Tyre Nichols was killed due to a traffic stop. Too many Black Americans are.

Tire Nichols, a 29-year-old black man, died earlier this month after he was pulled over by Memphis police, who violently beat him for three minutes, the incident was reportedly shown in a documentary that is expected to be released on Friday.

An attorney for the Nichols family said at a press conference Monday that Nichols has been treated like a “human piñata.” Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis said in a video statement Thursday that the attack was “vile, reckless, and inhumane.” The Memphis Police Department and other law enforcement agencies across the country will expect civil unrest following the release of the footage.

Five black officers for the Memphis Police Department – Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith – were fired after an internal department investigation found them “directly responsible” for the beating. He was also found to have violated the department’s policies on excessive force, duty to intervene, and duty to render assistance.

Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced Thursday that each will face charges of “second-degree murder, aggravated assault, two counts of aggravated kidnapping, two counts of official misconduct and one count of official oppression.” He could face up to 60 years in prison for the murder charge.

In addition, two Memphis Fire Department workers involved in Nichols’ initial treatment have been “relieved from duty,” according to the department. It’s unclear whether he, too, could face charges.

Police stopped Nichols for reckless driving on January 7. The Memphis police chief later said CNN that the investigators have “not been able to substantiate” the claim that Nichols was driving recklessly, however. Regardless, during the stop, there were two confrontations: one when officers approached Nichols’ vehicle and he fled, and another when he arrested him. He was taken to hospital after his arrest when he complained of shortness of breath. Three days later, he died of his injuries.

This isn’t the first time police have turned a traffic stop into a deadly altercation. Deaths like Nichols’s are common, especially for Black Americans, who drop out of nearly every available learning event more often than white Americans.

What traffic stops can be dangerous for Black Americans

Black Americans are often taught — at home, through personal experience, and the news — to view encounters with the police, especially traffic stops, as dangerous, if not potentially fatal.

The deaths of Americans like Nichols, or Daunte Wright, Sandra Bland, and Rayshard Brooks, prove that lesson. But it wasn’t just black civilians who learned to fear being stuck. As University of Arizona law professor Jordan Blair Woods wrote for Michigan Law Reviewpolice are taught to see stops as dangerous too – not for those being stopped, but for themselves and their colleagues.

“The police academy regularly shows officer trainees videos of the most extreme cases of violence against officers during routine traffic in order to emphasize that police work can quickly turn into a deadly situation if they are not satisfied on the scene or hesitate to use force,” Write Woods.

The training belies the fact that police officers are rarely injured during stops. In the Woods analysis of Florida traffic stop data from 2005 to 2014, the professor found that the police have a 1 in 6.5 million chance to kill during a traffic stop, and a 1 in 361,111 chance of serious injury. Overall, more than 98 percent of the stops resulted in zero or minor injuries to officers.

Data in other countries mirror Woods’ findings. In his book Citizen suspect, UNC political science professor Frank Baumgartner, University of Texas government professor Derek A. Epp, and University of South Carolina political science professor Kelsey Shoub found that North Carolina “officers encounter violence about 24,000 times, or just over once per 1,000 stops.” When someone is injured during a stop, it’s usually the person who stopped, the authors found.

And when wounded, like Nichols, the chances of a citizen living regularly with the police are less than stellar. A Study 2019 by Shea Streeternow a professor of American politics at the University of Michigan, found that in 2015, about 11 percent of police killings occurred in traffic and pedestrian stops nationwide.

Complicating matters for blacks is what the data shows stop more often than the whites — in some localities, by large margins. At Stanford Open Policing Project, Database of more than 200 million traffic stops, found that in St. in San Jose, California, Black drivers are six times more likely to be stopped.

Arguably, drivers of all races should be stopped at the same rate — anyone of any race or gender can engage in reckless driving, Nichols allegedly stopped. This has led some researchers to try to understand the difference in stopping. Overall, the results suggest that the problem is related to official bias, conscious or unconscious, that puts blacks at greater risk than their white counterparts.

Linked to this idea is the question of what stops. As a group of researchers from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Dartmouth College led by Baumgartner wrote in a 2017 paperin many departments, traffic stops serve a dual purpose: to prevent illegal behavior and as a chance for officers to investigate past or potential crimes. In many ways, this system is similar to stop-and-frisk, a practice most famously used in New York City which is intended to uncover criminal behavior through street searches. The program was ruled unconstitutional.

As Baumgartner writes, “officers are trained to use traffic stops as a general enforcement strategy aimed at reducing violent crime or drug trafficking. When officers pursue this broader goal, they stop their investigation, and this stop has little to do (if anything) with security.” traffic and everything related to it that looks suspicious.

It’s impossible to know — at least with the information available now — whether the officers who stopped Nichols did so because they were suspicious. But known, he is part of the Memphis SCORPION Unit, whose name is an acronym that means “Street Crime Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhood.” The restoration of peace brought traffic to a standstill, according to NBC News.

If Black drivers are seen as more suspicious and police are trained to view traffic stops as dangerous in public, this creates a serious problem. When the Black driver stops, the interaction is more likely to start with even more officers on the lookout for trouble than they can use.

This could lead to the type of rapid escalation seen in the Nichols case, where officers ended the stop with violence. Some officers like to start with violence, perhaps out of fear, as in the encounter that ended the life of George Floyd. Body camera footage released at Derek Chauvin’s trial, for example, showed officers drawing their weapons shortly after approaching Floyd’s vehicle and yelling at him to “Put your hands in now.”

These tactics, as well as the fear and prejudice that fueled them, put black drivers in danger. Law enforcement representatives insist that the stop — “we find drugs, evidence of other crimes … it’s a very valuable tool,” Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, told Pew Charitable Trusts in 2020 – but such discoveries are rare. Nationally, about 4 percent stop producing searches or arrest in 2015, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.

This has some activists and elected officials questioning whether the risk of traffic stops to drivers — especially black drivers — should be arrested.

BerkeleyCalifornia, for example, approved a plan in 2021 to prohibit officers from conducting traffic stops for violations unrelated to safety; Oakland have the same policy. Other places, including Montgomery County, Marylandand Cambridge, Massachusettshave also considered these steps. Washington, DCstripped the police department of some of its authority to regulate traffic laws in 2019, empowering the transportation department to do enforcement instead. Attorney General of New York has recommended that New York City make a similar change, and by 2022, New York City police announced that they will no longer use stop and open warrant checks at random..

The long-term effectiveness of these measures remains to be seen. But they represent a small step from the police who left Nichols, and many of whom are already dead.