I want to start this column with two cold, hard, indisputable truths about the murder of Tyre Nichols.
These are incontrovertible statements of fact.
First, 29-year-old Tyre was killed by a despicable mob of shamefully inhumane police brutes.
Second, the five cops who beat him to death were all black like him so the motive for their appalling conduct was self-evidently not racism.
Despite this, many high-profile black people have raced to blame white people for what happened in a way that is as ridiculous as it’s disingenuous.
The Black Lives Matter organization issued a statement that once again demanded defunding of the police and said: ‘Five police officers brutally beat Tyre to death. Although the media has spent a great amount of time drawing attention to the fact that the police officers are Black, as if that is important, let us be clear: ALL police represent the interest of capitalism and impel state-sanctioned violence. Anyone who works within a system that perpetuates state-sanctioned violence is complicit in upholding white supremacy.’
CNN commentator Van Jones said the killing may “still have been driven by racism.”
Jemele Hill, from The Atlantic, agreed, explaining: “The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence.”
Filmmaker Bree Newsome Bass tweeted: “Diversifying the police force doesn’t end racism because racism is inherent to the organization & its daily operation. Racism is what policing is.”
And Florida democrat congressman Maxwell Frost posted (but then deleted): “Doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.”
I read all these responses with a slow incredulous shake of the head.
What the bloody hell are they all talking about?
How can anyone possibly attribute five black men killing a black man to racism and white people?
It’s completely insane.
But this is where the increasingly demented woke mentality takes us as we saw last week in the UK when a shaven-headed, face-tattooed, muscle-bound monster named Adam Graham was convicted of raping two women.
When he first appeared in court in 2019, Graham did so as a man, his biological sex.
But by the start of his trial, he’d decided to transition into a woman named Isla Bryson.
And under new gender self-identity laws endorsed by Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, “she” was sent to a women’s prison where “she” was to be locked up alongside actual women of the kind “she” raped when she was a man.
Only a furious outcry led by Harry Potter author JK Rowling forced Sturgeon to reverse her dangerous decision.
What links this dreadful story to the death of Tyre Nichols is a common refusal by the woke world to accept reality when it stares them in the face but doesn’t fit their agenda.
Obviously, a male rapist claiming to be a woman so he gets put into a women’s prison where he can rape women again, isn’t a victory for trans rights, that’s absurd.
Equally obviously, five black men killing a black man isn’t a racist act of white supremacy, that’s also absurd.
In Memphis, where Tyre Nichols was killed, nearly 60% of the entire police force is black, and so is 65% of the population.
The issue that provoked this killing wasn’t to do with anyone’s skin color, it was to do with poorly trained police officers abusing their positions.
“The color doesn’t matter,” Darrell Johnson, a black downtown Memphis resident, told the New York Times. “It’s just that you had officers taking a guy’s life.”
Exactly.
And if it really was about racism, then where are the riots and burning cities that would have inevitably followed if the officers had all been white, as happened after the terrible murder of George Floyd?
Read more of The Post’s coverage of Tyre Nichols’ beating death
As for the crazy Defund the Police campaign, America needs MORE not fewer police on the streets.
FBI data revealed the number of Memphis officers dropped by nearly 20% from 2011-2017, while crime rose by 26% in that period.
You don’t need to be a statistical genius to work out the cause and effect.
In 2018, by way of response, Memphis lowered its standards to attract new police recruits during a hiring shortage.
Two of the five officers now charged in Tyre Nichols’ death, according to a Poynter Institute report, were hired during that time.
There, I suspect, is the real problem.
Many older, highly trained, experienced police officers all over America have quit their jobs in recent years, fed up with being constantly denigrated, abused, branded vile racists, and depicted as the enemy of the people.
At the same time, the recruitment process to replace them has been relaxed in many forces like Memphis.
This has sparked a disastrous reduction in the quality of law enforcement.
And that’s inevitably led to the kind of deplorable policing failures that cost Tyre Nichols his life.
I would do two things right now to help fix America’s cop crisis: toughen up all recruitment processes, and try to persuade the good, decent officers who’ve resigned to come back to their jobs and deploy the most valuable commodity in police work: experience.
I’m not talking about sickening rotten apples like Derek Chauvin who’ve given all US police a bad rep and are now quite rightly rotting in jail.
I’m talking about those officers who share the public’s revulsion at what that white scumbag cop did to a black man, and what those five black scumbag cops did to another black man.
Demonizing all police officers, defunding police forces, and blaming all cop killings on white people regardless of whether there was any racism involved may please the woefully naïve woke brigade.
But it will make America a more dangerous place for people of all colors.