The message that US President Joe Biden expressed on Friday about the death of Tyre Nichols after a conversation with the mother of the 29-year-old African American, who died on Jan 10, three days after five Memphis Police Department officers beat him during a traffic stop, is unequivocal: I can only do so much and he has called for Congress to send the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to his desk. When Senate Republicans blocked that bill, he signed an executive order that mandated stricter use of force standards and accountability provisions for federal law enforcement, as well as measures to strengthen accountability at state and local levels.
The way Nichols was brutally beaten by police officers, as the video shows, naturally leads to the question whether or not it is an issue that can be addressed by such institutional patchwork measures, even if they are at the federal level.
Even if police officers are found guilty of using excessive force, the death of Nichols shows that it is not enough to act as a deterrent to other police officers, as a result of Floyd's murderer Derek Chauvin, who was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
On June 27th, 2013 in Akron, Ohio, police officers killed 25-year-old Jayland Walker after a traffic stop and car chase. The police officers fired more than 90 times at the African American when he was not carrying a weapon, and the autopsy results showed he was hit by 46 bullets.
Biden pointed out that such tragedies have a lot to say and do with the image of the US, on whether or not we are the country we say we are, but he was telling the people that he would be no different from other presidents in evading the root causes of the problem because he would incur fundamental changes in the national wealth distribution pattern to give African Americans fair development opportunities. He will do what most of his predecessors did, which is to try and prevent the pot from boiling over by giving it a gentle stir.
By doing so, the US president and the whole political system of the country have become an accomplice of the evil, which has become a defining feature of the country, to Biden's disappointment.