 What we're gonna do is go through the Tyree Nichols beating or incident, we've got video. I wanna warn everybody and I'll try to remember to do this throughout. We're gonna be showing not just the Nichols case, but other cases that are pretty rough going. So if people should be forewarned about that. First, we're gonna see him being pulled over. We can discuss what happened there and then we will move on to the actual beating that occurred. Do anything. Hey, hey, hey, turn your ass around. All right, all right, all right. Put your hand on the ground. Put your hands on the ground. Do that, okay? Get on the ground. Get on the ground. Okay, I'm gonna be going to change your ass. Okay, all right. I'm on the ground. On the ground. On the ground. Yes sir. Take him out. Please take him out of the ground. Okay. Dude, dang. Put your hands on the ground. Piss! Put your hands out of your backpacks! Okay, stop! Knock the ass the fuck out! Okay, you guys are really doing a lot right now! Bro, what is that for? From the point of view of somebody who has prosecuted police and also worked with police departments and other forms of law enforcement in order to kind of make things better, what is going on in that scene that is most important for people to understand? I spent many years either as a police auditor or an inspector general reviewing incidents just like this. And I would say that what you see exhibited there in the first two minutes is extraordinarily stupid policing. Lack of discipline, a lack of exhibiting any effort at de-escalation, or what often police officers will say is taking control of the scene. So what you're seeing is immediately the officers start escalating, guns are drawn, yelling contradictory commands, not explaining what they're doing there. If you see a well-trained unit which is doing what they would consider a high-risk stop, let's assume for a second the officer is thought for some reason this is a high-risk stop, even though they claim is this for reckless driving. So I have to assume this is what they do all the time. Their tactics are off the charge, horrible. Some other officers met up with him as he fled to a nearby neighborhood that apparently was near where his mother's house may have been. But I've spliced together a few different angles here. One is from a lamppost, so it's a high-angle shot, and then you see some of the same off the officer's bodycams. So here's the high-angle shot. They're on the ground. They're, again, trying to subdue him. This is after they've caught up to him after he ran. Yes, they caught up with him. An officer has a baton out, and now he's beating him with a baton, as we never told him. Yeah, go ahead, Walter. So you've seen those baton strikes. They seem to be pretty on focused. Again, poor tactics, lack of control. So what sadly Mr. Nichols ran into, smack dab is compliance culture. He wasn't complying, so they take that as an affront, as from what I can say, and they kept on upping the ante. Yeah, and we'll see that same scene there from a different angle now and with some sound. Check the focal! Hey! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! You might get sprayed again! Hey! Hey, Mike, give me a hand! Watch out, watch out! Okay, all right, all right. Give me a hand! Give me a hand! All right, okay. Basically, now he's complying. That's the thing, right? Mike, give me your hand, bro! You're saying he's complying then? Essentially, at this point, when he says, all right, his hands are going behind his back now, he is complying. So, I think that a lot of officers, let's assume everything that just happened before with the really poor tactics and unnecessary escalation and inflammatory language that none of that has happened, and you have somebody who is ostensibly has presented some resistance. He's saying, all right now, and they have control of his hands. Give me a hand! Watch out! Spray your eyes again! Hey, give me your hand, bro! All right. Give me your hands, bro! Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Give me your fucking hand! Give me your fucking hand! Hey, give me your fucking hand! Watch out! I'm going to find the fuck out of you! Here the fuck it is! Okay, you need to call for a second now. Say that again. So, I think this is really important with the Biden-Warren camera footage that showed. Often you're saying, why do officers use force? And they use force because they have a reasonable belief in a threat to themselves or a threat to others. Or they're trying to seek compliance. Depending what the threat is that's presented, depends about how much force should be used. Now, this officer whose Biden-Warren camera we just showed, obviously did not think it was that urgent because he had completely stepped back to the Huda vehicle. He was taking a break and now what he was thinking. And then he decides to re-engage. Does he re-engage because there's some sort of ongoing threat that he now has to control? Or is he re-engaging because he now he wants to go in and get some legs? So, again, you're showing a complete breakdown in what policing should be. Give it to him! Give it to him! Sorry about that. Ross, it counts, okay? Ross, it counts, okay? Give me your fucking hand. Give me your hand! Give me your fucking hand! Give me your hand! For most people, including myself, that looks like a beating of a, at some point, helpless and relatively defenseless guy to the point of unconsciousness. And as you mentioned, they keep yelling, do this with your hands. Let me see your hands. Even though it seems like they had him somewhat under control, these guys know that they're wearing body cameras. Why would they do this knowing that it's all on camera? I'm going to speculate here for a second. Okay. And the speculation is that when you have officers who engage in excessive force and violations of the Fourth Amendment on a regular basis, they are essentially wrong to dice every single time that it is not going to go too far to get too much attention. These types of officers, except for the really dumb ones, I'm not sure which category these guys fall into, those types of sadistic officers, they know where the boundaries are. This last clip I want to play from the incident is the aftermath. So it's when Tyree Nichols is, you know, they kind of push them up against the car. He's just slouching over there and they're all talking through what they think just happened or what maybe they want to say just happened. Okay, right on time. So we got tickets out to the ground. Fuck my leg, bro. I'm not even hurting all day, but when I seen that boy running, bro, come on, fuck, I ain't got no more. Come on, fuck over here. Come on, fuck over here. He has a month. I'll just note right there that there was one of the officers there saying, remember your camera's on, that's what they're talking about. Hey, sit up, bro. Sit up, man. And, uh, here's that drink. I hit that man with so many peaches in this game. I eat it, bro. Bro, you know what they were saying? No, man, I didn't get... Hey, hold on, hold on, let me see. I was taking his camera off. Man, I was hitting him with spray. So they're hitting him with haymakers. Hey, man, rockin', man. I jumped in and saw a rockin'. Oh, the first time, what the fuck? Then he was going for a gun, too, so I'm like, he grabbed Mark Gunn, and everybody was like, if I hadn't been in a minute, I ain't even... Look, we got him out the car, we was like, hey, bro, he's good. I'm gonna swam, wow, I'm gonna hit me. Then he reached for Mark Gunn, then when he slammed him to the car, he literally had his hand on Mark Gunn, like, that motherfucker's on there. So we tried to... I'm talking about... Yes, oh, that's true. So we tried to get him stopped, he didn't stop. We still tried to get him stopped, he decided to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Then he drove around, swore he was gonna hit my car, so then I'm like, God damn, man, what are we doing? He pulled up to the red light, stopped at the red light, put his turn signal on. So we jumped out of the car, shit went from there. I think the two clips are important for how they showed really two different phenomenon going on. The first was that immediate aftermath when probably the cameras should not have been on from their perspective. And you heard incredibly unprofessional language and attitudes being exhibited. These guys were just in the fight. I mean, these are all big guys too, right? And Mr. Nichols was not a big guy. And so it just goes again to show how incompetent their tactics were, that if they actually were trying to deal with a combative person who he was not, how poor their tactics were, but everything they were talking about, you know, haymakers and this and that show this, you know, just admissions of violence. The second clip though is that is was for the camera, right? And you heard basically one officer kind of walking through the narrative where everyone else could hear it. And so my guess would be if there was a subsequent administrative interview, you would hear pretty much everyone reflecting that. Now, I've not looked at, for example, the narrative in the police report that was filed that night, but my suspicion is that if you listen to what you just heard that one officer explain there, you're going to see a pretty close narrative that was written down. When people think there are these conscious efforts to collude to make a false statement, would you just saw what you just heard? It seems really benign and almost natural where they don't even recognize that that is what they're actually doing. That's an excerpt from our reason live stream that Zach Weismiller and I do every Thursday at 1 p.m. We were talking about Tyree Nichols and the Memphis Police and what can be done to fix that with Walter Katz of Arnold Ventures. If you found that interesting, please look in the description of this video and thanks for watching.