Activists knock on the locked door of the Memphis Police Department’s Ridgeway Station during a protest in honor of Tyre Nichols, on Jan. 29 in Memphis.Patrick Lantrip/The Associated Press
Before showing video of Memphis police brutally beating Tyre Nichols, MSNBC host Joy Reid acknowledged the risk that watching it could desensitize her audience. But it was necessary to show the footage, she contended, because it was rare to get such a clear look at police violence on camera.
“We’re going to show you this video because you pay for the police. The police work for the public,” Ms. Reid said. “It is violent, but it also is a depiction of the kind of police violence that normally happens outside your view.”
This introduction was one of the more thorough attempts by a U.S. media outlet to explain the near-universal decision to broadcast the video and post it online.
Unlike other police forces, which have often stonewalled efforts to get information on such incidents, the Memphis Police Department chose to make public more than an hour’s worth of footage, gleaned from officers’ body cameras and nearby CCTV. Releasing the video voluntarily gave police the ability to control its timing.
The controlled release also gave media outlets more time to decide whether and how much of the video to disseminate. All of the United States’ major broadcasters and newspapers chose to show it in some fashion.
In stark contrast with other high-profile instances of police brutality, the Memphis police have moved swiftly to show accountability in the wake of Mr. Nichols’s death. In less than three weeks, the force fired five officers involved and charged them criminally. On the weekend, the unit to which they belonged was disbanded.
The footage shows officers dragging Mr. Nichols out of his car on the evening of Jan. 7, pepper-spraying him, tasing him, kicking him in the head, punching him in the face and hitting him with batons. He died in hospital three days later. Mr. Nichols was Black, as are the five officers accused of murdering him.
The Memphis police released the video footage on a Friday evening, when media outlets typically see their lowest readership and viewership figures.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland told The Commercial Appeal, the city’s main newspaper, that police wanted to ensure that, if there were mass protests in response, they would occur after people had left work for the day.
“That was a law-enforcement preference on trying to get people home from school and home from work, and do it after rush hour when people were safely at home,” he said.
As it was, protests on the weekend were far more modest than those in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd – when Minneapolis police initially denied wrongdoing until bystander video showed otherwise – and remained mostly non-confrontational.
In Mr. Nichols’s case, media outlets took differing approaches to disseminating the footage of his fatal beating.
CNN aired it live in its entirety, as it was released by the police. Later on, for its website, it edited the video down to its key moments, adding voiceover to explain the narrative of what was happening.The Washington Post synced the four videos up and posted them in full to provide as complete a picture as possible.
USA Today opted to post only the CCTV footage, which offered the broadest view of the scene but did not contain some of the most brutal close-ups of the beating. British newspaper The Guardian, which has a large presence in the U.S., opted for a heavily edited version that did not show the most violent moments.
All media included content advisories, though relatively few offered extensive explanations of the thinking behind sharing the video. One editor’s note, for the local NBC affiliate in Memphis, said it was necessary to put the footage out so viewers could judge for themselves what happened.
“Sharing this video will help our community understand and see the incidents from that evening,” the note read. “It’s the only way for you to see an unfiltered document of what transpired between Tyre and the five former Memphis police officers.”
Fox News, meanwhile, went in the opposite direction, with some of its personalities either downplaying the video’s significance or suggesting Mr. Nichols might have somehow been to blame.
“Does it bother you that you don’t have the cops’ perspective at all? I mean, it looks overwhelming, I get it. But don’t we need both sides?” Brian Kilmeade said. Jesse Watters speculated Mr. Nichols was “on something” during the arrest and opined that he “didn’t see any death blows” in the video.
Many Americans evinced discomfort with people so broadly viewing such footage. On social media, some chose to instead post video of a teenaged Mr. Nichols skateboarding in his hometown of Sacramento, calling for the 29-year-old, who worked as a FedEx driver and had a four-year-old son, to be remembered for the totality of his life.
“Before the Memphis Police Dept. releases the video of 5 MPD officers murdering #TyreNichols during a routine traffic stop, and that heinous video inevitably goes viral, I want to amplify THIS video of Tyre LIVING his best life,” writer Mai Perkins tweeted with the skateboard video.
Monnica T. Williams, an expert in mental-health disparities at the University of Ottawa, said people – particularly those who are marginalized or at a higher risk of falling victim to police violence – can become “very distressed or even traumatized” from watching these sorts of videos.
In Prof. Williams’s view, the videos should be made available to people who need to see them, such as those involved in the legal process, Mr. Nichols’s family and reporters covering the story, but they should not be broadcast in places people might see them without choosing to.
“One danger of putting videos like this out all the time is that people can sometimes become numb to the violence and just feel like it’s normal, and it shouldn’t be normal,” she said. “I don’t think they should be blasted all over social media and I don’t think people should be encouraged to watch them.”
Victoria Bridgland, a researcher at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, said limiting peoples’ exposure to traumatic materials “has to be balanced against the concern of spreading awareness about important social issues.” Her research has shown that there is little evidence trigger warnings are effective either at dissuading people from watching traumatic videos or preparing themselves emotionally for them.
“However, people often say they like trigger warnings because they like that they have a choice given to them (regardless of if they actually then choose to then avoid the distressing thing – which we know they likely do not),”she wrote in an e-mail. “People also say that they think trigger warnings communicate a culture of care.”
Mr. Nichols’s parents, for their part, used the police department’s management of the footage’s release to prepare the public ahead of time. Speaking with reporters before the video was made public, Mr. Nichols’s stepfather, Rodney Wells, called for demonstrations to remain non-violent.
“We want peaceful protests,” he said. “That’s what the family wants. That’s what the community wants.”
Nova Scotia RCMP say their investigation into two suspicious deaths earlier this month has concluded that one man died by homicide and the other by suicide.
The bodies of two men, aged 40 and 73, were found in a home in Windsor, N.S., on Sept. 3.
Police say the province’s medical examiner determined the 40-year-old man was killed and the 73-year-old man killed himself.
They say the two men were members of the same family.
No arrests or charges are anticipated, and the names of the deceased will not be released.
RCMP say they will not be releasing any further details out of respect for the family.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
For the first time in their history, members of the Cree community of Nemaska received a visit from a sitting Quebec premier on Sunday and were able to share first-hand the story of how they were displaced by a hydroelectric project in the 1970s.
François Legault was greeted in Nemaska by men and women who arrived by canoe to re-enact the founding of their new village in the Eeyou Istchee James Bay region, in northern Quebec, 47 years ago. The community was forced in the early 1970s to move from its original location because members were told it would be flooded as part of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydro project.
The reservoir was ultimately constructed elsewhere, but by then the members of the village had already left for other places, abandoning their homes and many of their belongings in the process.
George Wapachee, co-author of the book “Going Home,” said community members were “relocated for nothing.”
“We didn’t know what the rights were, or who to turn to,” he said in an interview. “That turned us into refugees and we were forced to abandon the life we knew.”
Nemaska’s story illustrates the challenges Legault’s government faces as it looks to build new dams to meet the province’s power needs, which are anticipated to double by 2050. Legault has promised that any new projects will be developed in partnership with Indigenous people and have “social acceptability,” but experts say that’s easier said than done.
François Bouffard, an associate professor of electrical engineering at McGill University, said the earlier era of hydro projects were developed without any consideration for the Indigenous inhabitants living nearby.
“We live in a much different world now,” he said. “Any kind of hydro development, no matter where in Quebec, will require true consent and partnership from Indigenous communities.” Those groups likely want to be treated as stakeholders, he added.
Securing wider social acceptability for projects that significantly change the landscape — as hydro dams often do — is also “a big ask,” he said. The government, Bouchard added, will likely focus on boosting capacity in its existing dams, or building installations that run off river flow and don’t require flooding large swaths of land to create reservoirs.
Louis Beaumier, executive director of the Trottier Energy Institute at Polytechnique Montreal, said Legault’s visit to Nemaska represents a desire for reconciliation with Indigenous people who were traumatized by the way earlier projects were carried about.
Any new projects will need the consent of local First Nations, Beaumier said, adding that its easier to get their blessing for wind power projects compared to dams, because they’re less destructive to the environment and easier around which to structure a partnership agreement.
Beaumier added that he believes it will be nearly impossible to get the public — Indigenous or not — to agree to “the destruction of a river” for a new dam, noting that in recent decades people have come to recognize rivers as the “unique, irreplaceable riches” that they are.
Legault’s visit to northern Quebec came on Sept. 15, when the community gathers every year to remember the founding of the “New Nemaska,” on the shores of Lake Champion in the heart of the boreal forest, some 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. Nemaska Chief Clarence Jolly said the community invited Legault to a traditional feast on Sunday, and planned to present him with Wapachee’s book and tell him their stories.
The book, published in 2022 along with Susan Marshall, is filled with stories of Nemaska community members. Leaving behind sewing machines and hunting dogs, they were initially sent to two different villages, Wapachee said.
In their new homes, several of them were forced to live in “deplorable conditions,” and some were physically and verbally abused, he said. The new village of Nemaska was only built a few years later, in 1977.
“At this time, families were losing their children to prison-schools,” he said, in reference to the residential school system. “Imagine the burden of losing your community as well.”
Thomas Jolly, a former chief, said he was 15 years old when he was forced to leave his village with all his belongings in a single bag.
Meeting Legault was important “because have to recognize what happened and we have to talk about the repercussions that the relocation had on people,” he said, adding that those effects are still felt today.
Earlier Sunday, Legault was in the Cree community of Eastmain, where he participated in the official renaming of a hydro complex in honour of former premier Bernard Landry. At the event, Legault said he would follow the example of his late predecessor, who oversaw the signing of the historic “Paix des Braves” agreement between the Quebec government and the Cree in 2002.
He said there is “significant potential” in Eeyou Istchee James Bay, both in increasing the capacity of its large dams and in developing wind power projects.
“Obviously, we will do that with the Cree,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEMASKA – For the first time in their history, members of the Cree community of Nemaska received a visit from a sitting Quebec premier on Sunday and were able to share first-hand the story of how they were displaced by a hydroelectric project in the 1970s.
François Legault was greeted in Nemaska by men and women who arrived by canoe to re-enact the founding of their new village in the Eeyou Istchee James Bay region, in northern Quebec, 47 years ago. The community was forced in the early 1970s to move from their original location because they were told it would be flooded as part of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert hydro project.
The reservoir was ultimately constructed elsewhere, but by then the members of the village had already left for other places, abandoning their homes and many of their belongings in the process.
George Wapachee, co-author of the book “Going Home,” said community members were “relocated for nothing.”
“We didn’t know what the rights were, or who to turn to,” he said in an interview. “That turned us into refugees and we were forced to abandon the life we knew.”
The book, published in 2022 by Wapachee and Susan Marshall, is filled with stories of Cree community members. Leaving behind sewing machines and hunting dogs, they were initially sent to two different villages, 100 and 300 kilometres away, Wapachee said.
In their new homes, several of them were forced to live in “deplorable conditions,” and some were physically and verbally abused, he said. The new village of Nemaska was only built a few years later, in 1977.
“At this time, families were losing their children to prison-schools,” he said, in reference to the residential school system. “Imagine the burden of losing your community as well.”
Legault’s visit came on Sept. 15, when the community gathers every year to remember the founding of the “New Nemaska,” on the shores of Lake Champion in the heart of the boreal forest, some 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. Nemaska Chief Clarence Jolly said the community invited Legault to a traditional feast on Sunday, and planned to present him with Wapachee’s book and tell him their stories.
Thomas Jolly, a former chief, said he was 15 years old when he was forced to leave his village with all his belongings in a single bag.
Meeting Legault was important “because have to recognize what happened and we have to talk about the repercussions that the relocation had on people,” he said, adding that those effects are still felt today.
Earlier Sunday, Legault had been in the Cree community of Eastmain, where he participated in the official renaming of a hydro dam in honour of former premier Bernard Landry.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
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