LOS ANGELES — Video footage of Memphis police officers beating up Tire Nichols has drawn comparisons to shocking footage of a watershed moment more than three decades ago in which a group of officers repeatedly punched a black motorist as he lay in the street.
“It will remind a lot of people of Rodney King,” said Ben Crump, a lawyer for Mr. Nichols’ family, told ABC News on Thursday, referring to Mr. King’s 1991 beating by Los Angeles Police Department officers.
Videos released on Friday showed a disturbing sequence in which Memphis officers repeatedly beat Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old black man, police say, after being pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving on January 7. When two officers detained Mr. Nichols, a third officer appeared to kick him in the head. Moments later, an officer hit him with a baton. Later, one officer punched Mr. Nichols at least five times while another officer held Mr. Nichols’s hands behind his back.
At the 1991 encounter, Mr. King was pulled over by Los Angeles police officers after going about 100 miles per hour. He tried to escape on foot, but officers grabbed him and violently beat him with batons, used tasers on him, and kicked him in an encounter who was captured by a neighbor who happened to have a new camcorder. The episode quickly made its way to a local TV station and was then broadcast all over the worldshocking viewers in a time before police CCTV and cell phone video became common.
Unlike Mr. Nichols, Mr. King survived his beating. Scarred and limping, he became one reluctant cultural figure. He drowned in a backyard pool in 2012 at the age of 47.
Mr. Crump and Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis this week drew comparisons between the beatings of Mr. King and Mr. Nichols, with videos of both featuring graphic images of multiple officers repeatedly beating black men.
The comparisons are striking in some ways, Los Angeles racial justice experts said Friday. But they said the differences in the cases reflect how the nation has changed in three decades.
“I don’t know if there’s as much comparison as there is continuum,” says Todd Boyd, chair for the study of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
For many Americans in California and beyond, the footage of Mr. King’s beating exposed for the first time the kind of routine abuse that communities of color suffered at the hands of law enforcement. “Rodney King is the first chapter in many ways,” said Dr. Boyd.
The officers who assaulted Mr. King were acquitted in state court the following year by a mostly white jury, sparking deadly riots that first devastated and eventually reformed Los Angeles.
Five officers in the Memphis case were fired 13 days after confronting Mr. Nichols. Six days later they were arrested and charged with manslaughter. All officers are black.
In the years since Mr. King’s assault, the rise of cell phone video and body-worn cameras has made it possible for Americans to witness a grim procession of police shootings, beatings and suffocations. Black people have been killed at a disproportionately high rate in police killings, sparking protests in cities across the country. It was a bystander video of a kneeling officer the neck of George Floydwho was pronounced dead in a hospital sparked a nationwide uprising in 2020.
“It’s unfortunate that this has happened so often that we have the option to choose what to compare it to,” said Dr. Boyd.
Dr. Boyd noted that in Mr. Nichols’ case, there are two significant differences from Mr. King’s beating: first, all of the officers charged with Mr. Nichols’ murder are black, while none of the officers in the attack on Mr. Nichols are black. black. were king. And second is the speed with which the Memphis officers were fired and charged with murder.
All things considered, said Dr. Boyd that it might suggest that officials are more likely to prosecute police officers who aren’t white. But, he said, it might suggest that “we learned from these past incidents.”
Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and co-founder of the city’s Black Lives Matter chapter, said she believed it was the latter.
“We’ve done a good job of amplifying what’s happening, shedding light on what’s happening and organizing a response,” said Dr. Abdullah. She said she saw the relatively swift indictment of Memphis officers as a sign that the names of black people killed after encounters with police have become “more than a hashtag.”
Still, Dr Abdullah and other experts stressed that the similarities between Mr Nichols’ death and a beating caught on camera more than 30 years ago demonstrated fundamental realities about policing and racial inequality that still persist.
After watching the video, she said: “It didn’t just feel like Rodney King to me. It felt like seeing pictures of enslaved people being beaten by overseers.”
Brenda Stevenson, a history professor at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Los Angeles who has studied the 1992 riots, said “the system itself” had not changed enough.
Dr. Stevenson recalled moving to Los Angeles from Virginia in January 1991, just two months before Mr. King was beaten.
She thought she was heading to a city far more diverse and progressive than any of the cities she had experienced in the South. But when she watched the footage of Mr. King’s beating, she realized her new home wasn’t all that different.
Across the country, then and now, Dr. Stevenson, black lives are not valued as much as those of other Americans—and that devaluation is perpetuated throughout society, including by police officers who are black themselves.
“It’s a racial issue — it’s also a violence issue,” she said. “The lack of respect for human life: that’s a broader problem.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting from Memphis.