The first thing the video captures Tyre Nichols saying to police are four simple words: “I didn’t do anything.”
It didn’t matter. In minutes, police yanked him from his car, threw him to the ground, attempted to Tase him, and threatened to knock him out. They gave him nonsensical commands, the journalist Wesley Lowery noted, yelling at him to lie on the ground when he was already there. “I’m just trying to get home,” Nichols said.
When Nichols escaped and ran away, more officers chased him down, tackled him and then proceeded to kick him in the head, punch him in the face, and hit him with a baton. As he struggled to sit up, officers and medical personnel stood around, declining to give him any kind of medical attention.
Even after being warned for days that the video of Nichols was gruesome, the images released on Friday evening were horrifying. “It’s as bad as it was described,” Charles Ramsey, the former Philadelphia commissioner, said on CNN shortly after the videos aired live on the network. Continue
