1. Tire Nichols
This 29-year-old African-American died in hospital on January 10, three days after being brutally beaten by five black police officers during a traffic check. Propelled into the spotlight, Cerelyn J. Davis, the chief of police of Memphis, knew how to conquer America by her unprecedented management of this tragedy.
2. Black Woman
Cerelyn J. Davis, alias “CJ”, was the first black woman to take the reins of the police force in Durham (North Carolina) in 2016, then in Memphis (Tennessee) in 2021. An exception in the United States, which usually reserve this position for white men: a 2021 Police Executive Research Forum survey found that police chiefs were only 9% women and 14% black.
3. Emotion
“If your image of a police chief is that of a gruff tough guy chewing on a cigar, then you need to meet CJ Davis”launched journalist Megyn Kelly when she received her on her show in 2017. The sixty-year-old police chief, who is a mother and grandmother, is the complete opposite. In a video carried out during the pandemic, we see her in uniform reading an album on a family of elephants for children deprived of school. And she did not hide her emotion hearing Tire Nichols scream ” Mom ! »in the video of his arrest, as he was beaten up.
Memphis: the Tire Nichols case extends, seven police officers and three firefighters now implicated
4.George Floyd
She says she is haunted by two victims of police violence: George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis in 2020, and Rodney King, a motorist beaten up in Los Angeles in 1991. But the atrocious death of Tire Nichols is beyond comprehension: “I don’t think I’ve witnessed anything of this nature in my entire career. »
5. Speed
In two weeks, “CJ” did what the police usually do in a year. It fired the offending police officers, disbanded their unit and released the footage of the arrest. “Communities will never trust us if we don’t treat officers the way we treat citizens when they commit egregious acts”she explained.
6. Scorpio
To restore order in Memphis, which had just broken a record of 342 homicides, it created the Scorpion special unit in 2021, which was to “restoring peace” in high-crime neighborhoods. Ironically, the five police officers involved in the death of Tire Nichols were part of this unit. Forced to admit failure, “CJ” disbanded her.
Memphis police dismantle unit involved in arrest that killed Tire Nichols
7. Reform
After the death of George Floyd, she went to the Senate to plead for police reform: the establishment of close relations with local communities, a modification of the legal protection of police officers, the creation of a national register of complaints aimed at the security forces, the prohibition of strangulation and a revision of the rules of intervention in order to oblige officers who witness police violence to act. A vision that goes in the direction of the legislative project known as “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act”. But the text has been blocked in Congress for two years for lack of a sufficient majority.
8. Commitment
During her more than thirty-year career, she has always been a committed police officer: in 2008, she was one of the 80 women making up the group of “Leaders of tomorrow” selected by Oprah Winfrey’s “O” magazine. Ten years later, she became president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, an organization of police officers that seeks to improve policing in the African-American community.
9. Georgia
Born into a military family stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, she grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where she rose through the ranks of the police one by one. A former Confederate state where she was able to measure as“African American the perpetual existence of discriminatory practices that remain a haunting reality for people of color throughout our country”.
CASE. This police violence that provokes global anger
10. Model
His management of the Nichols case is unanimous. “I feel that she makes things happen”said RowVaughn Wells, the young man’s mother. “He is a model for America”also applauded Ben Crump, a famous civil rights lawyer who is not very tender with the police.
