(KRON) -- Civil rights attorney Ben Crump represents Tyre Nichols' family. Friday night, he sat down with KRON4’s Justin Campbell to talk about what he thinks should happen next.
“It’s so hard to watch these officers continue to brutalize this young man to the point of him dying,” Crump said.
Crump says he was given the body camera footage -- showing five officers kicking, pepper spraying, and tasing Nichols in early January after a traffic stop. Nichols died three days later. Crump believes the Memphis officers handled it wrong from the start.
“They had 106 minutes and 30 seconds,” Crump said. “They could have de-escalated this from the first moment they interacted with him.”
The five officers have since been fired from the department and charged with second-degree murder. which can lead to 15 to 60 years in prison in Tennessee. But Crump and Attorney Arthur Reed say they believe more charges may need to come.
“There may have been some room to increase the charges, as well as there are some other officers on the scene that may need to be charged, after looking at the video frame by frame,” Crump said.
“The best part, they have already been arrested and indicted, and been fired, not at home on a vacation eating up the taxpayer money,” said Reed, who also represents Nichols.
Attorney Crump says police officers must change how they interact with people of color.
“We don’t see our white brothers and sisters who are unarmed face this type of excessive force. Where are those videos?” Crump asked. “We see videos repeatedly of Black people, especially unarmed Black men, killed by the police… and those videos are everywhere.”
from KRON4 https://ift.tt/yzKfrZP
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