Police Reform Doesn't Work. Tyre Nichols is Proof

How much training is enough to get cops to stop killing innocent Americans? In the United States, as we deal with the traumatic death of yet another young Black man, the policy solution you will often hear from liberals is that police need more training. But Tyre Nichols’ disturbing and gruesome murder at the hands of a specialized squad with specialized training and specialized resources should forever bury the idea that cops just need more training in order to not murder.

Police brutality is endemic in the United States, and it has been since the first police departments began springing up as kidnappers of Black people who escaped enslavement. What is rare, however, is that an incident of this brutality breaks through and makes it onto the national stage. Nichols’ case broke through for a number of reasons, and it’s shown us the incredibly negligible improvement that “more training” does for officers empowered with a license to kill and a culture of silence and violent encouragement.

Policing in the United States is either broken, or perhaps more accurately, it’s murderous by design. Time and again the only thing that cops are interested in is protecting property and cracking skulls of people they consider to be deserving (which they’re allowed to define for themselves). If they kill innocent people, they can always claim they feared for their lives. And with so much impunity, they get away with this lie nearly every time.

Adam Johnson is the cohost of Citations Needed a podcast about “media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit” and runs the media criticism and political analysis substack The Column

Dan from the Internet is the host of the Power Report and Good Morning Bad News on TikTok. Follow him

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