country. velshi starts now. good morning to you. it is sunday, january the 28. i m ali velshi. demonstrators in major cities around the country took to the streets again yesterday after the memphis police department released footage of the brutal beating of tyre nichols by five members of its own police force. in the continuing aftermath, memphis pd announced yesterday that it has permanently deactivated its scorpion unit. scorpion what the departments anti violence group which has been under scrutiny in recent days after it became public that all five of the police officers who were fired, arrested, and charged with second degree murder in nichols death where members of the unit. joining me now from memphis, tennessee, is nbc s antonia hylton who have been covering the story from the beginning. antonia. welcome tell us a bit about this new development with the scorpion unit, of which all five of these police officers were members. ali, i was actually with protesters yest
enforcement. the details of the naked story may be different, but is something that we have heard before. crucially we have seen other videos of abuse more often and cameras, police body worn cameras, security cameras, phone cameras, have become ubiquitous. among the footage that the memphis police department released on friday night was video from the police officers body cameras. we are not going to show it here again, but it has been widely seen. it is a startling in a close perspective of the violence as it happened. showing glimpses of nichols face just inches away pressed on the ground. calling, as antonia said, for his mother. having these videos hat makes it much harder to deny the cruelty what happened. they are also important pieces of evidence of police brutality across the country now. just a decade ago body cameras were not yet a regular piece of equipment it was not until the plea of a family of a victim of the shooting that body cameras became more central focus in the
we ve seen these cases keep coming, and this justice department is not moving at all to address these issues. that s correct, reverend al. unfortunately, since august 9th, 2014, over 1,000 black people have been killed wow. in america by law enforcement. and so we see all these tragic killings like in el paso and dayton where there are young white men who are mass murderers and and they re taken alive. people like lesley and mike s son who haven t killed anybody, for whatever reason, always seem to be killed and they are unarmed, and when they re killed, even though they are unarmed, for whatever reason, you have the intellectual justification of discrimination that always seems to allow the
shooting of michael brown on august 9th, 2014. brown was killed in a confrontation with police officer darren wilson, who was not criminally charged in the incident. what resulted was outrage throughout the st. louis suburb after a series of violent days and nights of protests. nbc s ron mott is in ferguson today for us, and ron, with a good sunday to you, how has this community recovered since 2014, and is it still ongoing? reporter: hey there, alex, good day to you. a lot of folks here find it hard to believe it s been three years since michael brown was shot and killed, not far from here, just around the street and down the corner. there was a lot of ugliness that followed that shooting. one of the ugly things was the quiktrip convenience store that once stood here. now there s a beautiful building here, the urban community league empowerment center. they have a program called save our sons that is targeting young african-american men and trying to get them into gainful employment
i became involved in the black lives matter movement on august 9th, 2014 when mike brown was brutally killed by darren wilson in ferguson, missouri. we knew that every 20 hours a black person was killed by police officers or vigilante. tray von. black lives matter. we really had to rely on ourselves. we couldn t just rely on our president. jesse jackson came to ferguson and we marched to one particular church. i think he tried to have us sing we shall overcome. that s not where these kids are coming from. they re not going to question