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Speaker 1: I feel like so many other Black people feel. I feel vulnerable. I feel susceptible. I feel more in danger with every killing than I've ever felt. I really feel it.

Speaker 2: Many people have to have what we now know as the conversation with their children in order to make sure they come home. It's central to our experiences in this country.

Speaker 3: That very phenomenon of needing it to be as good task as possible, as violence as possible to care about Black life is something I think I'm aware of and understand.

Speaker 4: It started with police violence in the sense of catching former slaves, the policing of Black bodies, so there's been this ongoing infatuation with Black death. We have to find a new way in which to find justice for Black people who are killed.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show and a special welcome to everybody in the Lexington, Kentucky area, which is joining us for the first time this week. Glad to have you all in the community. This week we are processing a crushingly familiar story in Memphis, Tennessee. Officers from a special anti-crime unit of the Memphis Police Department stopped 29-year-old Tyre Nichols on January 7th. It's still unclear on what grounds he was stopped in the first place.

The officers threw him to the ground and may have even tased him as he asked why he was being stopped. When he broke free and ran a group of officers chased him down and brutally beat him for several minutes. He died in the hospital three days later. The police department released a graphic video of the beating on Friday, setting off a fresh round of national news and protests over the state-sanctioned killing of yet another Black American.

In my 25 years of journalism, I have no idea how many times I've had cause to repeat almost everything I just said. It is a crushingly familiar story and still, we need to talk about a specific human life lost and a specific community confronting the aftermath. To help us process this story, I'm joined by Karanja Ajanaku. He's the Executive Editor of The New Tri-State Defender, a news organization serving the Black community in Memphis. He also spent many years covering both City Hall and Black life in general in the city for the commercial appeal. Karanja, thanks so much for making time. I know you got a lot going on there.

Karanja Ajanaku: Kai. It's my pleasure.

Kai Wright: To be fair, there are a couple of key differences in the details of this particular case. One thing that's different in the public conversation at least about it is the fact that all five police officers involved in the beating of Tyre Nichols are Black, many have had much to say about this fact. For you, how does the race of the officers matter or not in this case?

Karanja Ajanaku: Well, I think I'll just go to what Ben Crump said at one of the press conferences that they have found in dealing with these excessive force cases. That it is not the race and ethnicity of the officer as much as it is the race and ethnicity of the victims.

Kai Wright: Ben Crump, who is now the attorney for the family, for the Nichols family, and, of course, Wolves, whose name will be known to many as someone who has been an attorney in many of these cases around the country.

Karanja Ajanaku: I think it's also important to note, though, that while five officers have been fired and charged, when you see the video, I'm sure there are a lot more officers there. They're not all African American. One of the things that certainly the street-level protestors are saying is, "Hey. What about the other officers?" What particularly about the European-American officer that you see there? We recently found that there are two sheriff's deputies, and we don't know what the ethnicity of those are.

Kai Wright: That there are more people involved in this moment than--

Karanja Ajanaku: Yes. Then they've said there would be ongoing investigations, but, whoa, when you saw it and you could actually see how many more there were, you can understand why there's such an energy from people to say, "Hey. We want to know the names of everybody and we want action and we want it now."

Kai Wright: Another important distinction for this case is what has happened since Tyre Nichols died, at least relative to national conversation about this. The officers have been fired and charged with crimes, those five at least, and there is an investigation into why he doesn't appear to have received appropriate medical attention after the beating.

The response, at least as far as it has gone from the city in terms of holding officers accountable, has been more swift than in previous cases around the country when we've had this conversation. I guess my question for you would be, is that unexpected in Memphis to you as much as happened has happened? What do you make of what has happened so far in the speed with which it's happened?

Karanja Ajanaku: Sure. I think the first thing is to note that Mr. Crump again said that the way that it has proceeded relative to the swiftness within 20 days is a blueprint for America. That he's not seen anything like that in any of these other cases. Then why is that? How did that come to be? Well, in part, you'd like to think that you would have learned something over time, but I think particularly here, we have a new district attorney who just came into office a few months ago. On the campaign trail, he promised that he would move swiftly relative to these types of cases.

The previous district attorney was more on the conservative side and so there was an expectation certainly on the part of the African-American community that they would see a different type of action from the DA's office. Then I think too, there was just the severity of it. Having the video there made a difference. This is not the first time that an unarmed African-American man has been killed in Memphis in an encounter with the police. In 2015, I believe, it was Darius Stewart was stopped and he was-- I think, a passenger in a car. There was an encounter and he was killed. There were protests and nothing happened to the officer.

I think the officer actually took some type of pension. I think he gets $2,300 a month plus 70% of his health benefits for the rest of his life. That all was there, but, again, with this new district attorney coming in and so much of the African-American community backed him, there was an expectation that something different was going to happen. I think too that just the-- we had a police chief, a relatively new police chief, Chief Sarah Davis, she's African American. I think you put those two factors together, there was some expectation that there would be something different, but 20 days within the incident I think was a surprise for a lot of people.

Kai Wright: I hear you saying that the protestors on the street are asking for what about everybody else involved, but do you get a sense from the community that what has happened thus far people are like, "Okay. Applause to these new leaders for doing it."? How have they been received? How have these [unintelligible 00:08:03]

Karanja Ajanaku: Well, different elements in the community see it differently. There are some who are saying, "Yes, we do applaud that." There are certainly different other people saying, "Well, no. We see what you've done there, but there is a lack of transparency. Why didn't we know about these officers earlier?" It depends on who you're talking to.

Kai Wright: You mentioned the video. One of the very familiar parts of this case is the video and its role as a catalyst for public attention to the case. We have talked on this show in previous cases about the weird role these videos now play in American culture. On the one hand, they are this remarkable tool for establishing the truth for bearing witness. As you pointed out, that, no doubt, was part of the energy of getting what accountability we've gotten so far in this case.

On the other hand, I have not watched the video. I quit watching them a very long time ago. Unfortunately, I can refer to them as them, and that's regardless of the fact that it's actually my job to watch them. I just won't do it. I'm disturbed by the way they live in our media. That's me and I genuinely struggle with what to think and feel about them. I guess I just wonder about, in this particular case, as someone who's thought so much about Memphis and Black Memphis in general, how do you feel about this video and its role? Just help me think that through.

Karanja Ajanaku: Well, two things. You have the body cam footage and then you have the SkyCop footage. I think if you did not have the SkyCop footage, we might be in a little different situation. The body cam shows some things, but that SkyCop shows a whole nother level. There's just no mistaking on what happened there.

Kai Wright: This is a surveillance video. This is a police surveillance camera that's mounted on a pole in some parts of the city.

Karanja Ajanaku: It was actually put in place by the county commission because there was concern, a surge in the area, and as the county one of the attorneys for the family who was a former county commissioner [unintelligible 00:10:18] while we put it up there to catch crime and now we're catching the police doing the crime. There was not that type of footage available as I said in 2015 when Darrius Stewart was killed by the police and so that makes a difference.

I understand what you're saying about not seeing it, I really do. We're a small staff here but one of the main reporter that I had, she couldn't watch it. She just asked me please don't make me cover that, and so yes I understand it, and so I jumped in to do that. People [unintelligible 00:10:58] through all search of things like that trying to process it. Somebody's got to watch it, you've got to watch it and then react and respond appropriately.

That's not so much in terms of how people react out in the street stuff like that. Getting something done, that's the thing. We don't want to keep being where we are, and so if the footage then is going to allow us to get to policy change, serious systemic change then that's what we got to do.

Kai Wright: You told her don't worry about it, you don't have to watch it I'll take over.

Karanja Ajanaku: No. I understand it, so that's my job to fill in the gap.

Kai Wright: How did you take it in when you watched it?

Karanja Ajanaku: I have children, I could hear myself just [unintelligible 00:11:59] like that. They're just holding the guy and this guy just reaches back quite a wrestling thing just over and over again. You can feel the breath come out of you, but in my case, my job is to watch it. I've got to be able to tell my readers what I saw and to put them in a position to be able to process it and to take whatever next steps that makes sense for them in terms of getting where we need to get.

Kai Wright: I'm talking with Karanja Ajanaku, Executive Editor of The New Tri-State Defender, a news organization serving the Memphis area Black community. We can also take your questions for Karanja about Memphis, about this awful story, stay with us.

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Kousha: Hey everyone this is Kousha, I'm a producer. I want to remind you that if you have questions or comments about what you're listening to we at the show would love to hear from you. Here's how, first you can email us, the address is notes@wnyc.org. Second, you can send us a voice message. Just go to notesfromamerica.org and click on the green button a little bit down the page that says start recording. Finally, you can message us on Twitter and Instagram. The handle is @noteswithkai. However you want to reach us, we'd love to hear from you and maybe use your message on the show. All right, thanks, talk to you soon.

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright and I'm talking with Karanja Ajanaku, Executive Editor of The New Tri-State Defender which is a news organization serving the Black community in Memphis, we are talking about the awful story of the police killing of Tyre Nichols. We can also take your questions for Karanja about Memphis, about this awful story, whatever you've got on your mind. Karanja you've been covering the story from its beginning, it did not start this weekend when the video became public. Can you introduce us to Tyre Nichols, what have you reported about his life?

Karanja Ajanaku: Well, I think the best version of who he is comes from his mother, and boy your heart goes out for her being in front of the national media so many times and having to talk about her son under the circumstances. He was 29 years old, he worked at the FedEx hub with his stepfather who they just said it was his father, they were that close. He loved photography. He particularly loved skateboarding, and he loved taking photos of sunsets.

He was off that weekend, and his mom said that her name's RowVaughn Wells, that he was coming back from one of those sunset adventures when this happened. She said that every mother says that Hey they've got a good son, but as she said that he wasn't perfect but she said [unintelligible 00:15:47] She said that he had a tattoo of her on his arm, and she said sons don't normally do that. She said that he loved her dearly, that he was just the kind of guy that you can't seem to fight anybody that said this guy was a difficult personality. In fact, just the opposite. He would meet often with some friends up at Starbucks, and he was a very sociable kind of gentleman.

It's worth noting that he had Crohn's disease and amongst the things that does it affects your weight. They said that he weighed really about or just a little less than 150 pounds as they said "soaking wet" which made this [unintelligible 00:16:43] situation just that much more that five people are beating up this gentleman who by all accounts is the personality that you would want your son to have and to demonstrate.

Kai Wright: Whoever you are five on one, that's just basic stuff. Be it before we get to any of the rest of it, how are five people beating up one person? It's not surprising the outcome. What I said earlier that it's not clear yet why he was stopped in the first place. What has the Memphis Police Department said or the city said about why they were bothering him in the first place?

Karanja Ajanaku: You have to go back to this now disbanded Scorpion Unit, and one of these special units that actually the new police chief put in place about five months after she came in. I think she came in 2021. There had been concern and there is concern about a surge in crime, so this unit was put in place to do that. She says that there is evidence that it had been doing its job. It's gotten bad actor's off the street.

It's got a lot of guns, but what we know now at least certainly from listening to Mr. [unintelligible 00:18:04] and those folks that there have been a number of people in the community that are saying that this basically was a rogue unit built on essentially domestic terrorism in terms of how it was going about its business. I think attorney Antonio Romanucci was saying that you can call it whatever you want, Scorpion Unit or whatever but he said it's these saturation units and they tend to be oppression units, and they focus in on so-called Black and brown children and they just want to miss.

It's interesting too that our police chief here at one point served in Atlanta and she was over a similar type of operation I think they called it Red Dog there, and had also eventually ran into some criticism about how the officers were really going about the same type of aggressive behavior here, and I think it was eventually disbanded.

Kai Wright: Just to get a little more backstory about this unit, because I'd like to understand how it came to be in the first place. Now, this is again--the unit is called Scorpion. We have heard time and time again in cities across the country and throughout history that these are the units where there's so often excessive force comes out of it. It's worth noting that you interviewed the police chief. She told you they were never going to disband it, and then a couple days later they did in fact disband it, so it has now been disbanded.

Karanja Ajanaku: I wouldn't say that she said never, but it was obvious at that point when our reporter talked to her that she didn't think that was the way to go. She thought it was too much of a reaction to a bad actors. There was such a pushback in the community on multiple levels that she changed course in 24 hours. She met with members of the Scorpion Unit, and they agreed that they weren't going to go forward. I think Mr. Romanuchi really put it into the context is that given what has happened and our ability to see it, how is it that anybody in the community could ever trust that unity was basically defunct, and I think so many people got to her, and of course, 24 hours she changed her mind and it is now gone.

Kai Wright: Now it's gone but how it got there in the first instance? It was presumably in response to an outcry from the community about crime. Can you give the backstory of how you think this unit came to be in the first place? Because it's fairly new.

Karanja Ajanaku: True. She set it up, there's no doubt about that and she said she was hearing so often from people who they couldn't sleep at night from just the amount of gunfire, and things that are going on, a lot of guns in the Memphis. There are a lot of guns in Memphis, and there are a lot of people dying. I think we had over 300 people murdered last year and that's an improvement.

Kai Wright: So it's not a crime panic, we're talking about, there's a real crime problem that people in the community are concerned about?

Karanja Ajanaku: Yes, but the issue is how are you going to go about it, and I don't care what you put in place, that the thing is, you have to be accountable. When you go back in and you look at these officers, they are really seriously veteran officers and so then the question becomes, how are these officers picked? By whom? How are they trained, and what is the accountability so far? Which I don't know. What is the record here? How many complaints have they been from her side I hear her saying that every complaint that would have been addressed but I'm hearing from Mr. Crump and others that people called up, they called Internal Affairs.

Particularly one guy that they talked about who said that these officers and we don't know specifically if this these officers because there's four teams, put a gun to his head, he called Internal Affairs twice, and he got no feedback and so there has to be accountability for that. Even as I said the other day to another organization I was talking to, that we in the media have to take a look at ourselves too in terms of the role that we play and making sure that there is accountability.

A lot of us, especially African American newspapers, Legacy papers our resources are really, really major. We don't cover crime here as an every day be, there's more than one reason for that. What we don't but when I'm thinking about it now, I'm saying you know what? I'm going after redeploy what I do have, just not so much to cover crime but to cover accountability relative to the enforcement of crime, the law enforcement relative to crime.

Kai Wright: You came to Memphis as a young reporter just out of school in 1977 and adopted the city as your own, it's got this rich Black history both celebratory, and challenging. How much did you know about the city at the time and what'd do you know about it then and what did you come to learn about it that made you love it?

Karanja Ajanaku: I knew two things about Memphis. I knew that Elvis Presley was from here, I used to watch [unintelligible 00:23:41], especially movies and I knew that Dr. King died here. I got here because I went to the University of Missouri journalism school. I was in the bathroom one day, a professor came in and said, someone didn't show up for an interview at the Commercial Appeal, would you go in and the school won't look bad?

I said, "Well, what is that?" Commercial appeal because there's no name from city to it. He said, "It's Memphis.' Okay, fine. I went in, I did the interview for 15 minutes, I think for 13 he didn't ask me anything about journalism, he asked me about routes.

Kai Wright: The miniseries routes? Go ahead.

Karanja Ajanaku: Yes. At that time, I was taking two courses because I was finished with everything else. One was the private and America, and the other was routes, so I could talk about it this way, that way. That's when he said, "Well, we don't have a job." I said, "Well, that's fine, I'm just in here for the experience so who want to look bad." Two weeks later call me back and said, "Hey, we got a job." I said, "No, man, I got an interview with some others." We went through a long process, and that same guy in the bathroom convinced me that this would be a good place to start your career.

I came to Memphis and just tried to make my way through with covering. Eventually, they started integrating the downtown beats. When I got there, there were only two other African American reporters at the Daily Newspaper, and I was the third and after a couple of years, they'd said, they're going to start integrating the downtown beats. One of my friends was sent to the police department on the other side of federal B and I went to City Hall.

Kai Wright: Making you one of the first black people to cover City Hall in Memphis?

Karanja Ajanaku: Yes. I went through that, and then we would call in one day and the editor is now past decided he was getting some heat, a lot of heat from the community about the lack of coverage relative to the African American community, and all the African American reporters, we had a few more at that time. We got together all the things we want to talk to him about this, but obviously had something's, he wanted a specific reporter like a "minority affairs reporter" that was on the community as I recall, and I'm the only one in the room who argued against it.

I said, "Look now that we've gotten to the point where we recognize we need to cover the community as a whole, we need to get into it no need to"-- but it was obvious that he wanted to do one person. I went back I thought about it, went back in, I told him I want that job. He says, "Well, why would you want a job that you're just arguing for?" I said, "Because one, if you can make something out of it, I know I've got the skills to do that and if it needs to die, I know, I got the courage to tell you that too."

For about two and a half years, I just covered from the top to the bottom. At that time Ben Hooks was the head of the National NAACP, he was from Memphis, I followed him and different people around and just-- I got affected really, to be honest with you. I started to learn not so much about the community but I started to learn about myself relative to the community, and then ran into a group here in Memphis that just really introduced me to another way of looking at slavery, and how to look at myself relative to that, then I went through a process of self-discovery, made the transition from Leroy, we [unintelligible 00:26:53] and now here I am.

Kai Wright: I asked you to recount all that because you have deep, deep knowledge of the city and the Black community relationship to the city and place in it. I just wonder if you could characterize when a story like this happens, what is the community's relationship to power in civic life there. In terms of feeling like it's a majority Black city but does it feel like a majority Black city that has control over government, over power, and the city?

Karanja Ajanaku: Well, it isn't majority African American communities, no doubt about that but it's a very, very poor community. We have African Americans throughout government both we have a city and county mayor system. Both of the mayors are African American, their sheriff is African American, most of the people on the city council, African American and on the school board, but it's a very poor city and from an economic standpoint, we are nowhere near where we need to be and I know you know that if you don't have your economic base together, your politics is really just window dressing in a way.

That really, to me, in addition to what we've got to do from a social justice and criminal justice standpoint, we've got to get some economic justice going on both in terms of any pediments from the outside, but also there has to be a mind shift inside, about how we're going to go about marketing our resources. It is one thing to say that we've got X number of people, but if you don't have a structure in place to be able to do something with those numbers, it doesn't work, it just doesn't work.

Historically, that's been the challenge here, how we've learned to take these numbers and marshal them in some kind of way that we can leverage an economic opportunity. We've got this big Ford operation coming in here with electric vehicles, and in western states, there's the promise of so many jobs and opportunities here, but we have to be structured to be able to handle that and that's really the challenge here.

Kai Wright: Is money indeed. Neva on YouTube asks, do the officers live in Memphis, and how people in the community are reacting to them as individuals? I hear getting at like it's-- we talked about all the system things, but these are five human beings who did this to another human being, and I just wonder about that.

Karanja Ajanaku: Yes, they're all from either Memphis or the Memphis area. I haven't heard anything to say they're not from outside of Memphis. In fact, I think right now that's where our offices come from and so we don't really know as much about them as we need to know, and that's really the next frontier from my standpoint. Just digging into who these people are and as I said earlier, where did they come from? How did they get hired, and what was involved in that? If you could really, really get into it and really dig into their background it's like, what in the world was it in their background that could cause one human being to work in concert with other human beings to treat another human being the way that they did on video?

Kai Wright: Knowing that they were being videoed.

Karanja Ajanaku: When you listen to the video, the videos, and the footage you can hear that them almost and I don't even say almost it sounds like they're concocting a story. They knew that it was on. At one point one of them says, "Yes, did you see him go for my gun?" No, I don't see anything. I see you talking about that thing. Who are these people? As I said, I tell somebody the other day as bad as these actors are and they got to own up for that, but they have families too, and they have children. We got to find a way to-- how do I say it? Be holistic in the healing process, relative to that. That ain't no easy thing.

Kai Wright: Karanja Ajanaku is editor of The New Tri-State Defender in Memphis. Check them out to follow this ongoing story, and thank you so much for spending this time with us.

Karanja Ajanaku: My pleasure Kai. Thank you.

Kai Wright: Notes from America is a production of WNYC studios. Follow us wherever you get your podcast or on both Instagram and Twitter @noteswithkai. If you heard anything you want to chime in about this week, you can leave us a voice message right on our website. Just go to notesfromamerica.org and look for the record button. Our live engineer was Matthew Miranda mixing and Music by Jared Paul. Our team also includes Karen Frillman, Regina de Heer, Vanessa Handy, Rahima Nasa, Kousha Navidar, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. I am Kai Wright. Thanks for spending time with us.

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