandate to aggressively go after suspected criminals, and its members were supposed to be on the streets, doing what they could to make arrests.

"Human beings man, that's what happened. They let their emotions get the best of them, and there was no veteran officer there to stop them," Mr. LeSure said in a telephone interview. "Usually when vets are there, things go differently because we have that experience to say, ‘I understand you’re mad but you got to stop, you can't do this, it isn't right.’"

Steve Eder and Mark Walker contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research.

Jacey Fortin

Throughout the videos, the officers can be heard repeatedly cursing at Tyre Nichols, and he can be heard shouting in return: "You guys are really doing a lot right now," he said shortly after being pulled out of his car. "I’m just trying to go home."

Jesus Jimenez

Protesters have now walked onto Interstate 55, southwest of downtown Memphis. Several vehicles are stalled on the on-ramp, and there is no visible law enforcement present.

Jacey Fortin

After being pulled from the car and held on the ground as officers shouted instructions, Tyre Nichols broke free and ran after officers tried to pepper spray him, crossing through an intersection. An officer could be seen firing a stun gun in his direction, then chasing him on foot.

Jesus Jimenez

A group of protesters in Memphis is now blocking a roadway southwest of downtown. Several 18-wheelers and other vehicles are stuck.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Body camera footage shows that at the beginning of the traffic stop, an officer yells at Tyre Nichols that he will get "blown out," using several expletives. An officer yells for him to get out of the car, and an officer then opens the driver's side door and grabs Nichols, whom the police take to the ground. "I’m just trying to go home," Nichols says a few seconds later.

Jacey Fortin

In one video, Tyre Nichols is shown on the ground with officers around him, and he can be heard repeatedly screaming: "Mom, Mom, Mom." Lawyers have said that his mother's home was about 100 yards away from where he was beaten.

transcript

WEBVTT 00:00:03.840 —> 00:00:06.110 "You’re about to get sprayed again. 00:00:07.370 —> 00:00:08.970 [unclear] 00:00:08.970 —> 00:00:09.526 "Mom!" 00:00:09.526 —> 00:00:10.263 "Watch out, watch out." 00:00:10.263 —> 00:00:10.826 "Watch out." 00:00:10.826 —> 00:00:14.313 [screaming in distress] 00:00:15.361 —> 00:00:16.430 "Give me your hands." 00:00:16.430 —> 00:00:18.635 "Mom! 00:00:18.635 —> 00:00:20.480 Mom!" 00:00:20.480 —> 00:00:21.480 "Hey." 00:00:21.480 —> 00:00:24.085 Give me your hands."

Jacey Fortin

The police video shows that the confrontation appeared to have begun when Tyre Nichols was still in his car, sitting in the driver's seat. Officers yelled at him to get out of his car, which was in the road in front of a traffic light, and one officer could be seen opening the car door to reach in and pull him out. "I didn't do anything," Nichols could be heard saying.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

A surveillance video just released by Memphis shows several police officers kicking and punching Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, and beating him with a baton at one point while he shows no signs of resisting or fighting back. When Nichols stands up a few seconds later, one officer strikes him with at least five strong blows, while another officer holds his hands behind his back.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Videos of the beating that led to murder charges against five police officers have been released by Memphis officials on Vimeo. We will be posting updates here about what they show shortly.

Richard Fausset

Before Tyre Nichols moved to Memphis — before he was brutally beaten on a Saturday night by police officers there — he lived in California, in the Sacramento area, where he hung out with a crowd of skateboarders.

They were a pack of teenage nonconformists. "Our friend group, we were a bunch of little rebels," said Angelina Paxton, one of Mr. Nichols's closest friends in Sacramento. But Mr. Nichols, she said, tended to be the voice warning them away from confrontation and serious trouble.

"If anything, he was the one in the back saying, ‘Come on, guys,’" Ms. Paxton recalled. "He was chill. He was peaceful. He was laid back."

Mr. Nichols, she also said, was wary, as a Black man, of the police. His social media posts show that he identified with the Black Lives Matter movement and harbored a mistrust of prevailing government and economic systems.

And yet recently, Ms. Paxton said, Mr. Nichols had considered becoming a police officer.

"He was talking about how maybe that would be the easiest way to change things in the system — by becoming the system," she said.

Mr. Nichols, 29, died in a Memphis hospital on Jan. 10, three days after he was pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving. He had fled from the officers on foot, and had apparently been running toward the home of his mother and stepfather, where he had been living.

"All my son was trying to do was get home," his mother, RowVaughn Wells, said at a news conference earlier this week. "He was two minutes from the house when they murdered him."

Mr. Nichols's traumatic death has shocked Memphis, and forced the capital of the old Southern Cotton Belt to reckon with a nightmare scenario that does not fit neatly into most narratives of racist violence: all five of the officers, who have been fired and indicted for crimes including second-degree murder, are Black. So is the Memphis police chief, Cerelyn J. Davis, who this week called the officers’ actions "heinous, reckless and inhumane."

Mr. Nichols's life story also cut against old narratives of African American migration patterns. Decades ago, Black people left the former Confederate states in large numbers, headed for places like California in search of opportunity and the hope of greater freedom.

But for Mr. Nichols, it was California, and its high cost of living, that had begun to feel oppressive. In early 2020, Ms. Paxton said, he set out for Tennessee to find a way to make ends meet, becoming part of what scholars have called a "New Great Migration" of Black Americans back to the states of the old Confederacy.

"At least things are affordable here," Mr. Nichols wrote in a 2021 Facebook post. "OK jobs with decent pay. Cheaper registration fees. Cigarettes that aren't $10 a pack lol."

Ms. Paxton, 28, met Mr. Nichols when they were teenagers. They were both involved with a California youth ministry called Flipt 180. "They were trying to give teenagers an outlet that wasn't the streets," she said.

She recalled how she first bonded with him in a car as they headed to a church event. She noticed that they were both wearing shocking shades of lime green. She found him to be mellow, but difficult to pin down. When he played D.J. for his friends, he played everything: country music, the rappers Lupe Fiasco and Tupac, reggae.

As they grew closer, Ms. Paxton learned that her friend's situation was complicated. He had been living with his father in Sacramento, but the father was terminally ill, and would die before Mr. Nichols was out of high school. His mother was 1,800 miles away, in Memphis. Skateboarding offered an escape.

"He was going through a lot," Ms. Paxton said. "When he skated, it's like he wasn't worried anymore. It was like nothing mattered more than when he landed that trick, you know?"

Sometime after his father died, Mr. Nichols moved in with the family of a close friend. After high school, Ms. Paxton said, he bounced around from job to job. He had a son with a woman he was in a relationship with for awhile. Pressure to move up the economic ladder was mounting.

At a certain point, Ms. Paxton said, "he spent most of the time trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life."

His move to Memphis in 2020 roughly coincided with the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and its lockdowns. He posted online about missing California, his old friends and his son: on the child's fourth birthday, Mr. Nichols bought cupcakes in his honor, but acknowledged that he would be eating them himself.

Yet on other occasions, he celebrated the fact that he had escaped to Tennessee.

"He felt the presence of the creator out in Memphis more than he ever had," Ms. Paxton said. "I mean, the nature, the people are kind — it's just a whole different world."

Mr. Nichols was an avid amateur photographer, and his love of his new home was reflected on his Wix page, where he posted images of blues clubs, local landmarks and the sun setting over the Mississippi River. "He liked to go and watch the sunset and take pictures," his mother said at a news conference in Memphis on Friday. "That was his thing."

His embrace of Tennessee was also evident from his Facebook entries. In August 2021, he posted a video of himself in a checkered shirt, ball cap and mirrored sunglasses, dancing against a backdrop of farmland to Jason Aldean's "Girl Like You."

His other posts offered a glimpse into his passions and his politics. He posted about pro football and basketball. He wrote passionately about the plight of Indigenous people and the resilience of African Americans in the face of centuries of oppression. He denounced modern-day racism, political corruption and the power of elites. He embraced conspiracy theories about chemtrails, the John F. Kennedy assassination and the AIDS epidemic.

In June 2020, the month after George Floyd's murder, he posted a drawing based on a famous photo of Malcolm X peering out of a window, armed with a rifle. Beneath it was a caption: "Because I have a Black son," it said, followed by a drawing of a heart. That same month, in a separate post, Mr. Nichols wrote that he had seen "a lot more cops" who had decided to "kneel with all the protesters" and walk alongside them "with no batons and forceful weapons."

"Humanity is SLOWLY being restored!" he wrote.

Eventually his stepfather, Rodney Wells, helped him find a job at FedEx. The company's headquarters are in Memphis, and it has long been viewed as a crucial engine for economic sustenance and mobility for Black residents across the economic spectrum. "Those jobs are like post office jobs back in the day," said State Representative Joe Towns Jr., who represents part of Memphis. "Everybody wants one."

He worked the evening shift, and would come home with his stepfather, who worked the same shift, at around 7 p.m., when his mother had home cooking waiting. Ms. Paxton said that Mr. Nichols had specific goals: to earn enough to buy a car and a house, and to be able to fly his son out to visit him. Weekends, he would skate and take photos.

On the Saturday night when he was beaten, his mother had planned to cook him sesame chicken, a favorite. When the police stopped him, she said, he was driving back from Shelby Farms, a 4,500-acre park in the heart of Memphis, where he had probably taken in the sunset.

According to an initial police statement, the officers stopped him at 8:30 p.m., and a confrontation followed. He fled, but they chased him and caught him. The statement did not mention the beating, but it did note that he complained of shortness of breath. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital in what the police described as "critical condition."

At a news conference on Monday, Ms. Wells acknowledged that it seemed like every mother in her position describes their child as good. "But my son, he actually was a good boy," she said. Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, noted that Mr. Nichols suffered from Crohn's disease, and as a result was almost impossibly slim: six-foot-three and 145 pounds.

On Tuesday, one of Mr. Nichols's three surviving siblings, Jamal Dupree, posted to Facebook a photo of Mr. Nichols as he lay in a hospital bed with a tube in his mouth, his face swollen and bruised and resting on a bloody pillow.

In a later post, Mr. Dupree addressed his younger brother directly: "I’m sorry I wasn't there to protect you," it said.

It was accompanied by a video shot from above the cloud line, with a blazing sun on the horizon that appeared to be either rising or setting.

Rick Rojas and Susan C. Beachy contributed reporting.

K.K. Rebecca Lai

Black residents of Memphis, who make up two-thirds of the city's population of 628,000, are significantly more likely than white residents to be the subjects of police use of force. In thousands of encounters since 2016 in which officers used force, 86 percent of the subjects were Black, according to city data.

On a per capita basis, the data shows that Black residents were subjects of police use of force at a rate nearly three times that of white residents, and eight times that of Hispanic residents.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly indicated the rate at which Black residents experience police use of force compared with white residents. Black residents experience police use of force at nearly three times the rate of white residents. They are not six times as likely to be subjected to such force.

How we handle corrections

Hurubie Meko

Mayor Eric Adams, anticipating a visceral reaction to the release of footage of the police encounter that resulted in Tyre Nichols's death, addressed New York City on Friday and said that he was "outraged" and "devastated." But Mr. Adams also praised officials in Memphis for acting "quickly and decisively" in arresting the five officers. "As someone who spent decades fighting for police diversity and against police abuse," he said, "I feel betrayed by these officers."

Remy Tumin

Ben Crump, standing behind the lectern of a Memphis church on Friday, said the speed with which charges were brought in the police killing of Tyre Nichols presented a turning point.

For too long, Mr. Crump said, prosecuting cases of police brutality followed a recurring pattern. But this, he said, offered "a blueprint" for officers, of any race or ethnicity, to be held accountable.

"No longer can you tell us we got to wait six months to a year," Mr. Crump said.

He would know.

Mr. Crump has waited six months, a year, and in many cases, even longer for a case to work its way through the judicial system. For more than 20 years, he has been the go-to lawyer for victims of police involved shootings, a role that prompted Rev. Al Sharpton in 2021 to call him "Black America's attorney general."

In Mr. Crump's latest case, Mr. Nichols was pulled over by the Memphis police on the evening of Jan. 7 and beaten. He died three days later in a hospital. Five officers were charged with murder on Thursday.

"We have never seen swift justice like this," Mr. Crump said.

He has become a part of the fabric of the response to police killings in America, including those of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor.

But it was the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager who was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer in a suburb of Orlando, Fla., that catapulted Mr. Crump into the spotlight. Mr. Crump became a regular on cable news, bringing national attention to the case and motivating a new generation of activists.

"Trayvon Martin will forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all," he said after a jury acquitted the volunteer, George Zimmerman, in 2013.

Two years later, Mr. Crump represented the family of Michael Brown, a young Black man who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. The list continued to grow.

In the years since, Mr. Crump, who has a law degree from Florida State University, has embraced his roles as lawyer and activist. He continued to push for change on Friday in Memphis.

"We have an opportunity here, America, to really speak to this institutionalized police culture and show that it is not just about white officers or Black officers or Hispanic officers," Mr. Crump said. "It's about police officers having this biased belief that you can get away with doing certain things to Black citizens and brown citizens in America that you cannot get away with white citizens."

He noted how "the simple encounter" of a traffic stop led to murder and kidnapping charges against the police, adding that Mr. Nichols's death should lead to substantial changes in policing, including legislation requiring police officers to intervene when they see other officers using excessive force. His team called for the city to immediately disband the police unit involved in the traffic stop that led to his death.

"That is what we’re going to have to do if we’re going to give Tyre Nichols the proper legacy," Mr. Crump said.

Mr. Crump has also learned how to build power around a moment. After several speeches Friday by other lawyers and local officials, Mr. Crump introduced RowVaughn Wells, Tyre Nichols's mother.

"To the five police officers that murdered my son, you also disgraced your own families when you did this," Ms. Wells said. "I’m going to pray for you and your families because, at the end of the day, this shouldn't have happened. This just shouldn't have happened. We want justice for my son, justice for my son."

She remembered her son as someone who was passionate about photography, sunsets and skateboarding, and who showed little interest in conforming.

"I tried to get him a pair of Jordans one time and he said no, he wants some Vans," she said, referring to the shoes that are synonymous with skateboarding. "I’m just telling you, he was a beautiful soul. He was a good boy. No one's perfect, but he was damn near close."

Marc Tracy

When video showing the police encounter that led to the death of Tyre Nichols is released Friday evening, it will add to a tragic American canon that includes the cellphone video showing the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, the camcorder-shot video of Rodney King being beaten by the police in 1991, and the 1955 photographs of 14-year-old Emmett Till in a coffin his mother had kept open to show the world the horror of his lynching.

In each case, the visual evidence helped galvanize public opinion.

"An image speaks to us in ways that other types of communication cannot," said Brandon M. Erby, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies Black rhetoric and is writing a book about Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till. "When we see images, they often counter the rhetoric and discourse and narratives that we are given."

The footage being released this evening will differ in some key respects. Officials have said it would come from police body cameras and stationary cameras, with some redactions. "The police and law enforcement releasing the video is different from what we saw with the George Floyd footage, where you had an innocent teenager witnessing it and releasing it because the world needed to see," Mr. Erby said.

In the past, video and photographic evidence has often resonated with the public in ways that spoken and written accounts have not.

"People respond to visual evidence, video and film and photos, very differently than they do to other kinds of testimony and evidence," said David Levi Strauss, a faculty member at Bard College who has written about photography and video. "It seems built in."

Emmett Till was far from the first victim of Jim Crow violence, Mr. Erby noted, but the photos of his funeral helped launch the civil rights movement. ("The Big Bang," the Rev. Jesse Jackson would later call it.) The video of Mr. Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, shot by Darnella Frazier when she was 17, helped mobilize the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

And in a social media age, these images can be instantly distributed very widely, as the Floyd video was when Ms. Frazier uploaded it to Facebook.

Some observers question whether these images ought to be broadly circulated. In a statement, the Center for Policing Equity said videos like the one showing the Memphis traffic stop "are crucial to holding police accountable when they do egregious harm," but also "re-traumatize those closest to the person whose life was taken, along with that person's broader community."

Mr. Erby said that the footage would need to spur action if it is not to be in vain.

"The circulation is sacred in a way," he said. "If we’re not careful, we just continue to perpetuate the images of Black bodies under distress. We focus on the images and not necessarily on the actions, the justice and accountability."

Mitch Smith

Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, called the reported failure of other officers to intervene in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols "sickening," adding: "The event as described to us does not constitute legitimate police work or a traffic stop gone wrong. This is a criminal assault under the pretext of law."

Mitch Smith

Chief Schenita Stewart of the Evanston, Ill., police said she expected the Nichols video to "again spotlight police misconduct on a national level." She said certain law enforcement actions had "upset our social fabric and undermined the confidence in and legitimacy of our police agencies and local governments. This has to change."

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

The Memphis Grizzlies of the N.B.A. said in a statement that they are "distraught" over Tyre Nichols's death, calling it "a needless loss of life due to police brutality." The Grizzlies are scheduled to play the Minnesota Timberwolves starting 30 minutes after the body camera videos are to be released. The game will be in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer in 2020, sparking protests.

Eliza Fawcett

In an interview with NBC News on Friday, Chief Cerelyn Davis of the Memphis police said that her department has been unable to find evidence for why Tyre Nichols was stopped by officers on Jan. 7. Police initially described the incident as a traffic stop for suspicion of reckless driving. After her staff pulled all possible video from the surrounding area, including from roadways and officers’ body cameras, "the only thing that we have right now," she said, "is the officer saying that Mr. Nichols was driving recklessly, initially on the wrong side of the road."

Jim Tankersley

The White House said President Biden spoke on Friday with RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, Tyre Nichols's mother and stepfather, "to directly express his and Dr. Biden's condolences for Tyre Nichols's death," adding that the president "commended the family's courage and strength."

Eliza Fawcett and Jesus Jiménez

Bracing for public outrage, the authorities in Memphis have chosen to wait until shortly after 6 p.m. Central time on Friday to release video of the police encounter that resulted in Tyre Nichols's death.

Mr. Nichols was hospitalized on Jan. 7 following a traffic stop that escalated into a brutal beating; he died three days later. The five officers involved in the encounter were fired last week and were arrested Thursday on second-degree murder and other charges.

Officials have said that the video footage is nearly an hour long, and was obtained from police body cameras and stationary cameras. It is being released with limited redactions, the officials said.

Chief Cerelyn Davis of the Memphis police has said that the video shows a "heinous, reckless and inhumane" incident that she expects will draw public outrage.

Some Memphis city council members who were not involved in deciding when to release the video said they supported the plan to wait until after schools and many businesses in the city had closed for the night.

"Friday at 6 p.m., very, very few people will be at work," said Frank Colvett Jr., a councilman from the city's east side. "Everyone will have had plenty of time to get home from school, from their jobs, and just stay home."

Another council member, Dr. Jeff Warren, said he thought waiting until Friday evening would "allow time for people to digest the fact that arrests had been made and charges had been brought."

Anticipating protests after the video is made public, local civic leaders, members of Mr. Nichols's family and President Biden have urged demonstrators to remain peaceful.

Michael Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, noted that the delayed release gave the Memphis and Shelby County authorities time to investigate and fire the five officers and to arrest and indict them before the public saw the video.

"They anticipate people will be shocked and horrified by what they see," Professor Lawlor said. "And before that happens, they want to make sure it's very clear what the official reaction to this is: The officers charged with murder, second degree."

In other high-profile cases of police-involved deaths, the timing of the release of body camera footage has varied widely. Sometimes the video has been made public swiftly to emphasize transparency.

The authorities in Columbus, Ohio, released video footage of Ma’Khia Bryant's fatal encounter with the police just a few hours after she was shot and killed by an officer in April 2021. That same month, when Daunte Wright was fatally shot by a police officer at a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minn., the authorities showed graphic body camera footage to reporters the next day.

But laws in some states can make the release take much longer, and in some cases, police departments have withheld video footage out of fear over the public's reaction to seeing it.

When Daniel Prude died in March 2020 while being detained by the police in Rochester, N.Y., police commanders intentionally delayed releasing body camera footage of the encounter for months. Ultimately, it was Mr. Prude's family who made the footage public in September 2020.

Kami Chavis, a law professor at William & Mary Law School, said that the expected release of the Tyre Nichols video in Memphis seemed "timely."

"Violence has erupted in other cities when you’ve had different situations, where the officers haven't been named or fired or arrested," she said, but those steps "happened very quickly in this situation."

Jesus Jimenez

Michalyn Easter-Thomas, a Memphis city councilwoman, said all City Council members have had an opportunity to see the video but she has decided not to watch it because she didn't need to "see it in order to know what was done," adding, "For some, it will help them see the truth."

Clyde McGrady

In a sweeping effort to enact reforms in an era of racial reckoning, states have passed more than 140 police oversight laws in the nearly three years since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.

The movement has focused largely on holding police officers accountable and making police agencies more transparent.

Specific steps that have been enacted or considered include bans on chokeholds, limits on no-knock warrants, requiring officers to wear cameras and tightening use-of-force rules, as well as overhauling disciplinary procedures.

Colorado passed one of the nation's most sweeping packages, influenced in part by the deaths in custody of Mr. Floyd and Elijah McClain, who was stopped by officers in Aurora, Colo., placed in a chokehold and injected with a powerful sedative. He died a few days later.

In 2020, the city of Memphis enacted its own policing overhaul, voting to require the Memphis Police Department to adopt policies meant to reduce the use of excessive force by officers.

Even so, activists argue that across the country, the progress has been too slow, and police brutality remains endemic.

"When we look at what's happening overall and the landscape of police violence, it seems to be getting worse and not better," said Samuel Sinyangwe, founder of Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group.

American police officers killed more people in 2022 than in any year of the past decade, according to an analysis by Mr. Sinyangwe's organization. Not all the killings are the result of inappropriate use of force. The analysis noted that 26 percent of the people killed by the police in 2022 were Black, though only 13 percent of the U.S. population is Black.

Some police agencies have moved to hire more nonwhite law enforcement officers to reflect the communities they serve. But activists emphasize that reducing police violence is more about changing the way the criminal justice system views Black people than about who is doing the policing. All five officers charged with killing Tyre Nichols are Black.

"It doesn't necessarily matter about the police officers’ race when the police officers are being indoctrinated into a system that is, in part, systemically racist and biased," said Charles Coleman Jr., a civil rights attorney and former Brooklyn prosecutor.

Rashad Robinson, chief executive of Color of Change, a racial justice organization, said: "At a deeply structural level, policing in this country has been designed to control and to harm and to hurt Black people. You cannot change that issue simply by diversity."

"True public safety isn't about charging police officers after heinous acts like this," he added. "It is about actually ensuring that institutions that are supposed to keep us safe actually do that."

Even though some state and local jurisdictions have changed their approaches to mental health incidents or traffic stops, some activists believe that hostility from law enforcement toward any changes to policing has contributed to the rise in police violence.

Mr. Sinyangwe called it a "backlash" in which "the police are sort of responding to calls for accountability and calls for reform with doubling down on the types of policies and practices that got us in this mess."

Mr. Coleman pointed to Congress's failure to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, which was approved by the House but stalled in the Senate, as a profound setback for police reform. The bill would have, among other things, banned chokeholds and ended the qualified immunity defense for officers who are sued. On Thursday, President Biden renewed his call for Congress to pass a policing bill.

Mr. Sinyangwe said the federal bill had some good provisions regarding standards for transparency and data collection, but was limited in its capacity to reduce police violence. "That's not going to change the game," he said.

He cited Denver's STAR Program as a more effective approach to reducing police violence. That program sends emergency medical technicians and behavioral health specialists on calls about people having mental health episodes — calls that previously would have been handled by police officers alone.

Audra D. S. Burch contributed reporting.

Mike Baker

The Memphis police officers charged with the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols were part of a specialized unit that had been formed a little more than a year ago to help halt a surge of violence in the city.

The unit — called SCORPION, or the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit — was designed as a 40-officer group that would deploy in neighborhoods, with a focus on crime hot spots. The officers have often operated in unmarked vehicles, making traffic stops, seizing weapons and conducting hundreds of arrests.

The unit was such a key part of the city's crime-fighting strategy that Mayor Jim Strickland touted it in his State of the City address a year ago, at a time when the city was tallying record homicide numbers.

Now, that unit has been involved in a fatal encounter that Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who created the team in the fall of 2021, called "heinous, reckless and inhumane." Five officers have been charged in Mr. Nichols's death, and Chief Davis has ordered a review of the unit.

On Friday, Antonio Romanucci, a lawyer for Mr. Nichols's family, said units that saturate neighborhoods under the guise of crime-fighting end up oppressing young people and people of color, often operating with impunity. He said the family was calling on the Memphis police department to disband the Memphis unit immediately.

"How will the community ever, ever trust a SCORPION unit?" he said. "The intent was good. The end result was a failure."

Specialized crime-fighting teams have long been the subject of scrutiny in cities around the country because they often target people of color and utilize tactics such as pretext stops, in which officers may stop someone for a minor violation and then use the opportunity to look for more serious crimes.

Memphis police reported in an initial statement that officers stopped Mr. Nichols for suspicion of reckless driving on Jan. 7 and that a "confrontation occurred" as the officers approached the vehicle. Mr. Nichols was taken to the hospital in critical condition and died three days later.

An independent autopsy found that Mr. Nichols "suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating," according to preliminary findings released by his family's lawyers, who said Mr. Nichols told the officers that he just wanted to go home.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, said the Memphis unit has used excessive force before, adding that a man reported being confronted by the unit — and being threatened with an officer's gun — while he was going to get pizza just a few days before Mr. Nichols's death. Another man, age 66, also described being brutalized by the unit and had photos of his injuries, Mr. Crump said.

"We believe that this was a pattern and practice, and Tyre is dead because that pattern and practice went unchecked by the people who were supposed to check that," Mr. Crump said.

He called on federal officials to investigate such teams and their tactics.

Sean Keenan

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia has issued an emergency order activating up to 1,000 Georgia National Guard troops to "subdue riot and unlawful assembly" that may break out over a public safety training facility — dubbed "Cop City" by detractors — that has been proposed in Atlanta.

The governor's move on Thursday follows more than a week of unrest in Atlanta over the officer-involved shooting death of Manuel Teran, 26, a demonstrator who had been living in the forested site of the planned training campus to protest police militarization and protect the trees.

The authorities claim that Teran fired a gun at a state trooper during a "clearing operation" in the woods before being killed by the police. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said that no body camera footage of the encounter is available.

Teran's death brought an already tense feud between law enforcement and opponents of the project to a head, prompting vigils and marches in Atlanta and across the country.

Some of the protests in Atlanta have taken a turn for the destructive, with activists smashing windows and setting fire to police cruisers. So far, 19 activists have been arrested and charged with "domestic terrorism" in connection with protests.

The expected release on Friday of video images of a traffic stop in Memphis that led to the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by police officers may further inflame tensions in Georgia.

The Atlanta Police Department said in a statement that its personnel were "closely monitoring the events in Memphis, and are prepared to support peaceful protests in our city."

"We understand and share in the outrage surrounding the death of Tyre Nichols," the department added. "Police officers are expected to conduct themselves in a compassionate, competent, and constitutional manner and these officers failed Tyre, their communities and their profession."

Mr. Kemp's executive order is set to expire on Feb. 9.