Commands in 13 minutes: officers gave strange orders to someone

The Memphis Police Officer-Involved Shooting Charged with a Man for Boasting and Stealing a Nashville Officer, Revisited

As protesters gathered across US cities over the weekend after a Memphis police officer beat a man to death, officials have said the investigation into the incident will continue, amid questions over whether there could be additional charges.

Three more people were fired from the Memphis Police Department for their actions following the death of a man in an altercation with police.

As the investigation continues, Nichols’ family attorney Ben Crump said he thinks there will be additional fallout, but “whether that’s going to lead to criminal charges, we have to see.”

Steve Mulroy doesn’t know if there will be additional charges brought, but he does know nothing precludes them from bringing other charges later.

Officials knew that releasing the video without charges was incendiary. He said that the solution was to speed up the investigation and the consideration of the charges so that the video could be released first.

Videos of the arrest show what that second “confrontation” actually entailed: Officers with the police department’s specialized SCORPION team punched, kicked, pepper-sprayed and used a baton on Tyre Nichols while he was restrained.

The officers were milling around, with no one showing any aid in the critical minutes after the beating. It took an ambulance more than 20 minutes to arrive on the scene, and Nichols, who suffered “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to preliminary results of an autopsy commissioned by attorneys for his family, died three days later.

All the officer failed their oath, according to CBS News’ Gerald Crump. They failed to protect and serve. Was anyone attempting to protect and serve Tyre Nichols in that video?

In cities all across the country, protesters carried signs with their names on them and called for an end to abuses of authority.

The Memphis Police Department is Going Through a Big Trouble: Mr. Nichols’s Reprehensible Conduct and the Rollin’ Out of Memphis

The family remembered him as a good son and father who enjoyed skateboarding, photography and sunsets. They remember his smile and hugs and mourn the moments they will never have again.

The Memphis Police Department must take proactive steps in the healing process of those who have been impacted by the heinous actions of a few. The Memphis Police Department remains committed to serving our community and taking every measure possible to rebuild the trust that has been negatively affected by the death of Mr. Tyre Nichols.”

“That reprehensible conduct we saw in that video, we think this was part of the culture of the SCORPION unit,” Crump said. “So we demanded that they disbanded immediately before we see anything like this happen again.”

Frank Colvett, a Memphis City Council member, said that there is a big reckoning coming for the police department and the leadership. “She’s going to have to answer not just to the council but to the citizens – and really the world.”

“We just have to change the culture … People need to be held accountable. We have to let the legacy of Mr. Nichols be that there is going to be police reform not only here in Memphis but in this country.”

Easter-Thomas thinks that the peaceful and direct sense of protest in Memphis is because people have faith that the system will get it right this time.

The Memphis Black Lives: The Charge of a Murdering Black Man Involved in a Rapid Rapidly-Evolving Traffic Stop

Black officers were charged with second degree murder and kidnapping on Thursday, amid mounting public pressure to release footage of the incident.

Mills Jr.’s attorney, Blake Ballin, told CNN the videos “produced as many questions as they have answers,” specifically regarding his client’s involvement during the fatal encounter, adding that Mills arrived later than other officers and that his vision was impaired by the pepper spray used during the traffic stop.

Two Memphis Fire Department employees who were part of Nichols’ initial care were relieved of duty, pending the outcome of an internal investigation. And two deputies with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office have been put on leave pending an investigation.

After the death of a Black man at the hands of officers, attorney Ben Crump called on congress to reform the police.

The chair of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote in a news release that the caucus wants to meet with the president this week “to push for negotiations on police reform.”

Crump said that the quick firing and arrests of the police officers and release of video should be a “blueprint” for how police brutality allegations are handled going forward. Memphis Chief Cerelyn Davis was applauded for arresting and charging officers within the allotted time.

She had no reaction to Congress, who she called to action, because they failed to craft and pass bills to stop police brutality. The blood of Black America is on your hands. Stand up and do something.

Towards Effective Constraint-based Law Enforcement Reform in Memphis, Tennessee, After the First Officers Killed by Tyre Nichols

On the state level, some democrats in Tennessee said Saturday that they will file police reform legislation ahead of Tuesday’s filing deadline. The bills would seek to address mental health care for law enforcement officers, hiring, training, discipline practices and other topics, said Rep. G.A. Hardaway, who represents a portion of Memphis and Shelby County.

While Democrats hold only 24 seats in the house, the Republican majority has 99. Rep. Joe Towns Jr. said this legislation should be passed by both houses.

You would want to see what happened to the young man but you wouldn’t want to do anything about it. If a dog was beaten like that in this county, what would happen? Towns said.

Law enforcement has faced a wave of criticism since video footage of police officers brutalizing a man in Memphis was released.

“It was far more rampant in the ’80s, when I started doing police work, than it was in the ’90s or 2000s,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. “Even before body cams, cops were getting more professional and wouldn’t make it personal, like it seemed to be in this case. This is out of the norm.

To mitigate the potential for escalation and confusion during police encounters, today’s police training typically calls for a single officer at the scene to issue clear and specific commands. It requires police officers to respond in a professional manner to any act of defiance.

The footage doesn’t show a sign that the officers tried to stop the use of force. If anything, it shows the contrary.

The official efforts to respond to the vicious beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police are already underway, just two days after footage of the incident was released to the public.

“We hope that other cities take similar action with their saturation police units in the near future to begin to create greater trust in their communities,” the attorneys said. This is the next step in the journey for justice and accountability, as shown by the fact that it is not limited to the specialty units. It extends so much further.”

The Tennessee Black Police Experience: Proposal for a Reformed Justice in Policing Act after George Floyd’s Death in February 2020

House Democratic Caucus Chair John Ray Clemmons, Rep. G.A. Hardaway and Rep. Joe Towns, Jr., announced their plan during a press conference on Saturday.

Among the issues the bills aim to address are implicit bias training, mental health evaluations for police officers, limits on officers transferring departments after facing discipline or being fired and a reevaluation of low-level traffic stops, NBC News reported.

Democrats in the Tennessee General Assembly said they were confident they could get bipartisan support because of the magnitude of the incident, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

“Without federal police reform, I think we’re going to continue to see these hashtags proliferate so much that we can’t keep up with them,” Crump told ABC’s This Week.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would ban choke holds, prohibit no-knock warrants in drug cases, and end qualified immunity for law enforcement officers.

Editor’s Note: Sonia Pruitt is a retired Montgomery County, Maryland, police captain. The Black Police Experience was founded by her in order to promote the education of the Black community. She is also a professor of criminal justice at Howard University in Washington, DC, and at Montgomery College in Maryland. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. CNN has more opinion.

Based on my 28 years of experience as a former police officer and captain it was clear to me that the officers lacked supervision, shown little professional maturity and used a complete disregard for human life in their actions.

To see Black officers embracing brutality and aligning themselves with a police subculture that calls for loyalty to even the most heinous of police behaviors — such as beating subjects who run from the police — is beyond devastating, especially since modern day policing in this country can be traced back to slave patrols, and abuses within the criminal justice system continue to result in the over-policing and death of Black people.

The association’s current stance is unusual. It didn’t defend the officers or say they were just doing a difficult job that required them to make split-second decisions, responses police unions usually provide to protect officers accused of wrongdoing.

Efforts to push for police reform in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020 have been largely replaced with calls to address the fear of rising crime, partially through hiring more police officers. Last year, President Joe Biden proposed funding for 100,000 new police officers as part of his Safer America Plan and the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill includes $324 million in funding to hire more police officers.

I know that crime prevention can be accomplished by trusting relationships between the police and the community it serves rather than by adding more police officers. There can be no trust when there is over-policing of disadvantaged communities with suppression units such as the SCORPION unit, which were formed to protect communities – not terrorize them. (On Saturday, the Memphis Police Department announced it will permanently disband its SCORPION unit.)

Such deaths are preventable, but training or a patchwork of local policies will not be sufficient. Transformation will look like dedication to change through federal legislation that addresses the use of no-knock warrants, duty to intervene, use of excessive force, and other dangerous policing issues; the placement of strong political change-makers in office through voting and a commitment by the criminal “justice” system to hold corrupt police officers accountable for their actions through administrative and criminal charges.

This article has been modified to accurately reflect the writer’s experience; she has 28 years of combined experience in law enforcement, not just as a captain.

Memphis Police Department: Shooting Nichols, a 28-year-old, and Describing the Case of a Shooting, Killing, and Injuring

The five former Memphis police officers involved in the arrest have been charged with second-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping, among other charges, according to the Shelby County district attorney.

Ron Johnson is a former captain of the Missouri State Highway patrol, and he said there have been mistakes made in previous cases of police brutality. “I think a lot of things have been done right” in this case.

“A year ago, two years ago, we wouldn’t have seen some of the things we’re seeing here,” Johnson said of Memphis law enforcement’s handling of Nichols’ death.

In Taylor’s case, an initial statement from police about the botched raid in which the 26-year-old was killed said there was no forced entry. But officers had used a battering ram to enter her home before shooting her. Floyd appeared to be suffering a medical problem, according to Minneapolis police. Video showed Officer Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck.

The actions of the Memphis police department in the wake of fatal encounters are being viewed as an example of how to maintain some semblance of trust in the community.

The proliferation of police body cameras, cell phone and even police video that captures violence by officers is a new way of accountability, said CNN legal analystJoey Jackson. “The more we have these instances that are caught on camera, the more public is outraged, the more there is demand for accountability.”

Memphis Police Commissioners Have a Blueprint: When Officers and Public Officials Assisted in the Investigative Investigation of a Jacksonville Autopsy

Benjamin Crump, an attorney for the family of Nichols, said that preliminary results of the autopsy show that he suffered bleeding which was caused by a severe beating.

On January 15, noting the serious nature of the officers’ conduct during the stop,Chief Davis vowed “immediate and appropriate action.” The department was “serving notice to the officers involved,” she said.

Officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith were terminated for failing in their “excessive use of force, duty to intervene, and duty to render aid,” the department said in a statement.

Areva Martin, an attorney and legal affairs commentator, said that the police department learned something from other high-profile cases when district attorneys were not transparent.

They did the right thing by charging the officers with crimes, after sending the case to a grand jury.

Crump, in a news conference Friday, called Memphis’ rapid criminal charges – compared to other cities that have waited months or years in brutality cases – a “blueprint” for police departments, prosecutors and political leaders in future cases.

The death of Walter Scott, who was fatally shot in the back after he was pulled over for a broken brake light in South Carolina, reminded CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers.

In court two years later, the man who shot Scott admitted to using excessive force and said his use of force was unreasonable. He pleaded guilty to depriving Scott of his civil rights under the color of law.

Memphis police responded to a fatal encounter with EMTs and paramedics during a protest that killed 11-year-old Jordan Nichols

“The last thing you want to do is take a high tension event and then add that thing that’s going to increase tension … on a Friday night knowing that people don’t have to be at work in the morning and they have the whole weekend ahead of them,” said CNN law enforcement analyst John Miller.

But, Miller said, the delay allowed authorities to show the public “the wheels of justice are turning and turning relatively quickly.” The additional time also allowed officials to “unite the faith community in Memphis, the voice of the family and the family’s lawyers, and the key community contacts” in calling for calm.

In Los Angeles, Atlanta, Minneapolis and New York, police departments said they were monitoring events or had plans in place in case of protests.

“We’ve watched so many of these cases over the last several years,” Martin said. Law enforcement authorities usually come forward when they are transparent and give information about the situation, which leads to a peaceful response.

Mostly peaceful protesters in Memphis took to Interstate 55 Friday night after the videos went online, blocking both lanes of the highway’s bridge connecting the western Tennessee city to Arkansas. No one was arrested.

The video shows that after the EMTs arrived and before the ambulance arrived, first responders repeatedly walked away from him, with Nichols intermittently falling onto his side.

The footage stunned hardened law enforcement experts. Officials across the country expressed outrage – including President Joe Biden, who said it was “yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day.”

The footage of the fatal encounter has left unanswered questions about what the Memphis Police Department did to prevent the tragedy.

She told CNN that all of this was preventable. They are young officers who are doing what they were trained to do. This was not the kind of thing they are used to doing.

Memphis City Council Chairman Martavius Jones grew emotional after watching the video, telling CNN that despite the positive shift in the handling of brutality cases, much more needs to be done.

The online fundraiser reads in part: “My baby was just trying to make it home to be safe in my arms. There was no violence or threats made against the police during the entire encounter.

“We have to fight the bad players in our community, and now we’ve got to fight our own police officers. That is deplorable,” Robinson said. We are going to have to do something.

But disbanding the unit without giving officers new training would be “putting lipstick on a pig,” city council chair Martavius Jones told CNN Saturday.

A National Crime Prevention Action Plan for a Memorial Skeepark in Memory of Tire Nichols, an Elliptical State Police Officer

US Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, called for Congress to revive national police reform legislation and said the previously stalled legislation was a good starting point.

“It’s the right starting point, and Sen. (Cory) Booker, chairman of the crime subcommittee, has been working on this for years. I think he and Sen. (Tim) Scott should sit down again quickly to see if we can revive that effort, but that in and of itself is not enough. He called for a conversation about policing in a constitutional and humane way.

He was a father and the youngest of four children. He was a “good boy” who spent his Sundays doing laundry and getting ready for the week, his mother said.

As of Sunday, a mother of Nichols has raised over one million dollars on a GoFundMe. The donations will go towards the cost of Wells’ and her husband’s mental health services as well as their time off from their jobs, according to the page. They want to build a memorial skate park in honor of Tire and his love for skating and sunsets.

The officers, paramedics and people who filed the paperwork were all looking at as well as anyone involved in the incident.

The district attorney said the charges against the five officers were primarily responsible for the death of Nichols.

The Memphis City Commission says he was beaten to death by a white cop and that he didn’t speak to the EMS department

I do not believe that we have seen the end of it. And I think we’re going to find there’s more to this as we go into the trial,” Memphis City Council member Jeff Warren said. “I don’t think we’re on top of this yet.”

“We need to make sure that we go through our police department and see where we were weak, what happened with our procedures, what happened with our oversight,” Warren said.

The latest police killing in which a black man was shot to death by a white cop sparked angry nationwide protests and an intense public conversation about how police officers treat Black people.

Police said that one of the two officers is white. Police spokesperson Kimberly Elder declined to say whether Hemphill is being paid.

That body-cam video does not show Hemphill at the second site, where the county’s district attorney has said Nichols was beaten and suffered his serious injuries.

The fire personnel terminated over their response to the encounter are emergency medical technicians Robert Long and JaMichael Sandridge and fire Lt. Michelle Whitaker, the fire department said Monday.

The fire department’s investigation concluded that “the two EMTs responded based on the initial nature of the call and information they were told on the scene and failed to conduct an adequate patient assessment of Mr. Nichols,” the fire chief said in a news release.

Attorneys for two of the fired police officers have commented to CNN. The attorney for Martin said that there were no plans to have someone die that night.

“Some of the questions that remain will require a focus on Desmond Mills’ individual actions,” and “on whether Desmond’s actions crossed the lines that were crossed by other officers during this incident,” Ballin said.

They failed him by excessive force, they failed him by not intervening, and they failed him by not rendering aid, according to the attorney.

The Nichols’ Family of Memphis, Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. died last year: An investigation into the Minneapolis police department’s response to Eric Garner’s death

The attorney said Nichols’ family still is trying to absorb the breadth of this multi-agency investigation, while also dealing with the loss of their loved one.

On Tuesday, Sharpton and Nichols’ family gathered at the Mason Temple Church of God In Christ headquarters in Memphis – where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famed “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech the night before he was killed.

“To the extent that you’re putting out statements that are indicating one thing and then the video footage released later on shows completely the opposite, that definitely is problematic for trying to build police-community relations,” Andrea Headley, a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, told NPR.

On May 25, 2020, the Minneapolis Police Department said officers responded to a forgery in progress and arrested a suspect. The suspect was arrested and officers noted that he appeared to be suffering medical distress. “They called for an ambulance.”

The man was George Floyd, and video footage of the incident captured by a bystander showed former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd repeatedly pleaded, “I can’t breathe!” Floyd passed away that day.

When the New York Police Department disclosed Eric Garner’s death in 2014, a police spokesperson said a man was “being placed in custody, went into cardiac arrest and died,” according to a New York Daily News article at the time.

In 2018, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office first said that 23-year-old Dujuan Armstrong died of a drug overdose inside the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif. Body camera footage showed that officers put him in a protective jacket before he became unconscious, as the Guardian reported. An autopsy found that the man died from asphyxiation due to the restrains.

For example, John Elder was the Minneapolis Police Department’s public information director in 2020 and wrote the initial statement about Floyd’s death. He told the Los Angeles Times that he got his information from sergeants and computer-aided dispatch, and that he hadn’t seen any video footage of the encounter before writing the press release.

This was not planning on being dishonest or disingenuous. Had we known that this [situation] was what we saw on the video, that statement would have been completely different,” Elder told the newspaper.

“But I think really where the conflict comes in is when there are discrepancies in the report or in the statements that are put out that don’t match the evidence when it comes out. And when the language that is used is particularly one that tries to abdicate responsibility,” she said.

She said she worked with one agency that would bring in community leaders for an explanation of an incident before discussing it with the media. She said departments can acknowledge that if they haven’t reviewed any video evidence yet.

There was an altercation between the driver and officers, police said. The suspect fled the scene on foot, and another “confrontation occurred” as officers tried to take him into custody, the statement said.

The situation is similar to what we saw in the case of Derek Chauvin, according to Mr. Hansford, a law professor at Howard University. “Once again we have a huge gap between what was in the police report and the facts that later came out. It’s a problem that we need to reexamine because we think police reports on their face as they are released is a problem.

Troopers said Greene’s death was “caused by crash-related blunt force chest trauma that resulted in a fractured sternum and ruptured aorta” and said they used force “for their own personal safety and for the safety of the public,” according to court documents.

Videos from police body camera and dash camera showed a different story than what was reported in the media. The footage, obtained by the Associated Press in 2021, shows officers after the crash kicking, tasing and restraining Greene.

A car crash killed Hollingsworth in September 2020. Five law enforcement officers involved in the arrest were indicted for state charges including negligent homicide and malfeasance in office.

The police arrested George Floyd in May of 2020 and said that he appeared to be suffering from medical distress as he was put into handcuffs. The officers asked for an ambulance. The adult male was pronounced dead after being transported to the Medical Center.

During Chauvin’s trial, one bystander took video. “I heard George Floyd saying — I can’t breathe. Please. Get off of me. She said that she couldn’t breathe. The way he cried for his mom seemed like he knew it was over for him.

Several other bystanders also captured video of the encounter, including another high school student, an off-duty firefighter and an employee at the Speedway across the street.

The 2012 Chicago shooting of Laquan McDonald: a former lieutenant accused of killing a Chicago police officer in a shooting spree

Chauvin could face up to 40 years in prison for second-degree murder, up to 25 years for third-degree murder and up to 10 years for manslaughter. Minnesota sentencing guidelines recommend a prison sentence of between 12 and 1/2 years for each murder charge and four years for manslaughter, for Chauvin, who has no criminal record.

Taylor was struck by bullets six times after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot at officers serving a warrant. Walker later claimed he believed that the officers were inside.

The officers, the investigator wrote, “took a total of thirty-two shots, when the provided circumstances made it unsafe to take a single shot. This is how the wrong person was shot and killed.”

One of the officers at the scene, Brett Hankison, is expected to stand trial in 2022 on charges of wanton endangerment for allegedly firing into an adjacent occupied apartment, according to the state attorney general. In June 2020, Hankison was fired.

But cellphone video taken by a bystander captured Slager chasing Scott. According to prosecutors, the video shows that Slager fired at Scott from 17 feet away and that he dropped his weapon on Scott’s body.

In the wake of Laquan McDonald’s 2014 fatal shooting by a police officer, 11 Chicago police officers were accused of making false statements to exaggerate the threat he posed. An investigative report shows that a former lieutenant destroyed handwritten notes from witness interviews in the shooting investigation.

Police initially said McDonald, a Black teenager, approached officers while armed with a knife and refused verbal commands to drop it, prompting Jason Van Dyke to open fire six seconds after getting out of his squad car. He shot McDonald 16 times.

Thirteen months later, a judge ordered the release of the grainy dashboard police camera footage of the shooting, and the fallout was immediate. The footage showed McDonald walking away from officers, rather than charging at them.

Tamika, Philonise, and John Nichols, the Man Who Formed a Black Man After He Was Gunned by an Ex-cop

Three weeks after the death of a man in Memphis, a funeral for him is set to be held on Wednesday with protests and calls for accountability nationwide.

In Memphis, mourners at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church are not expected to pay attention to the gruesome footage of the beating that left him in a hospital bed for four days before he died, instead they are expected to celebrate his life.

Representing other Black people killed by police, Tamika Palmer – whose daughter Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police during a botched raid in March 2020 – is expected to attend the service.

Also expected is Philonise Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd, whose name reverberated across the nation following his May 2020 death after an ex-cop Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck and back for more than 9 minutes.

Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to attend the funeral at the invitation of Nichols’ family. Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, and Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, are also expected.

The Rev. Al Sharpton would deliver a eulogy that would serve as a clarion call for justice in the wake of the death of John Nichols.

They will never recover from the loss. Every holiday, there’ll be a missing chair at their table. The family members of the departed will have to remember every day, Sharpton said. “But we will never leave them.”

My brother was the quietest person you could ever meet. He’s never lifted a finger to nobody. Never raised his voice to nobody,” Dupree said. “If my brother was here today and he had to say something, he would tell us to do this peacefully.”

A Memphis mom’s earliest days during the 19-year COVID-19-Pandemic — a memory of his father, Row Vaughn Wells

The brutal attack sparked largely peaceful protests from New York to Los Angeles as well as renewed calls for police reforms and scrutiny of specialized police units that target guns in high crime areas.

Nichols was the baby of his family, the youngest of four children, according to his mother, RowVaughn Wells, who has said he usually spent Sundays doing laundry and preparing for the week.

He moved to Memphis from California before the Covid 19-Pandemic and remained there after the lock downs, his mother has said.

A group of people at a Starbucks befriended him because they set aside their phone and talked mostly about sports, particularly the 49ers, according to a friend.

His visits to Starbucks would be followed by a nap and then he would head to FedEx. His mother said that he would return to his house for dinner during his break. Her sesame chicken is his favorite dish.

Writing could not capture the self-expression that taking pictures would serve as a form of, which is why he had written on his website that it helped him look at the world in a more creative way.

A case of violation of the Memphis police department’s response to resistance form and a fatal shooting of a man in a loaded handgun

Services at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis are scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. The time is Central Time. Organizers said the funeral would be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube.

The two cases about the use of force weren’t interested in examining if the force was justified, but whether the officers filed the required reports.

Haley joined the department in August 2020. He violated department policy when, in February 2021, he did not fill out a response to resistance form after he grabbed a woman’s arm to handcuff her. The forms must be filled out if an officer uses any part of their body to make themselves comply with the law.

The violation was dismissed because the hearing officer wrote that Officer Haley took full responsibility for the accident and was very humble during the hearing.

Mills joined the Memphis police department in March of last year after graduating from West Virginia State University with a degree in criminal justice.

Mills violated procedure in March when he dropped his assistant into the street as he entered his squad car. The device was then run over by a separate car.

It was Mills’ first infraction, and he immediately reported the incident to his union representative, so he received a written reprimand, according to department records.

When Mills used physical force to take the woman out of her house, he failed to file a response to resist form. In the hearing in August 2021, Mills said he did not realize his actions necessitated use of the form and was again issued a written reprimand.

In March 2019, a loaded handgun was found in the rear passenger side of a squad car used by Martin and his partner. Martin said he failed to do a proper pre- and post-shift inspection, and only inspected the car from the outside. During his shift that day, he and his partner conducted two traffic stops, in which the suspects were placed in the backseat where the gun was found. After the suspects left the vehicle the officers did not inspect it. The files show that Martin was suspended for three days without pay.

A fellow officer and lieutenant at the disciplinary hearing defended Martin, saying the victim didn’t want a report and Martin is not one to “shirk responsibility.”

“Memphis police officers are instructed by their department and state law to make a complete report on domestic abuse calls,” the hearing officer wrote. “Officer[s] cannot base their decision to arrest based [on] the victim’s consent or on the perception of the victim’s willingness to cooperate with prosecution.”

“Officer Martin is respectful when dealing with others regardless of their sex, race, age, or rank,” the evaluation stated. “He approaches his calls with a positive attitude and is well received when dealing with the public. He is continually a top leader in arrests and calls, and not one person he has arrested has complained.”

Smith began at the department in March 2018. In January 2021, he was passing a vehicle and crashed into its rear, causing it to spin and crash into a third vehicle, which had two people inside. All parties were sent to the hospital in non-critical condition.

Smith said the driver of the second vehicle went right and then left into his lane suddenly. The summary from the hearing said that he admitted to speeding, but said his memory was hazy due to his head injury.

According to the Tennessee Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission, Haley sent photographs of himself posing with Nichols to other police officers and a female friend as he lay propped against a police car.

Lawyers for the other four officers either refused to respond or didn’t respond to requests from The AP.

The newly released documents are part of a request by the Memphis Police Department that the five officers who have been charged with murder be decertified and prohibited from working in law enforcement again. Each of the requests to decertify the officers was signed by the Memphis Police Chief.

A Caught-Up Felon: a Black Hole Pedestrian Sprayed with a Chemical Irradiant Spray

Haley, who was driving an unmarked car and wore a black sweatshirt hoodie over his head, forced Nichols from his car using loud profanity, then sprayed him directly in the eyes with a chemical irritant spray, according to the statement.

“You and other officers were captured on body worn camera making multiple unprofessional comments, laughing, bragging about your involvement,” the decertification charges against Mills said.

They added, “You admitted you did not provide immediate medical aid and walked away and decontaminated yourself from chemical irritant spray,” and further accused Mills of later failing to give Nichols’ mother an accurate account of what happened.

A hearing officer wrote about the case of Justin Smith, who said that he struck a non-violent man with a closed fist because his partner couldn’t cuff him. You sprayed the person with your irritant spray and also held the person’s arm as other officers kicked, punched and pepper sprayed him.