The Memphis Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods (Cremorse of the Memphis Police Beating of Tyre Nichols)

As protesters gathered across US cities over the weekend following the Memphis police beating that led to the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, officials have said the investigation into the incident will continue amid questions over whether there could be additional charges.

The public has noted the swift action taken against five officers of the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods. In less than two weeks, all five were fired. Criminal charges were filed and body worn camera video was released in three weeks. These actions were appropriate. The case in Memphis is a model for transparency and accountability in police killings, an attorney for the family of the man told a press conference on Friday.

Ben Crump, the family attorney, said he thinks there will be more repercussions and that they need to see whether criminal charges will be made in the case.

Steve Mulroy, the District Attorney for the county, said he can not say if there will be more charges because there wasn’t any last Thursday.

Officials knew releasing the video without charges for the officers could be “incendiary,” Mulroy said. To speed up the investigation and consideration of charges was the best solution. The video will be released later, he added.

Video footage released Friday, taken from officers’ body cameras and a street surveillance camera, shows a different story. In the videos, police quickly yank Nichols from his car, shout obscenities and threats, and then pepper spray him. When police finally catch up to Nichols a second time, they kick, hit, and punch him in his head while he’s being restrained.

The officers were not present in the critical minutes after the beating. It took an ambulance more than 20 minutes to arrive on the scene, and Nichols, who suffered “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to preliminary results of an autopsy commissioned by attorneys for his family, died three days later.

“All of these officers failed their oath,” Crump told CNN on Sunday. They failed to fulfill their oath. Look at that video: Was anybody trying to protect and serve Tyre Nichols?”

Several cities in the US, including New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, joined other cities in a demonstration to end abuses of authority.

A City Council Action Against the Disbanding of the SCORPION Unit in Memphis, Tentative Attorney General Mills Jr.

He has been described as a devoted son, a loving father, and a free spirit with a passion for skateboards and sunsets, who tattooed his mother’s name on his arm.

After a meeting between the police chief and his officers, the scruPion unit will be no more.

“That reprehensible conduct we saw in that video, we think this was part of the culture of the SCORPION unit,” Crump said. “So we demanded that they disbanded immediately before we see anything like this happen again.”

“I think the smart move and the mayor is correct in shutting it down. The actions of these people are not representative of the Memphis Police Department.

Memphis City Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas also commended the move and said the case should give the city a chance to “dig deeper” into community and police relations.

There was a direct sense of protest in the city of Memphis, and perhaps we have faith that the system will get it right this time.

The officers, who are not named, will be in court February 17 for their first appearance.

The attorney for one of the officers indicted, Mills Jr., put out a statement Friday night saying that he didn’t cross lines “that others crossed” during the confrontation.

Memphis Fire Chief, Jayden Biden and the Memphis Black Caucus “Stop Talking a Black Man’s Obituary”

Two Memphis Fire Department employees who were part of Nichols’ initial care were relieved of duty, pending the outcome of an internal investigation. Two deputy sheriffs with the county have been placed on leave pending an investigation.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act needs to be passed by Congress according to the vice president. Harris said that it was important for us to not delay and that Joe Biden would sign it.

The White House has said the president will meet with the Congressional Black Caucus on Thursday to talk about police reform. Ms. Jean-Pierre said Mr. Biden would continue to push for the reform bill after he took office. Ms. Jean-Pierre didn’t say whether the White House would consider using executive action if congress failed to act on reform measures.

Gloria Sweet-Love, the Tennessee State Conference NAACP President applauded Memphis Police Chief Davis for “doing the right thing,” by not waiting six months to a year to fire the officers who beat up Tyre Nichols.

She was booed by Congress, who she said should stop passing bills to stop police brutality because it was writing another Black man’s obituary. The blood of Black America is on your hands. So stand up and do something.”

Defending the Vicious Victims of Tyre Nichols with a Mississippi State Police: Tennessee Police Reform Proposed Before the June 14th Session

On the state level, two Democratic state lawmakers in Tennessee said Saturday that they intend to file police reform legislation ahead of the Tennessee general assembly’s Tuesday filing deadline. The bills would seek to address mental health care for law enforcement officers, hiring, training, discipline practices and other topics, said Rep. G.A. Hardaway, who represents a portion of Memphis and Shelby County.

While Democrats hold the minority with 24 representatives compared to the Republican majority of 99 representatives, Rep. Joe Towns Jr. said this legislation is not partisan and should pass on both sides of the legislature.

You would be hard-pressed to not want to do something about that young man, no matter what the footage said about him. What would happen if a dog was beaten like that in this county? “Towns said.”

The official efforts to respond to the vicious beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police are already underway, just two days after footage of the incident was released to the public.

Protesters are taking to the streets of Memphis and other places in the country to further their protest against the treatment of Black people by police.

The attorneys said that they hoped other cities would take similar action with their saturation police units in the near future. This is only the next step in the journey for justice and accountability, as this conduct is not restricted to these specialty units. It goes on so much further.

What Will the Police Officers in Memphis, Tennessee, Charged with George Floyd’s Death Loss Do? The View from a Black-Law Officer’s Perspective

House Democratic Caucus Chair John Ray Clemmons, Rep. G.A. Hardaway and Rep. Joe Towns, Jr., announced their plan during a press conference on Saturday.

Among the issues the bills aim to address are implicit bias training, mental health evaluations for police officers, limits on officers transferring departments after facing discipline or being fired and a reevaluation of low-level traffic stops, NBC News reported.

Republicans hold a sizable majority in the Tennessee General Assembly, but the Democrats said they were confident they could get bipartisan support because of the magnitude of the incident, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported.

“Without federal police reform, I think we’re going to continue to see these hashtags proliferate so much that we can’t keep up with them,” Crump told ABC’s This Week.

The federal policing bill that bears George Floyd’s name failed to pass in the Senate and efforts to end qualified immunity, a judicial doctrine that protects police officers from being held personally liable for violating a person’s rights, have not succeeded in Congress.

The police captain of Montgomery County, Maryland is now a retired woman. She is the founder of The Black Police Experience, which promotes the education of the intersection of law enforcement and the Black community. She teaches criminal justice at Howard University and Montgomery College in Maryland. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion.

When I served as a captain and an officer in the Police Department, it was clear to me that there was a lack of supervision, little professional maturity and a disregard for human life among the officers.

Through tears, the mother said the officers charged with her son’s death “brought shame to their own families. They brought shame to the Black community.

The association is currently in a stance that is different. It did not defend the arrested officers outright or say that they were just doing a difficult job that required them to make split-second decisions – responses we’ve come to expect from police unions that so often help shield officers accused of misconduct from accountability.

Efforts to push for police reform in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020 have been largely replaced with calls to address the fear of rising crime, partially through hiring more police officers. Last year, President Joe Biden proposed funding for 100,000 new police officers as part of his Safer America Plan and the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill includes $324 million in funding to hire more police officers.

However, I know from experience that crime prevention is achieved through trusting relationships between the police and the community it serves, rather than feeding a broken system more police officers. There can be no trust when there is over-policing of disadvantaged communities with suppression units such as the SCORPION unit, which were formed to protect communities – not terrorize them. On Saturday, the Memphis Police Department said that it would permanently close its SCORPION unit.

Laws have been passed to try and prevent police corruption through new policies. Law enforcement has conducted training time and again and revised policy over and over, and yet we still have too many unnecessary deaths at the batons, feet, hands, fists, and guns of police.

This article was changed to clearly reflect the writer’s experience in law enforcement, not just as a captain.

The Memphis Police Tyre Nichols Case: Three Years After a Traffic Stop, Attorney’s Attorney Mark O’Mara Revisited

The five former Memphis police officers are accused of murder and kidnapping in addition to other charges.

There have been mistakes made in previous cases of police brutality, says Ron Johnson, a former Missouri State Highway Patrol captain. “I think a lot of things have been done right” in this case.

“A year ago, two years ago, we wouldn’t have seen some of the things we’re seeing here,” Johnson said of Memphis law enforcement’s handling of Nichols’ death.

In Taylor’s case, an initial statement from police about the botched raid in which the 26-year-old was killed said there was no forced entry. But officers had used a battering ram to enter her home before shooting her. Minneapolis police initially said Floyd “appeared to be suffering medical distress.” Officer Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for a while.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ”Davis thought the initial account was a strange summary of what happened on a traffic stop. Once she viewed video of what actually happened, she was “outraged,” she said.

In light of fatal police encounters in Memphis, law enforcement and legal analysts are pointing to the actions being taken as an example of how to maintain trust in the community.

Mark O’Mara, a criminal defense attorney, believes that cops should be held responsible for an event when it lasts more than five minutes and they don’t act. “So we are in a new era, I think, of looking at police behavior under a different eye towards possible prosecution.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/us/memphis-police-tyre-nichols-case/index.html

Memphis, Tennessee, does not prosecute crimes against young black people, but does prosecute when the case against Walter Scott is convicted of murder in South Carolina

Benjamin Crump, a family attorney, said this week that the preliminary results of the autopsy show that Nichols suffered bleeding on his brain from a severe beating.

On January 15, Chief Davis promised immediate and appropriate action, after noting that the officers conduct during the stop was serious. She said that the department was giving notice to the officers.

Officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith were terminated for failing in their “excessive use of force, duty to intervene, and duty to render aid,” the department said in a statement.

“The police department obviously learned something from … other high-profile cases when district attorneys were not transparent, when they did not act quickly,” said Areva Martin, an attorney and legal affairs commentator.

They did the right thing in this case by charging them immediately after convening a grand jury and investigating the case quickly.

Crump, in a news conference Friday, called Memphis’ rapid criminal charges – compared to other cities that have waited months or years in brutality cases – a “blueprint” for police departments, prosecutors and political leaders in future cases.

The case surrounding Walter Scott, who was fatally shot in the back while being pulled over for a broken brake light in South Carolina, reminded CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers of the charges against him.

Former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager was arrested days after the shooting and indicted on a murder charge two months later. Scott was killed by the former officer in April of 2015, but the statemurder trial ended in a mistrial. He was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

The Memphis Night Before the Shooting: Witnesses of a Premeditary Era in the Memphis Police Regime, After the Tyre Nichols Shooting

“The last thing you want to do is take a high tension event and then add that thing that’s going to increase tension … on a Friday night knowing that people don’t have to be at work in the morning CNN law enforcement analyst John Miller said they have the whole weekend ahead of them.

But, Miller said, the delay allowed authorities to show the public “the wheels of justice are turning and turning relatively quickly.” The additional time also allowed officials to “unite the faith community in Memphis, the voice of the family and the family’s lawyers, and the key community contacts” in calling for calm.

In addition to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Nashville and New York, police departments across the country said they had plans in place in case of protests.

Over the past several years, we have watched many of these cases. When law enforcement authorities come forward, and provide information to the community, we typically see a peaceful response.

Mostly peaceful protesters in Memphis took to Interstate 55 Friday night after the videos went online, blocking both lanes of the highway’s bridge connecting the western Tennessee city to Arkansas. There were no arrests.

Though paramedics arrived minutes after officers disengaged, Nichols appeared to be left multiple times on the pavement without assistance before an ambulance showed up.

The footage drew stunned reaction from law enforcement experts and outrage from officials including Biden, who said it was “yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day.”

The footage of the killing of a man by Memphis police has left unanswered questions about what the department did to prevent it.

“All of this was preventable,” she told CNN Saturday. You have officers on the job who don’t want to be seen doing anything other than what is asked of them. This was not anything that they aren’t accustomed to doing.”

Memphis City Council Chairman Martavius Jones grew emotional after watching the video, telling CNN that despite the positive shift in the handling of brutality cases, much more needs to be done.

“To see the events unfold how they’ve unfolded, with this Tyre Nichols situation, is heartbreaking. There is a makeshift memorial to the man who was beaten near the Memphis corner. “He was the calmest out of the officers who were there.”

We have to fight the bad players in our community, then we have to fight our own police officers. Robinson said that that’s deplorable. We have to do something.

The city council chair told CNN that if the unit was not given new training it would be put into a state of disrepair.

Durbin: Towards a Reviving the National Police Reform Reform Debate in New Jersey, and a Case Study of Los Angeles Mayor Cory Bass

US Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, called for Congress to revive national police reform legislation and said the previously stalled legislation was a good starting point.

“It’s the right starting point, and Sen. (Cory) Booker, chairman of the crime subcommittee, has been working on this for years. I believe that they should sit down again to see if they can revive that effort. We need a national conversation about policing in a responsible, constitutional, and humane way,” he said.

The baby of his family was the youngest of four children. His mother said that he was a good boy and that he did laundry on Sundays.

As of Sunday afternoon, the mother of Nichols had raised more than one million dollars on the GoFundMe. The costs of Wells’ and her husband’smental health services as well as their time off from their jobs will be covered by the donations. They would like to build a skate park in memory of Tyre, and he liked skating and sunsets.

The negotiations on police reform came to a screeching halt in 2021.

Previous talks broke down without a deal in September 2021 despite months of negotiations between Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and then-Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democrat, now serving as mayor of Los Angeles.

What Can the White House Tell Us About Crime and Police Reform? A Comment on Jordan’s View of Crime in the ‘Faintest’ Memphis

It would take bipartisan support and 60 votes in the Senate to clear it and then a GOP-controlled House to pass it.

Jordan believes there is no law that can stop evil, like the one he saw on Meet the Press. I am not sure if any reform is going to happen because of the lack of respect for human life. They continued to beat him.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a member of the GOP leadership and Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN that “I don’t know what the pathway is” to finding a deal on policing legislation.

Changing qualified immunity on police officers is a central sticking point, according to Cornyn.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was pushed to the forefront after the death of Mr. Nichols, who was killed by five former Memphis police officers.

He told NPR that he wants to know what more can be done from an executive action standpoint and that he thinks Biden can be a key player in negotiations.

“I believe the president has the ability to bring us together in a very unique way,” Horsford said, noting Biden’s role in passing gun safety legislation and the bipartisan infrastructure legislation. “We expect the president to be involved in helping us reach consensus in a bipartisan way on comprehensive police accountability and justice reform.”

In order to address the issue of pain and suffering in families and people around the country, they would like Biden to address it in the State of the Union.

When a mother wants her child to go to the park, when a family member is concerned about someone breaking down a door in the middle of the night, and sometimes when a young man gets pulled over for what may or may not be a traffic stop.

“We have to keep our community safe, and anyone who says they don’t is abandoning their responsibility to do that,” he said. You cannot stand up in one minute and say you’re for safety and do nothing to keep our community safe from bad policing.”

“We are working to come up with opportunities to negotiate on the principles of justice and police reform that are meaningful,” he said, noting he has reached out to Scott, one of the central players in previous negotiations. “We are looking for ways to tackle the pattern and practices of cities like Memphis that have higher rates of use of force against Black residents.”

He said that it was false to say we couldn’t both support law enforcement and hold them accountable in order to keep people safe.

“It had many elements in it that are important: banning chokeholds, dealing with no-warrant searches, dealing with accreditation of police departments. The Illinois Democrat said it is necessary that we do all these things, but not enough.

“Imagine my disappointment,” Scott said, “when the duty to intervene, de-escalation training, more resources, more reporting, so that we all have eyes around the country, was filibustered in this chamber.”

“We should have simple legislation that we can agree on,” he added. “But too often too many are too concerned with who gets the credit. I know that when a conservative Republican starts talking about policing in America, some people seem to just turn the channel. That’s not right.

“There’s things we can do. I think there’s all kinds of grant dollars that could go out. There’s reform that can happen there. It’s not a big deal, I think, in philosophy. The Democrats think that a new law will fix something awful.

Trying to build a better relationship between police and public information: A Minneapolis officer’s encounter with a forgery in progress on May 25, 2020

“To the extent that you’re putting out statements that are indicating one thing and then the video footage released later on shows completely the opposite, that definitely is problematic for trying to build police-community relations,” Andrea Headley, a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, told NPR.

On May 25, 2020, the Minneapolis Police Department said officers responded to a forgery in progress and arrested a suspect. “Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress,” a press release read. “They called for an ambulance.”

The man was George Floyd, and video footage of the incident captured by a bystander showed former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd repeatedly pleaded, “I can’t breathe!” Floyd died on that day.

But video shot by a bystander showed former NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo putting Garner in a chokehold until he went unconscious. The death of Garner was ruled a homicide by the New York City medical examiner’s office.

In 2018, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office first said that 23-year-old Dujuan Armstrong died of a drug overdose inside the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif. But as the Guardian reported, body-camera footage released later showed that officers put Armstrong in a restraining jacket and a spit mask before he became unresponsive. An autopsy found that Armstrong died of asphyxiation due to the restraints.

John Elder was the public information director for the Minneapolis Police Department in 2020 and wrote the initial statement about Floyd’s death. He told the Los Angeles Times that he got his information from sergeants and computer-aided dispatch, and that he hadn’t seen any video footage of the encounter before writing the press release.

“This had literally zero intent to deceive or be dishonest or disingenuous. Had we known that this [situation] was what we saw on the video, that statement would have been completely different,” Elder told the newspaper.

There are discrepancies in the report or statements that are put out that don’t match the evidence that comes out. And when the language that is used is particularly one that tries to abdicate responsibility,” she said.

She said she worked with one agency that would bring in community leaders for an explanation of an incident before discussing it with the media. Departments can also acknowledge if they are still looking into what happened, she said, including if they haven’t reviewed any video evidence yet.

The Wells Family: A State of the Union Address for the 70th Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Importance of Justice

The president will be giving a State of the Union address on February 7 and it was announced that Nichols’ parents will attend.

“The Vice President expressed her deep condolences and offered the family support as they continue to navigate this challenging time,” the official added.

Harris is invited by the Wells family. The director of the Office of Public Engagement and a senior adviser to the president will also be in attendance.

President Joe Biden talked with the Wells family the day before the video of an altercation between police officers and a man was released.

The administration presence at the funeral will come as come as prospects for federal legislative reforms on policing, which the Wells family has pushed for, appear slim.

The Congressional Black Caucus has invited the parents of one of the members to join them in Washington, according to a message from the Executive Director.

Tyre Nichols, whose death at the hands of police in Memphis led to second-degree murder charges against five officers, will be remembered at a funeral service on Wednesday for the life he lived.

Nichols’ funeral service will take place less than a week after Friday evening’s public release of footage of the attack on Nichols shook a nation long accustomed to videos of police brutality, especially against people of color. The five officers charged with Nichols’ death are Black.

Representing other Black people killed by police, Tamika Palmer – whose daughter Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police during a botched raid in March 2020 – is expected to attend the service.

The name Philonise Floyd became synonymous with George Floyd, who died in May of 2020 after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck and back for more than 9 minutes.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who has been in this role before, is expected to speak about the need for justice during the funeral service.

The day before Martin Luther King was killed, the family of Sharpton and Nichols gathered at a church in Memphis where he gave his famous speech.

They will never recover from the loss. On holidays, there’s a missing chair at their table. Every day, this mother and father and brothers and sisters will have to think of him. We will never leave them.

“My brother was the most peaceful person you ever met. He’s never lifted a finger to nobody. Never raised his voice to nobody,” Dupree said. If my brother were here today, he’d tell us to do this peacefully.

The Memphis Naked Shooting of Tyre Nichols: a New Look at the World after the Martin Luther King Jr. Shooting

The brutal attack sparked mostly peaceful protests from New York to Los Angeles as well as renewed calls for police reform and scrutiny of specialized police units that target guns in high crime areas.

According to his mother, RowVaughn Wells, Nichols was the youngest of four children and used to spend Sundays do laundry and prepare for the week.

He moved to Memphis right before the Covid-19 Pandemic and his mother said he stayed after the lock downs because of the health crisis.

Nichols was a regular at a Germantown, Tennessee, Starbucks where he befriended a group of people who regularly set aside their cellphone at a table and talked mostly about sports, particularly his beloved San Franscisco 49ers, according to friend Nate Spates Jr.

He would take a nap after visiting Starbucks and then head to his job at FedEx. His mother recalled that he would would come home for dinner during his break. His favorite dish: her homemade sesame chicken.

It was a form of self expression that Nichols could never capture in writing, so taking pictures gave him a new look at the world.

As mourners filled the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis on Wednesday to pay tribute to Tyre Nichols, lawmakers, clergy and activists found themselves again calling on Congress to act.

The death of Mr. Floyd, a black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, inspired a movement for police reform.

“We need to get that bill passed,” said RowVaughn Wells, Mr. Nichols’s mother. If we don’t, the next child that dies will have blood on their hands.

The bill, co-written by Vice President Kamala Harris when she was a senator, has languished for a year and a half amid partisan differences. The broad measure addresses the use of excessive force and racial discrimination, but party leaders have failed to reconcile their differences over altering the legal liability shield for individual police officers, known as qualified immunity, to make it easier to bring civil lawsuits against them for wrongdoing.

Democrats have demanded changing the federal code to make criminal prosecution of individual officers easier. The Democrats’ bill would also include restrictions on the use of deadly force except as a last resort.

The Case of Tyre Nichols: A Case for Public Safety and the Innocence of a Black Person with the Right to Be Safe

Is he not entitled to the right to be safe? Let us understand what public safety means in its truest form. Tyre Nichols should have been safe,” Harris said in her brief remarks at his Memphis funeral service.

The vice president called on Congress to pass police reform legislation as she expressed hope that Nichols death would light a light on the path toward peace and justice.

In 2020 and again in 2021, the legislation was introduced to create a national register of police wrongdoing to make it harder for officers who move from one area to another to avoid consequences.

And the road for police reform has only become more challenging in the new Congress now that House Republicans, who have placed their priorities elsewhere, are in the majority.

Despite picking up one more seat, Senate Democrats are still well short of the 60 votes needed to succeed, as evidenced by their dismal results in the last elections. Unless Congress supports a policing plan that is meaningful to them, it will likely be stripped of the measures that protesters are calling for.

A mother and father mourn the life of a young man who should be here today. A grandson doesn’t have a father. His brothers and sister will lose the love of growing old with their baby brother,” Harris said in her remarks.

The additional footage relating to the police beating of the 29-year-old black man is yet to be released, and the prosecutor is considering filing more charges in the case.

Mulroy declined to give any more information about what could be heard from that unseen video, which will be decided by the Memphis and Memphis police.

Mulroy said the footage was relevant to the initial stop and the beating at a second location. The other footage could help with the investigation.

Mulroy said that the incident report does not match up on all fours when one watches the video that has already been released.

The comments are an indication that this is the latest instance of a Black person being arrested for not living up to the terms of their parole. George Floyd, Ronald Greene, and Walter Scott were just some of the cases where charges had been filed against law enforcement officers.

The photo of the police report was posted on a controversial Memphis radio talk show host’s website. The police report account has been reported before.

Is Your Son a Killing Dog? Revealing the King of the Laws: The Kennedy in Policing Act for a Beautiful Son

Mulroy has requested that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation speed up their investigation and all of the people that were involved in the encounter are being scrutinized as prosecutors consider additional charges.

RowVaughn Wells said her son was a beautiful person and called for the enactment of the George Floyd Policing Act.

“Why do we want to see the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed? You have to think twice before you play a game. You need to think twice about shooting someone with a gun.

You walked through the doors that we had to fight to open and acted like the people we had to fight for to get through them. You did not get on the police department on your own. “The police chief didn’t get there by herself. It was a sacrifice to go to jail and some lost their lives to open the doors for you, how dare you act like that?

“This is a continuous fight that we have to fight for. We have to stand up for what’s right. We cannot continue to let these people brutalize our kids,” Wells said.

At Wednesday’s funeral, she broke into tears and said that she believed her son was dispatched on an assignment from God.