Tennessee's Governor Subverted Police Reforms After the Killing of Tyre Nichols

Local organizers claimed victory when the city of Memphis passed several ordinances that would restrict police, including one called the ​“Driving Equality Act in Honor of Tyre Nichols,” which banned stopping drivers for minor infractions like a brake light out or recently expired registration. 

And it is this ordinance that the state of Tennessee recently overruled.

Gov. Bill Lee signed into law Senate Bill 2572, that blocks Tennessee cities from enacting local police reforms, forbidding any law ​“that prohibits or limits the ability of a law enforcement agency to take all necessary steps that are lawful under state and federal law to fulfill the law enforcement agency’s duties to prevent and detect crime and apprehend criminal offenders.”

That’s a mouthful, but what it means is that years of local work and gut-wrenching advocacy by N ichols’s family goes in the trash. And it’s part of a growing pattern of state governments moving to curtail any sort of reform that might improve the lives of Black, brown and working-class people at the city level.

While some of those efforts have been in the form of preemptively banning ordinances, like minimum wage increases, that might get passed in the future, this one stings particularly because it comes on the heels of a hard-won success.

RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, Nichols’s mother and stepfather, lobbied the state legislature heavily to stop the bill, to come up with a compromise, to preserve some of the reforms. 

They called the move ​“political sabotage” and said ​“this bill hurts us deeply.” Further, they noted, ​“This legislation was clearly targeted to take down the ordinances named after our son, and while we miss him dearly, this is about so much more than Tyre. There are many other Memphians that have experienced pretextual stops with police that ended with violence. Our goal was to create something in Memphis that could protect our community, but even after doing so, our success is fleeting.”

The bill’s main sponsor, state Sen. Brent Taylor, is one of many politicians around the country (and not just in so-called red states like Tennessee), who are riding a post-Covid, post-George Floyd Rebellion wave of fears of ​“crime.”

Decarcerate Memphis organizer Joshua Adams called it ​“fearmongering and scare tactics,” a way to galvanize a right-wing base. ​“No matter what the data says, as long as he can scare his base into believing something different, he’s going to be hard on that line. So he cannot defend his choices around these bills very well.” 

Taylor told reporters that Nichols’s life would not have been saved by the ordinances he overturned, and according to state Rep. Justin Pearson, he also said this to Nichols’s family, when they pleaded with him for time to find a compromise. ​“What type of person would say that? Let alone somebody in a position of power?” Pearson asked on his Instagram page. But Pearson vowed to keep fighting, and so did local organizers, even as they acknowledged the pain of the loss.

Amber Sherman, a longtime organizer who was central to the fight for the Memphis ordinances, told me ​“It’s very draining watching the reforms we put in place that we really fought hard for be pushed out in this way, especially in a preemption by the state, especially a state that has acknowledged what actually happened in Memphis and that someone was viciously murdered.”

“We address these bureaucratic matters by deploying armed police to collect fines (42% of all police contact is traffic stops),” the report noted. 

It also found that traffic stops were ​“disproportionately enforced upon Black and low-income drivers,” that between the years 2017 and 2021, ​“Black drivers were cited 10 percentage points more than their share of the population. Black drivers were twice as likely as white drivers to receive multiple citations on one ticket.”

In other words, Black drivers were being pulled over more often, written up more often, and got more tickets per stop. And that was when the stops did not result in violence. The report proved RowVaughn Wells correct when she said, ​“what those people don’t understand that with pre-textual stops is all they are doing is harassing Black citizens of Memphis.”

After the report, Decarcerate spoke to the Memphis City Council on December 6, 2022. They had ordinances already written to present to the council, vetted by lawyers and based in some cases on laws passed in other cities. They expected a fight that would take years, but then Nichols was killed. Their ordinances dovetailed with what Nichols’s family and the protesters in the streets were demanding, and so they began to move. 

Sherman was organizing alongside community groups, making sure that there was a presence at every council meeting, that people were calling and emailing the council constantly, providing transportation for people who might have a hard time getting there. 

“We had to push a social media campaign. I did a lot of digital organizing, especially on Instagram and TikTok,” she said. ​“And then we were going to these meetings every two weeks because it takes three readings and votes for something to be passed.” There were delays, waffling from the council, even an attempt to put Nichols’s name on a bill that contained things the family and the organizers opposed. 

There were moments through the process, Adams said, that felt like ​“glimpses of democracy,” in conversations with the council, with staffers, in negotiations that were sometimes messy but through which something was actually achieved and trust was built. They built in turn on the work of years past done by UpTheVote901, Black Lives Matter, Memphis Artists for Change, the Memphis Coalition of Concerned Citizens, and others, to change the idea of what it means to have public safety, because Tyre Nichols was not the first one, the Wellses not the only family members to get the call that their loved one was dead at the hands of Memphis police. 

Nyliayh Stewart was a teenager when her cousin Darrius was killed, in 2015, and testified in front of the council in 2023. ​“My cousin would still be here today if that law would’ve been passed eight years ago,” she told me. He had been the passenger in a car that was pulled over for a broken light, and she still isn’t clear on how the officer ended up shooting him. Only that the officer was never indicted.

For Stewart, even the Memphis ordinances did not go far enough. It was hard for her to celebrate, she said, ​“when this could have been done years ago and my cousin would still be here.” She was happy that it might save others, but it was hard for her to feel celebratory. 

And now, even the pretextual stops ban that would have prevented her cousin’s death is gone. 

But what now? Sherman had done electoral organizing in the past, but the passage of the ordinances in Memphis had cemented her decision to focus on issue work. Yet watching the state just undo their efforts was ​“emotionally draining,” she said. ​“I think it also made it harder for us to organize in a way,” she continued, noting that it’s harder to say ​“look at the local power that we have and the things that we can do” when the state just swept in to preempt it all.

Still, she said, ​“We’re not just going to let that stand and we’re reminding folks that there are always options.”

The right-wing supermajority at the state level has been maintained by ​“gerrymandered districts, disenfranchised voters and an increasing sense of political despair,” according to George Chidi at the Guardian, and it has used that power to crack down on dissent. Pearson and Justin Jones, another Black state representative, were expelled by the state house last year for taking part in a protest following a school shooting. One of the governor’s first moves in office, Adams noted, had been to help crush a union drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga (the same Volkswagen plant that just voted to unionize on their third try). 

The Republicans are clear that they oppose everything the Memphis organizers stand for, but most of the Democrats, Adams noted, have been milquetoast at best. 

Now, Adams said, it is more obvious than ever that they need to expand a people-powered strategy. What that means to him is to organize more people across the state to ​“move the police and the prison out of the center of focus,” and then to build their willingness to demand change without apology, without fear, to understand ​“that they have been wronged, and to believe that they are owed something after they have paid taxes for a system that comes in and takes and takes and takes.” 

Sherman said people on the ground are considering multiple options to fight, and she does not think that the power built in the past years of struggle has gone away. 

“I think the main thing that’s changed is people realizing their power and seeing where the decisions are made and that they can push back against something and be successful. It just takes time,” she said.

Across the South, she said, she has seen a more dramatic movement for justice in recent years than ever before. ​“I was in Atlanta when 400 people came for public comment against the budget for Cop City,” she said, ​“I think that now more than ever, we’re really seeing more sustained movements of people.”

Passing the ordinances, she continued, required a multifaceted strategy that held space for everyday people as well as committed organizers, that contained asks of people who had money to donate for stipends and snacks as well as their time. ​“There’s more good happening than bad. But that fearmongering and that hysteria that the media and our government are creating is really being used to squander our organizing to make it easier for them to give more money to police or to continue criminalizing us.”

The South, Adams concurred, has much to teach the rest of the country. ​“One piece is do not let a sleeping dog lie,” he said. The consolidation of power that Tennessee has seen is not unique to that state, nor is the ongoing capitulation to policing. 

“There is this bubbling up of a racist, regressive ideology in certain political spheres, it should be our work to agitate it out.”