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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you are here. I'm looking forward to seeing some of you tonight at our Get Lit with All Of It event at the New York Public Library. We've spent the month reading Stacey Schiff's, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. Now it's time to discuss, and also time to hear Rosanne Cash perform. Tickets are sold out but you can watch our live stream or you can join the standby line at 5:30. Very often people get in. For more information, go to wnyc.org/getlit.

On today's radio show will mark the 25th anniversary of the movie Titanic. With a whole hour, we have some shenanigans planned, and we'll also talk to Grammy winner and current nominee, Christopher Tin. That is our plan. We're going to get started with a conversation about the fatal police beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols. There are videos of Tyre Nichols, the skateboarder, not the victim of police brutality. They're all over social media. Friends of Nichols wanted to spread the message that he was a real person who had passions and interests.

Mai Perkins said the reason she shared the clip was, "To extend to him in death, the dignity he deserved in life." Many people chose to watch that clip rather than be potentially traumatized by images of five Memphis police officers brutally beating a young Black man. There are so many questions in this age where so much is caught on camera. When did these videos cross over from being valuable evidence to something else?

How should the media cover police violence in a way that isn't exploitative of Black bodies and grief? How do we engage with disturbing videos of violence and police brutality while taking care of ourselves? With me now, as we take your calls on these questions is Arun Venugopal, senior reporter for WNYC's Race & Justice Unit. Arun, thank you for being with us today.

Arun Venugopal: Thanks for having me, Alison.

Alison: Listeners, we want to know, did you watch any portion of the Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols? Why or why not? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also reach out on social media @allofitwnyc. Did you watch because you want to feel informed and advocate for justice? What do you want from the media in this moment? How have you been thinking about engaging with the videos and media coverage surrounding Tyre Nichols death? What do you want to see? Should the video be shown?

We want to hear from you. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. How do you think our culture has changed regarding police violence and media coverage since 2020? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. If there's been a change, what do you think it is and what do you think's the cause? Our social media is @allofitwnyc. Arun, as our screeners take some calls and get them set up for us, let's start the conversation about-- the conversations that you and your colleagues, and the Race & Justice Unit have about how to cover police violence and brutality.

Arun: There's no one particular thing that I can pinpoint. It's more the ongoing conversations that happen, hundreds of ways in which you're talking to your colleagues, fellow reporters, and editors, and those conversations happen. There are hundreds of those that over the course of time, especially with things this, we're talking about years and years. I think there's no specific directive about you must watch this video, or you are completely allowed to not watch it. It doesn't necessarily happen at that level. For me personally, I ultimately had to watch it because of my job.

For days before that, I thought, "Do I need to watch this?" There's so much hype and build-up. If it came at-- I don't know, 7:00 PM or so on, on Friday, I was probably watching it by 7:10, 7:15. I was about to go to dinner and I felt I have to see this. Of course, you're haunted by this, you need people to talk with because you're juggling this thing of watching it as a journalist who probably has to deal with this professionally. Also with just the blunt force of encountering these things yet again.

Alison: Each situation is unique and has its unique set of circumstances. There was something about knowing this was coming that gave it in some ways I think gave a little more dread in some ways, and the way that it was presented like this is going to be bad. This wasn't cell phone video that leaked that some kid had taken. This was the police chief saying, "This is going to be bad." This was the city leader saying and announcing it with such force so early on that, I don't know, somehow I think that is part of this story and the way people are engaging with this particular horrific video.

Arun: Yes. I think what we forget is that we're not feeling these things in isolation. We are living through very challenging times. The last time that we had something of this level was a couple months into the pandemic, and then the whole country, so many people, millions of people are coming out in the streets. Three years later, it's sort of that feeling of, I don't know, is it Deja Vu or what is this going to happen yet again? How do I feel about that? How do I simply psychologically deal with this stuff? I think a lot of us are feeling very fragile in ways that are just different from the many, many, many times this has happened in the past.

Alison: Let's take a call. Lex is calling in from Jamaica, Queens, on line four. Hi, Lex, thanks for calling All Of It.

Lex: All right, thanks. Good afternoon.

Alison: Good afternoon.

Lex: Specifically what I chose to do was not watch the beating because I'm beyond the hill in terms of having the pain be something that's carrying with me every day. I think everyone knows, or at least they must have some idea what loss is. Just like James Baldwin said that quote, "To be Black in America and relatively conscious is to be in a almost constant rage, and the only way to tamp down that rage is to try to focus on the things that are beautiful, the things that add value in your every day."

I pour into the people I love. I reach out to my friends I haven't talked to in a minute, from college, from grade school. I do my damndest to a pastor. I've watched that video of him skateboarding, and it was wonderful to see him alive and free and moving. I couldn't bring myself to watch those other brothers in those blue uniforms destroy another Black man. I've lost family to gun violence.

My very first memory is of my cousin who ended up being shot in the head coming up a hill in Jamaica. I know for a fact that he died a violent death. My very first memory in life is of him literally walking up a hill in West Indies. I carry both of those things and that's what being Black is in a lot of ways for me. It's carrying that pain and transmuting it into something that's beautiful and transcendent.

Alison: Lex, thank you so much for calling in and being so vulnerable and candid with us. We really appreciate it. I want to talk to Magarey, calling in from Saugerties, New York. Hi, Magory. Thank you so much for calling in.

Magory: Oh, thank you for taking my call. I forced myself to watch this video because as an older white woman, I am and not living in this city any longer. I feel it is my obligation to myself to experience the horrors that are so blatantly imposed on Black and brown people. As uncomfortable as I was it's unspeakable. I just felt I had to experience what I don't experience. I walk outside and I'm a white woman-- somebody who's Black and to be perpetrated by people of his own race is just horrifying. Something has to change.

Alison: Magory, thank you so much for calling in. Magory was calling in from Saugerties, eastern New York. Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Did you watch any portion of the video of the beating of Tyre Nichols? Perhaps you chose to watch the skateboarding videos instead. What do you want from your media during these times? We would be very interested in hearing about that. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

Joining me is senior reporter for WNYC's Race & Justice Unit, Arun Venugopal. It was so interesting to hear what Magory said because she said-- I think she used the word responsibility, that she felt it was her responsibility to be informed. I think that is part of the tension here is you don't want to watch this because it is so brutal, but at the same time don't we have a responsibility to bear witness?

Arun: Yes. I think that there's a question that is sort of like-- or a responsibility for those of us who are not Black who can insert distance between ourselves, our collective, our communities, and what is happening in neighborhoods across the country. It forces it a more difficult set of questions about like, what do we owe to our fellow Americans In these communities where this is happening with such frequency? Whether you're white-- it's so easy to say, “My family came over. After slavery, I owe nothing to this issue. It's unfortunate.”

Whether we're immigrant backgrounds-- I think in that sense, whether you're watching the video or not, it makes us have to confront this and say, “What do I owe to this issue, and who am I to that?” You introduce me as someone who's with the Race & Justice Unit. I think that world justice is something that we need to take very carefully and very intentionally. We can't allow ourselves to deploy the editorial equivalent of thoughts and prayers. Just keep on having the same-- it's sort of like new day, just the same old tropes and stuff like that. It's very difficult, but it's something we have to confront forthrightly.

Alison: There are people who have chosen not to watch the video. A prominent person who's chosen not to was Questlove, who's the artist, who's also produced documentaries about very difficult subjects, not one to shy away from hard conversations. He posted on Instagram and Friday, do not watch it, do not watch it, and went on to call it torture porn. Those are not his words. If you turn any cable news or social media, there's a chance that you could just come upon the video. Even if a network's intention is good and wants to inform the public by exposing any truths. What are some ways-- this has a little bit of speculation and we can talk about it as colleagues-- that you think media can do a better job around these issues?

Arun: I think by not falling into today's outrage, pinning ourselves to just the moment. We have to be able to pull back. As journalists, as individuals sometimes watching the video it's not very beneficial because we're too much in the moment, and we need to be able to see these in a larger sort of like in the arc of history. One reason I don't just doom scroll is not just because it's painful and numbing, but it's also because it seems useless. That's why you need to read your history. You have to know what the larger thing is, so you're not trapped in that. I think that media and news media there's just too much of that frenzy that happens and here today, gone tomorrow. We have to figure out different ways and we have to figure out how to engage people in a way that's just not trite.

Alison: Let's take a call from Nadia calling in from Bloomingdale, New Jersey. Hi, Nadia. Thank you so much for calling in.

Nadia: Thank you. I read the timeline of what happened, the news. I wanted to be informed. I did want to know what happened. I thought that was very important. I've worked in racial justice through an organization working with the moms of Black men that have been killed by police. Doing that work, for me, I could not watch the video. I don't judge anybody who watched it though, but for me, it would feel perverse to watch it. Because this was a life that had value being taken brutally as if it had no value, and it was another Black life taken as if it had no value but this is a life that had value.

What I did instead just informing myself, and that's why I read the timeline of what happened. I'm a mother of two young boys, knowing that he yelled mom out, mom out because of the same neighborhood as his mom. I just know I just can't carry that with me. What I did was on my social media and my Twitter I shared beautiful art of him and the Black artist. Making sure their names are there, the artist's name, and beautiful images of him skateboarding.

Pictures of him with his kid, pictures of him living his life, showing that his life innately had value. That's what I wanted to put out to my social media is Black life has value. I don't want to keep just perpetuating the torture about Black lives and putting that out to the universe because it needs to be different. It's not going to change the world me sharing that, but that's what I felt comfortable sharing was his life had value. Those officers didn't think so, they didn't act so, but it did, and that's what I want to put out.

Alison: Nadia, thank you so much for calling in. You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Arun Venugopal, senior reporter for WNYC's Race & Justice Unit. You're my guest as well. We are discussing the video of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols being beaten by Memphis Police officers, and the media coverage surrounding it, and the way that you've been consuming this video. Arun, just from a very practical reporter's point of view, when you think about the value of these videos, what is it in terms of Justice-- capital J Justice, not as you were saying, thoughts and prayers, justice?

Arun: In the context of this particular video what I have been doing the last few days is discussing with policing experts, what happened here. The question a lot of people have been asking is, how do we understand this when it's committed not by say white officers, but by Black officers? What does that mean if it just keeps on happening regardless of who the police officers are? What went wrong there?

How do we understand this at the granular level of what happens in policing if we're going to take steps to remedy those things? We've maybe attributed a lot of that to, oh, those are white cops. Now we see it's not about necessarily the skin color of the cops, it's the fact that cops do this regardless of their skin color. How do we understand what the implications are for police forces whether it's in Memphis or here in New York?

Alison: Who else have you been talking to, and once you were able to metabolize the video and understand, okay, this is my job, this is what I need to do next, what were your next steps?

Arun: One of the gentlemen I spoke to he's on the faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and it's Greg Davidson. He has spent a lot of time riding around the backs of police cars. He's a white guy from Long Island so he’s able to have that access and to see what happens, the socialization of cops. Regardless of the background, this is a macho culture that people fall into where they have to prove themselves, and they’re also doing dangerous work. You want to have each other's back. How does that go wrong?

Also, how can it go right? How can we side an example that he saw happen before his eyes in Brownsville in the 90s where he saw these cops surround a man with a machete? They all drew their guns. Something terrible was about to happen. Suddenly another cop drives up and he's like, “Listen, guys, I just spoke to the man's sister. He's off his meds. Lower your guns.” That is the level of connection to a community, to people who are close to the facts where if only we saw that more kind of a-- I don't know if community policing is the correct term.

That connection to human beings and not just as a threat, but as someone who needs help. In that situation, it played out in a better way than what we've seen all too often. How do we take those examples and apply that and maybe build it out? Those are the things that need to happen. Another person I spoke to is a former police chief himself. He's been a police chief of Tucson and Fargo and other towns across the country. Talking about like there is this macho culture, it happens with people regardless of skin color/

There are also ways of saying-- there are methods of saying like, how do you have each other's back in a way that's positive. Say like, “Hey, listen, buddy, I know you're getting really riled up here. There's a lot of adrenaline flowing.” I'm now in the position to say, “Let's calm down, take a step out. I've got this.” Tragically, that did not happen here, but there are ways in which police forces can institute these practices in a way that they're all too often not doing.

Alison: Let's talk to Gavin, who's calling in from Baltimore. Hi, Gavin, thanks for calling All Of It.

Gavin: Hi. Thanks for having my call. I got to say I haven't seen the video-- I haven't been purposefully avoiding the video, I just haven't seen it. With regard to the media and the way they covered this, and with the way they cover everything, specifically referring to the Nightly and The Morning News, the news stations that the majority of Americans tune into on television across my life.

I've seen that African Americans are routinely made into these more criminalized communities and these less valuable communities by the nightly news nations. I would say that more often than not I see crime represented as a Black thing on these news stations more so than African Americans are responsible for crime in the United States. Given that we're responsible for an amount of crime that's disproportionate to our representation in the population.

My point here is that when you watch this, when you see this, it just creates this concept of a worthy villain, an African American being a criminal. When you're an adult, when you're 17, when you're 18, and you've been seeing this on television your whole life. No wonder the population that we draw from for the police department is going to have that in the back of their mind. There's no training, there's no college credits. You can do that with no [crosstalk] what has been engrained.

Alison: Would undo that. Thank you for that point. We really appreciate it, Gavin. Let's talk to Damani, who is calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Damani.

Damani: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. I really appreciate it. I'll just jump right in. As much as I want to see this video, I've seen clips of it and I feel like I've seen it all before it. This started with Rodney King. All I saw was Rodney King over again. This time to the extent where they took this kid's life. I wanted to say how quickly they are to hang these five Black guys, which rightfully so it's a righteous bus, but that has never happened in the history of all the killings of African people in this country. Rarely ever. Maybe the one guy who did George Floyd, he got convicted. This has been happening for over 30, 40 years that we know of only because of our social media ability and the fact that we have a phone now in our pocket.

Alison: Ability also to have that information spread. Let's talk to Alec, who is calling in from the Bronx. Alec, I hope you don't mind, it says you're 73 on my screen.

Alec: Oh, [yes. I don't know how you knew that, but probably, okay. Anyway, yes, I'm 73. I think it's really essential that this information-- these videos be out there. It's really important. I wasn't going out to look at the video, I happened to see probably segments of it on the news, but it's very important to record this information. I'm from Poland. My grandmother, my aunt, and her family were killed in Auschwitz, and some people are trying discount this, it never happened. It's very important to document this. Black people in this country have been brutalized for hundreds of years, and it's a horror. It's really important-- I can understand why people wouldn't want to see these videos, people especially who've experienced trauma, both in a historical, or family, or story way. It's important. You don't have to--

Alison: I appreciate it. Thank you so much for calling in. Arun, Alec, I think speaks to how people here-- people in this room, also you and I-- feel about documenting things and how important it is to write history. They say the first draft is wrong often and it needs to be adjusted as time goes on, but it is important, as Alec said, to write it down. To make sure that this does not get lost and become a mythology. The facts need to be recorded.

Arun: Yes, and sadly we know that as we speak, there are people who are thinking of ways to discount, to undermine the truth of what happened. They're still doing it all these years after the Holocaust, and they're certainly doing it right now.

Alison: What has the reporting been like about the reaction? There was this idea that there was going to be this explosive reaction. Mr. Nichols' mom called for calm. I lived downtown near where a lot of protests happened. The helicopters were up over the weekend, and there wasn't any real huge-- there wasn't the reaction that we saw in 2020. Let's put it that way. I don't want to discount if there were issues with people, but the reaction feels different.

Arun: I'm exactly in the same boat. I think for 24, 48 hours last week that buildup felt very ominous and eerie. Even if you're aware of how it felt like the media, if you will, was part of that buildup, making us think that this is what's going to happen, and then surprised when it didn't play out in the way we might have expected it to. I have been speaking to people about that, trying to make sense of that. You can never know definitively what it was, but I think the question is, yes, does that prompt response from the station hint at a certain transparency that we deserve?

Does the fact that these officers were almost all Black-- the ones that are on video certainly were. How much is that complicated? There's a lot more footage to go through. It's not like watching eight minutes of George Floyd on video. I think it has a different character to it. I think one of the mysterious aspects of this is just that where are we as a society, are we just tired? In 2020, we had people bottled up and explode onto the streets. I don't really know what the mood is of the society as to whether they have it in them to hit the streets in huge numbers like they did three years ago.

Alison: Let's talk to Peter from Huntington, Long Island. Hi, Peter. Thanks for calling in.

Peter: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I guess, for me, it's a little bit of contextualizing. This was horrendous. This was a murder. We all understand that Black, white, color didn't matter. For me, when I look at there are 800,000 police officers making 10 million arrests, and what we portray in the media are select few. This happens less than 30 times the Blacks plus to whites. When we look at that, the media on balance is not giving the other hand of the story, and we're painting these police officers with such a broad brush that the public is led to believe that this happens every second of every day, and we know that's not true.

Alison: Oh, sorry. Peter, did you want to finish? I'm sorry. Did you want to finish your point real quick?

Peter: No, I just wanted to say, we wanted to hear the context of the other side of what the good cops do every day, but we only get to hear a few bad cop stories.

Alison: Peter, thank you for calling in. I'm going to say that I think in certain communities this does happen regularly, and unfortunately, we don't see it on videotape. I'm glad Peter put his point forth, but we do know in certain communities this does happen on the regular. We just don't get to see it on the regular on video, and perhaps that's what's so shocking.

Arun: By it you're referring to?

Alison: Violence, stops, harassment.

Arun: Yes, absolutely. I think that it is a difficult conversation. I will say as somebody who has reported on this kind of stuff for a long time. We are often attending press conferences in which people speaking are police officers, the people getting medals are police officers, the people who are graduating and joining the force are police officers.

Many of those stories of valor I do think are documented to play on the media. To the point an earlier caller raised, for many of us who've been around long enough, there's no peeling away the effect of the other side of the thousands of times we've seen a perp walk on TV. That balancing act it's hard because there's a culture we're also embedded in. Right now what we're trying to do as a society is trying to figure out what a more appropriate balance is.

Alison: Is there anything that we haven't talked about you think that's important, or you'd like listeners to think about, or that you're thinking about as you go forward?

Arun: The thing I've been thinking about the last few days, it's also that point about the perp walks and just how much we've been embedded in this. How much just seeing the Nightly news every day was a part of our lives. Maybe not so much now. Now we look at social media, but we have to look at it with a little more scrutiny. I have to think of a conversation I had in 2015 with Pamela Newkirk. She's a scholar at NYU and she'd written a book called Spectacle. It's about a Congolese pigmy man who was brought here and put on display at the Bronx Zoo in the 20th century.

She said after having written this book and then in 2015 looking at Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon, all these other things that were forming this new era of viral video she said, "I worry that these killings today are just another form of spectacle entertainment." I think if Ota Benga, that Congolese pygmy, was displayed in the name of science, which is what a lot of people thought it was. The question is whether this modern-day spectacle that we all engage in, is it really in the name of transparency, in the name of truth and social justice, or is just-- how different is it really in practice, and how do we combat that effect of just engaging in another form of entertainment?

Alison: Listeners, thank you so much for calling in. Arun Venugopal, senior reporter with WNYC's Race & Justice Unit. Thank you for taking our listener's calls, and after the break, we're going to hear some beautiful, beautiful music.

Arun: Nice.

Alison: This is All Of It.

 

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