MEMPHIS (Dispatches) – More protests have erupted in the U.S. city of Memphis against the killing of young Black man, Tyre Nichols, by the police, with protesters marching blaming the U.S. government for the rising violence against the Black community and saying the system is “murdering us.”
Gathered for a common cause, the residents of Memphis, which consists of 65 percent of Black people, took to the streets as they held placards reading “RIP Tyre Nichols” and chanted, ”Whose streets? Our streets!”, and “No justice, No peace”.
At one point, the demonstrators also surrounded and cat-called a police car that was monitoring the march, and shouted against it, “Say his name! Tyre Nichols”.
“It’s supposed to be a system that protects us, that provides safety for us. But instead, it’s killing us, murdering us, innocent lives who just began their adulthood,” lamented the protesters.
“I go around Memphis, scared, every single night. This is a place where I get my education and where I live, and so I don’t want to be scared going across the street,” a protester said adding that: “I need to change to survive, just as many other 19-year-olds need to change to survive. I want to make it to 35. I want to make it past 30. I wished Tyre could have made it past 30.”
In the meantime, the police unit that included the Memphis officers involved in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols was disbanded on Saturday amid the snowballing protests.
In a statement, the police department said it was permanently deactivating the SCORPION unit after the police chief spoke with members of Nichols’ family, community leaders and other officers.
Consisting of 40 officers, the SCORPION unit was launched in November 2021 to target “violent crime”.
The Memphis protest organizer Amber Sherman said this is only a first step and other, similar specialized units also need to be eliminated, as she referred to the dismissal of the unit that attacked Nichols.
“Just by ending that unit, that’s a good move. But then you still have these same task forces that are doing that same terrorism, assaulting people, over criminalizing, the poor and low-income neighborhoods,” she said.
In another development in the U.S., three people have been shot dead and four others injured at a home near Beverly Hills, at what U.S. police described as a gathering at a short-term rental property.
Emergency services rushed to the swanky address in the Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles late Saturday, where they found three people dead in a vehicle parked outside.
Four others were being treated at hospital, two of them for critical injuries.
Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said the attack was not random. Neighbors reported seeing several cars driving away from the shooting scene within minutes of the gunfire.
The incident happened in an area nestled between Beverly Hills and Bel Air, where multi-million dollar homes with lush landscaping are located.
Detectives investigating the attack say it happened at a “short-term rental home,” The Los Angeles Times reported.