“A lack of respect for a human life”: Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers speaks out on the death of Tyre Nichols
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WTVQ) – Tyre Nichols, 29, was beaten by Memphis Police officers after a traffic stop on January 7th and died three days later from his injuries.
“That incident was not policing. I mean, that was so far outside of the realm of policing,” says Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers.
Since Nichols’ death, some bodycam and surveillance footage has been released of the tragedy. The Memphis Police Department has now fired six police officers involved, five are charged with second-degree murder among other felonies.
“Anybody who does that, we need to treat it with the highest level of outrage and the highest level of disgust. They beat a man to death,” says Weathers. “They need to be held to the highest level of accountability in order for justice to be served.”
Weathers says just like we saw a couple of years ago after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, when law enforcement in one place is involved in a horrific act, it impacts law enforcement as a whole.
“There’s no excuse for what was shown on that video. Nobody trains for that. Everybody trains for the exact opposite of that,” says Weathers. “That’s a human failure and it needs to be dealt with.”
Weathers says officers are specifically trained to not react with anger, especially after watching what led up to the protests in 2020.
“That’s not the standard we strive to set and that’s not going to be acceptable at any time, any place or anywhere,” says Weathers. “We use an academically-based training to teach officers, but we also use scenario-based training not just to teach them ‘this is what it looks like’, ‘this is what you might see’, but ‘this is how you can offset it’, ‘this is how you can intervene’. If you feel yourself leaning towards getting angry or something like that, we’ve got techniques that we can show you how not to do that. We’ve taught officers how to recognize that and how to properly intervene.”
Unlike the former officers involved in the deaths of Floyd and Taylor, the five former Memphis officers charged in Nichols’ murder are black. But Weathers says Nichols’ death is not about race, it’s about a lack of respect for a human life. His message to Lexington’s black community?
“To see that once again happen, I’m sorry that we have to go through it again. I’m sorry that somebody had to lose their life because of lack of respect for a human life,” says Weathers.
