Washington Post Editorial on the Tyre Nichols Murder Shows Liberal Reformers Are All Out of Ideas—Even Fake Ones

A phoned-in editorial shows that elite consensus makers aren’t even bothering to run through the motions of substantive reform.

Measuring elite policy consensus can be difficult, but one way media critics attempt to do it is to register the opinions of major editorial boards. Comprised of columnists, high status opinion curators, and other major players who shape the news, they provide an insight into how our media class thinks and acts. In and of themselves, almost no one listens to them, but like a lot with legacy media they matter to people who matter: lawmakers, CEOs, the wealthy. So what they say does have tremendous consequence.  

The police murder of Tyre Nichols is the first majorly publicized post-George Floyd police killing. And one reason it’s the first one to cause a media storm is because it was so egregious and naked in its brutality. Institutions like The Washington Post—which would just as soon never talk about police violence again—were forced to say something, to have a stance, to offer an opinion. 

So they checked the box, and what they came up with provides a useful example of how our liberal institutions, when it comes to even feigning support for “police reform,” are entirely out of ideas—even fake ones. In their editorial, “On violent policing, we say ‘never again’ but we get ‘once again,’ the Washington Post editorial board manages to look Concerned, Sad, and Upset, but offers basically zero idea of how to prevent killings like those of Tyre Nichols from happening again. 

Wade through all 900 words and one is hard pressed to find any actual solutions on offer, except to “modify the qualified immunity doctrine.” How exactly? It’s not clear. The editorial then mentions the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act but doesn’t support it, despite this being a lay up. Activists have roundly criticized it as an insulting, toothless half measure. But this isn’t even something The Post can bother feigning support for to “do something.” 

After acknowledging Memphis has already enacted many “reforms,” they don’t see this as an indictment on the reforms themselves, but as a good thing that somehow is independent from this latest police killing. Then they offer their actual solution—squishy “cultural” changes:

The change Memphis and many other departments need is the kind that cannot come from laws and policies alone: cultural. Police officers — regardless of their race — too often regard young Black men as inherently suspect or dangerous. The savagery with which the police beat Mr. Nichols was unfathomable. But so was the f-bomb-laced disrespect with which they immediately approached him, based on what appears to have been at most a traffic violation, and then suddenly snatched him out of his car.

Basically, The Post is calling on police to just be nicer guys. Liberal reformism is now moved on entirely to Vibes. How this is achieved isn’t clear. But they have to call on something to change, and anything with any teeth or substance—like, say, redirecting resources away from police into social services or life-giving institutions—is simply not on the table. So, since this is out of the question, and all the empty “reforms” are already on the books, all that’s left is dopey calls to change “culture.” This is the logical end of an approach that is entirely bankrupt, by design. As Derecka Purnell points out today in a scathing and urgent piece in The Guardian: 

“Almost all of the reforms that liberals suggest will save Black lives were present in Tyre’s death. Diversity was not an issue: the five cops who killed him are all Black. The body cameras strapped to their chests did not deter their fists from delivering blow after blow. Memphis has about 2,000 cops, and if this were a “few bad apples” in the department issue, then maybe they all happened to be working on the same shift. Cops did not shoot Tyre; they opted for a less deadlier force: they beat him for three minutes, shocked him and pepper-sprayed him. 

In fact, Memphis police department boasts that they have met all of the features of Campaign Zero’s #8CantWait campaign, which includes a requirement for officers to intervene when other officers are using excessive force and a requirement to de-escalate encounters with civilians. The department has been under a consent decree for decades. MPD hired its first Black woman police chief in 2021 and holds Black History Knowledge bowls and basketball programs to “build trust” and relationships with local teenagers.

You should read the whole piece (and buy her excellent book). It makes all the points I’m making here, but much better. What I’d like to build on is how this basic fact—that all the liberal reforms implemented since 2014 were present that day and did nothing—necessarily means the liberal responses will become more vague, lifeless, obscure, and padded with schlock. They’ve run out of placebos to hand out. There isn’t much else they can offer up that doesn’t meaningfully shift and weaken the power of our police and prison state which they absolutely do not want to do..

Obviously, counterfactuals can be difficult to prove (perhaps liberal reforms in Memphis prevented deaths that, by definition, never happened). But this can’t be true either, because data makes clear police killings are up. Indeed, according to one recent analysis by Mapping Police Violence, 2022 had the most police killings since researchers began keeping track in 2013. 

The half measures, “more training,” banning chokeholds for the 900th time, approach isn’t changing the basic calculus of policing. Police killings aren’t even the primary criteria: They’ve always been the tip of the iceberg of abuse, harassment, over-policing, over-sentencing, and racial discrimination—all of which remains largely unchanged since 2014. A broader architecture of oppression The Post editorial board, despite their hand-wringing, routinely supports. In October they joined a moral panic over fare evasion, calling for “an enforcement campaign” to “send an overdue message to Metro riders: The rules are there to be followed,” and heavily hinting the D.C. city council should re-criminalize turnstile jumping. This is the way the game of phony Liberal Concern is played. The Washington Post twice opposes a social solution that would meaningfully reduce police interactions (free fares on D.C. transit), supports a policy shift that would massively increase those police interactions (police fare enforcement) then feigns concern about the inevitable result of over policing: violent interactions stemming from police interactions. 

So all that’s left is vague claims about changing “culture.” Not a new demand, but one that is uniquely unfalsifiable so it’ll be here to stay. The one concrete item politicians, high status pundits, and the Post are rallying around, the major liberal reform that remains elusive—Qualified Immunity—is just another way to look busy and buy time. Getting rid of it would be a net win, but it would do little to change the basic problem of police power. As Purnell notes in her piece, “Those who care about justice must absolutely challenge qualified immunity, as long as they understand that the protections that cops receive through the law is not the basis for their violence. Cops brutalized and killed people before they had immunity. The job necessitates it, which is why abolitionists have fought to reduce and eliminate police funding, encounters with cops, and the underlying reasons why cops have jobs in the first place.”

What else is left to say? After murder rates increased in major cities during the pandemic, it became fashionable to bash “Defund the police” as unserious, hurting Democrats, and not representing the True Voice of the Black Voter. But reinvesting resources away from police and prisons into institutions that educate, care, and provide life is the only sensible, pragmatic solution. Don’t call it “Defund” if you don’t want, but concrete, material reallocation of resources is how you change the entrenched politics at work—not legal tweaks, finger-wagging, pointless “bans,” or other time-wasting lateral passes.