Tyre Nichols video worse than Rodney King footage, Memphis ...

The chief of the Memphis police warned on Friday morning that the video of officers beating Tyre Nichols is “perhaps worse” than the infamous footage of Rodney King being attacked by police in Los Angeles more than 30 years ago.

The police department intends to release the video to the public on Friday evening.

In her first interview since five officers were charged with murder on Thursday, police chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis told CNN that she was “outraged” after seeing the “alarming” video of the traffic stop of Nichols, 29, who died three days after a 7 January apprehension spiraled into a fatal physical attack.

Davis said there appeared to be no legitimate reason for the traffic stop, and that she did not see any of the five officers intervene to stop excessive force by their fellow officers, saying they appeared to be in a state of “groupthink” as they confronted Nichols and became violent.

“I was in law enforcement during the Rodney King incident and it’s very much aligned with that type of behavior … sort of groupthink. I would say it’s about the same if not worse,” Davis said in a live interview on Friday morning.

King barely survived on 3 March 1991, when he was beaten by officers from Los Angeles police department during an arrest after a car chase, with the violence caught on tape.

Davis called for federal action to reform policing in the US, saying that the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act “should be part of this”, the legislation that is stalled in Congress and named after the Black man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck in Minneapolis in 2020, sparking a national and international civil rights uprising.

She said she has watched the tape and heard Nichols calling out for his mother as he was being beaten.

“That’s what really pulls on the heartstrings … why was a sense of care for this individual just absent?”

Also on Friday morning, RowVaughn Wells, Tyre Nichols’s mother, told CNN she “feels really sorry” for the five Black police officers, whom she said beat her son “to a pulp”.

“They have brought shame to their own families. They brought shame to the Black community. I just feel sorry for them. I really do,” she said.

“Because they didn’t have to do this. Once you see this video, and I know I didn’t see it, but from what I hear, it’s horrific. And the humanity of it. Where was the humanity? They beat my son like a piñata.”

The officers had been fired and were charged on Thursday with various crimes including second-degree murder.

Davis said the fact the officers are Black “takes off the table that issues and problems in law enforcement [are] about race”.

“It is not,” she said. “It’s about human dignity, integrity, accountability, and the duty to protect our community. As this video will show, it doesn’t matter who’s wearing the uniform, we all have the same responsibility. It takes race off the table, but it does indicate to me that bias might be a factor also in the manner in which we engage the community.”

Davis added that she has spoken to Nichols’s family and added that she felt pain, loss and a sense of responsibility, “especially in the first steps of justice” over the killing.

Joe Biden has appealed for calm as the authorities prepare to release the body-camera video and other footage of the violent confrontation between the motorist and the officers.

Nichols died in hospital on 10 January from injuries sustained during the encounter.

“I join Tyre’s family in calling for peaceful protest,” the US president said on Thursday. “Outrage is understandable, but violence is never acceptable.”

The president said the Nichols family and the city of Memphis deserved “a swift, full and transparent investigation”, adding: “Public trust is the foundation of public safety, and there are still too many places in America today where the bonds of trust are frayed or broken.”

The video to be released on Friday evening is expected to include footage captured by body cameras, as well as cameras mounted on the dashboards of police vehicles and security cameras on utility poles in the vicinity.

The few individuals who viewed the video before its release and spoke to the media on Thursday said they found it disturbing.

David Rausch, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, said of the confrontation: “Let me be clear: what happened here does not, at all, reflect proper policing. This was wrong. This was a crime.”

Police officials initially said there was a confrontation when officers came toward Nichols’s car and then another after they arrested him.

Memphis police officials said the officers had flouted “multiple department policies, including excessive use of force, duty to intervene, and duty to render aid”.

The recording showed Nichols “called repeatedly for his mother”, his family’s legal team said, throughout the beating, which took place about 100 yards from her home, family representatives told reporters.

“Tyre was brutalized by Memphis police, much like how Rodney King was beaten more than 30 years ago – but unlike Rodney, Tyre lost his life from this violent attack,” Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer on the family legal team, said after seeing the video.

Appearing with Nichols’s mother and stepfather on CNN on Friday, Crump said the speed with which the Memphis police chief and district attorney acted to fire the officers and file murder charges should be “a blueprint for America”.

Citing other killings of young Black men and youth, including Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery and Philando Castile, he said: “Think how these cases took so long for them to charge. Here in Memphis, we have the blueprint, that it can be done swiftly and efficiently.

“Now when it’s not Black officers we want to see this same type of justice.”