department. what is ems doing? when they got there, i cannot believe that they could not see that tyre nichols was in need of help, that he was on the verge of a true already in a medical crisis. so that they would not act expediently boggles my mind. you see i m having difficulty finding my words today, because the more i talk about it, the more it s so heinous, the actions that were taken. they probably come into contact with them a lot. what was that dynamic? i think we ll probably see that come out in court, those details. sonia, the officers clearly could see that tyre was just slumped over. there was no urgency even to check on him. so part of policing culture,
talk about the path forward without looking back and understanding how it is that we arrived at this system. you are absolutely right. in order to understand the person you have to understand the past. we are dealing absolutely with a police problem rooted in policing culture that has deep roots in historic racial discrimination. we are also dealing with a political culture problem. one that says this kind of intense policing, the scorpion units, these surging into black communities is the primary way, the only way to reduce crime. so this is not something new, certainly we saw images of this going back to the rodney king videotape, and the early 1990s, but even longer history, the way in which we have historically policed black and brown communities, and black and brown bodies using this kind of
associate sociology professor. it is good to see you both. i want to start with you because i do not know that we can look forward and really talk about the path forward without looking back and understanding how it is that we arrived at this system. you are absolutely right. in order to understand the person you have to understand the past. we are dealing absolutely with a police problem rooted in policing culture that has deep roots in historic racial discrimination. we are also dealing with a political culture problem. one that says this kind of intense policing, the scorpion units, these surging into black communities is the primary way, the only way to reduce crime. so this is not something new, certainly we saw images of this going back to the rodney king videotape, and the early 1990s,
talking about the reforms that we are hearing from this community. some swift action has been taken. we talk about the disbandment of the scorpion unit. what else are folks telling you they want to see now? e are folks people are talkit about the moments in the video that seem to stretch on forever. tyre nichols does not get aid for quite a long time, only almost 20 minutes of time. there are additional people who showed up on the scene, emts, other officers. people here want to know more about who was there, what more they should ve done, what their training was. they re feeling is that people should have jumped into action, recognize, because you can see on the video, how much anguish to tyre is in in those moments. they are outraged. they believe that not enough people have been relieved of their duties or investigated. they want more. and then on the scorpion unit, there s a desire to understand more about the policing culture here. if the specialized teams have
you want to make sure that you are getting the best of the best that society has to offer and try to do away with those who might have some sort of situation where they can t control themselves. whether you are talking about increased de-escalation training perhaps, if you are talking about screening people better, if you are talking about increased training on how to respond to high-pressure situations like this, you know, they are doing a car stop at night, which is one of the most dangerous jobs a police officer can do. that s where most police officers get injured or killed every year, so doing car stops, particularly at night where your vision a hampered. increased training. that s what we need, is to have higher and more intense and more training done more often to lessen the chance that something like this happens. that s a great point. and i think, you know, it probably goes deeper than that, too, right because it comes down to policing culture. we are out of time.