This week, tape emerged from Memphis, Tennessee of 5 black cops participating within the beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old black man. Nichols was pulled over for reckless driving in keeping with the officers; they ordered him to get on the bottom and to present them his fingers; he didn’t comply and as an alternative started to run. When the officers caught up with him, they pummeled him, full with strikes to the pinnacle whereas his fingers had been being held behind his again. Nichols died within the hospital.

The 5 officers concerned had been charged with second-degree homicide, kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. All had been fired from the police division.

The nationwide media protection was swift — and confused. For some within the media, the narrative was clear: the police are usually brutal, and thus have to be dramatically curbed. “The problem right here, as loads of individuals have identified, will not be black versus white, it’s blue versus the remainder of us,” stated MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. “You possibly can’t reform these things with physique cameras or diversifying the police, as we simply noticed in Memphis.” As an alternative, Hasan instructed, abolition of the police is likely to be a attainable resolution.

This resolution, after all, is not any resolution in any respect: Memphis has one of many highest crime charges in america. Based on Neighborhood Scout, the possibilities of turning into a sufferer of violent or property crime within the metropolis are one in 12. And we all know with statistical near-certainty that high-profile instances of police misconduct usually end in police stand-downs — which in flip end in extra crime. As professors Tanaya Devi and Roland Freyer present in 2020, “all investigations that had been preceded by ‘viral’ incidents of lethal drive have led to a big and statistically important enhance in homicides and complete crime.”

A second media narrative shortly emerged from the Nichols killing: even though all concerned had been black, that the Memphis Police Division is majority black, that the chief of police is black — the killing was a results of “white supremacy.” The Washington Put up headlined, “Black Memphis police spark dialogue on systemic racism within the US.” Van Jones opined at CNN.com, “The police who killed Tyre Nichols had been Black. However they may nonetheless have been pushed by racism.” Kimberle Crenshaw, founding father of intersectionality, defined, “One can’t think about this occurring in a well-heeled white group. That could be a racial downside that the legislation has constantly stated is a non-problem.”

This narrative, like the primary, is designed to keep away from options. If all policing is the results of buildings of white supremacy, the one reply is to abolish policing. If every particular person occasion of police brutality, irrespective of the race of the officers, is an instance of racism, then the one method to alleviate police brutality is by utterly restructuring American society — which is simply what these like Crenshaw suggest. The end result received’t be a safer America, however a a lot much less protected and extra fractious one.

In actuality, cases of police brutality cross races. Whether or not it’s Daniel Shaver being shot to dying in a resort whereas trying to adjust to police calls for in 2016 or whether or not it’s two Arkansas Sheriff’s Deputies beating Randal Worcester in August 2022, white victims of police brutality aren’t arduous to search out. Some police brutality can undoubtedly be curbed by higher recruitment and coaching. But when we want to truly decrease the variety of encounters between a given inhabitants and the police, thus decreasing the variety of attainable violent interactions, the obvious technique can be to cut back legal exercise — which requires extra policing and extra law-abiding habits.

None of this needs to be controversial. However options aren’t what advocates of police abolition or essential race concept are in search of. They’re in search of revolution. And all revolutions have casualties.