At the VIP barbershop, less than a mile from where Tire Nichols was attacked by five Memphis police officers, shop owner PJ recalls the moment he realized Nichols was from his community.
She recognized him as the quiet young man who was skating in the parking lot of her local.
“He would ride his skateboard with his headphones on, just gliding around and going about his business,” he said. “He never bothered anyone.”
As PJ talked about Nichols, 29, his violent death and the video of his beating that was released, the barbershop customers nodded in agreement.
“It’s a shame, it’s embarrassing,” said a man named London, adding that it’s painful to add another name to the list. long list of unarmed black men killed by police.
Perhaps something more difficult to discuss is the race of the police officers themselves. The five men, who are now facing murder charges, are also African-American.
“I heard a couple of them were just standing there looking, instead of saying, ‘Hey man, don’t do that, stop it!’ You’re just as guilty if you stand there and let that happen,” PJ said.
That makes Nichols’ death feel different, he added.
The fact also seems different from others cases of police violence or deaths involving African-American victims and white officers: Rodney King in Los Angeles, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But race and police experts told the BBC that the involvement of black officers in Nichols’ death it is not surprising.
“I wasn’t surprised because Memphis is a majority black city,” says Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, a professor at Brooklyn Law School and co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice.
Hoag-Fordjour, who practiced law in Memphis for a decade, notes that “elected officials, those who work for the city, the county, there are a lot of black leaders.”
In fact, under the direction of Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, the city’s first black woman to serve in that role, the majority of the force is black, according to the city’s website.
But there is no clear answer as to why these officers attacked Nichols and how, exactly, the skin color of the six men could have led to their deaths.
Davis told the BBC that It’s still hard for him to explain what happened. two weeks after first seeing the video of the beating of Nichols.
“The mindset of what I saw is very difficult to explain,” he notes, adding that he “cannot vouch” for whether the match would have ended differently if Nichols had been white.
“It doesn’t matter what color these officers were, it doesn’t matter what color the driver was. If you look at the video, race has nothing to do with it,” she states.
Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, told the BBC it was the race of the victim that mattered, in this case her son, and not the race of the perpetrators.
“It’s not about the color of the police officer. We don’t care if it’s black, white, pink, purple. What they did was wrong,” she said.
“And what they are doing to black communities is wrong. We don’t care about the policeman’s race. We are concerned about the behavior of the police officers.”
Professor Hoag agrees. The race of the police is not the main issue, He says. Instead, it is a surveillance problem.
“Police action in this country focuses on control, subordination and violence, regardless of the agent’s race,” he says.
“Society sees black people as inherently dangerous and criminal… even if there are black people in law enforcement, that doesn’t mean the idea goes away.”
According to data collection from the Mapping Police Violence project, black people in the US are approximately three times more likely to be killed by police than white people.
The picture is less clear when it comes to the race of officers who perpetrate police brutality.
“We know that there is more bias against blacks among white police officers than among black police officers, but we also know that blacks and black officers are also biased against blacks. We’re talking about a difference in degree,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of race and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
The Stanford prison experiment tells us that “bad things happen in places built to do bad things,” he notes.
“Anyone who wears a uniform is more likely, on average, to be involved in a abusive behavior directed toward a black person.”
Rodney King, in his memoir, spoke of being abused by black and white police officers alike.
Frank Sykes, a former Tennessee deputy sheriff, who is also black, told the BBC that this abusive behavior stems from how police officers are trained, which led him to leave the institution.
Agents “will judge a person by their look, because they are trained to think that ‘if they look this way, they are bad,’” he explains.
Until Americans take a closer look at how police officers are taught, he adds, these tragic incidents of police brutality will continue to occur.
“It’s a bigger issue than just the agents, it’s something that, within the entire training process, continues to drive these things to happen,” he says. “And it will continue to create the same outcome of us vs. them.”
On Friday afternoon, Nichols’s family held a press conference. As his attorney, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, spoke, PJ turned up the volume on the barbershop television.
But if he and VIP clients were looking for a direct answer to this latest incident of police brutality, they didn’t find it.
Crump urged the country to focus on change police culture that allows any agent, regardless of race, to have such cruel contempt for the citizens they are sworn to protect and serve.
As Crump spoke, a man shook his head. “Memphis is tough,” he said.
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