Some of the fired police officers charged with the murder of Tyre Nichols were reportedly hired after the Memphis Police Department lowered its job requirements.
Nichols died on January 10, three days after Memphis police pulled him over in a traffic stop, local media reported. Nichols, and the five former police officers accused of murdering him, are black.
Officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmit Martin III, Desmond Mills, Jr., and Justin Smith have all been charged with two counts of official misconduct, local media reported, with one count of official oppression, second-degree murder, aggravated assault-act in concert, and two counts of aggravated kidnapping.
The New York Post reported that Bean and Haley joined the Memphis Police Department during the summer of 2020 as riots related to the death of George Floyd rocked the nation.
Bean and Haley’s hiring by the department in August 2020 came two years after the department significantly lowered the education required to join the force.
The lowered standards meant that recruits no longer needed an associate’s degree or 54 college credit hours to join, the report said, and could instead get by with just work experience.
Experts who spoke to the Post said the lowered requirements meant “less desirable” candidates were being brought on by the department.
A LinkedIn post by law enforcement official Karan Parmar claimed that sources inside the department said that the officers were not hired through the normal process that the department had implemented.
“According to a source within the Memphis PD, the 5 charged officers weren’t hired through the usual structured PD hiring process,” Parmar claimed. “City leaders felt the existing process was too strict and kept certain people from getting jobs at the department. City leaders began their own hiring process and then pushed new hires into the agency, bypassing the testing procedures in place at the department. You can read between the lines what that all means.”
“All 5 of the charged officers were hired by the City, and didn’t go through the rigorous PD testing process,” the statement continued. “This is what quota hiring looks like. Lawsuits and dead innocents. The city should pay (sic) the lawsuits instead of the Police department. This Murder wasn’t created by old school policing or by ‘white supremacy’. This murder was directly facilitated by liberal policy.”
You get what you ask for. pic.twitter.com/j6GlyvSzsN
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) January 29, 2023
Story cited here.
