NY Times: “The Justice Department said on Thursday that it had begun a sweeping civil rights investigation into policing in Memphis, digging into allegations of pervasive problems with excessive force and unlawful stops of Black residents that were amplified by the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in January.
In announcing the investigation, officials specifically cited Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died after a traffic stop escalated into a brutal confrontation in which Memphis police officers kicked, pepper-sprayed and pummeled him, even as he was restrained, and then failed to render aid.
The beating, which was captured by body camera and surveillance footage, brought intense scrutiny onto how the Memphis Police Department operates. Residents and activists argued that Mr. Nichols’s case was anything but an isolated episode and was instead reflective of an aggressive approach that officers routinely took with Black people — particularly officers from specialized units patrolling high-crime areas, like those who stopped Mr. Nichols.
A preliminary review by the Justice Department lent credence to those claims, officials said.
“We received multiple reports of officers escalating encounters with community members resulting in excessive force,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, said in a news conference on Thursday in Memphis. “There are also indications officers may use force punitively when faced with behavior they perceive as insolent.”
The investigation is the ninth so-called pattern or practice inquiry that has been pursued by the Biden administration, following in the mold of other sprawling inquiries that were started across the country after high-profile cases of deadly police violence, including in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd and in Louisville, Ky., after the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor.”