Tyre Nichols death is resurfacing questions about structural bias in policing and disparities in the use of force by law enforcement that occurred in this attack even when the victim and the officers were of the same race Melissa Rose Cooper reports I was deeply disturbed because it could have been me a scary thought from Michael Mitchell after watching video of police in Memphis brutally beating Tyree Nichols during a traffic stop Nichol's death three days later now raising concerns of racial bias among law enforcement I am a former police officer local police officer in Texas um and so I I left the police department because personally I felt as though I was complicit um in situations and incidents such as this and so again watching it as a former police officer but now as a criminology professor and a professor who teaches courses on African-American studies and you know race and social justice uh this you know this speaks to how much we we have not come as a country and how much work we still have yet to do the assault by the officers creating even more outrage across the country and here in New Jersey since five of the officers involved were also black officers aren't exempt from that socialization process and it becomes very muddy because they are black but they are also police officers but criminal justice experts say police brutality targeting the black community is a concept that has long been ingrained within police culture regardless to if the officers are black you know if they're operating under a white supremacist ideology with an institution um or um you know just like these racial inequities I think that race still plays a huge factor in how officers perceive um the community as well as the way in which they interact with the community right so officers aren't necessarily enacting on their own you know personal behaviors and biases well they act on their personal biases but not necessarily their behaviors or like their Community um all officers go through socialization all officers go through training the training academy all officers are subject to Blue police organizational or occupational culture and that's the reality of it I always think that's a dangerous notion to kind of generalize that when there's so many different very able to go into why something like that occurs Thomas Shea is the director of Seton Hall University's law enforcement executive leadership program and a retired police officer he says with there being hundreds of thousands of officers and police departments across the country all with different levels of hiring and supervision a few bad ones will unfortunately always fall through the cracks that's why Shea says it's extremely important to have strong leadership in place I worked Internal Affairs for seven years in a police department and the internal affairs complaints dropped dramatically during my tenure I don't say that to boast I say that because they knew that they would be held accountable when I say they I mean the cops who had any any inclination to do anything bad knew that they weren't going to get away with it now if I was the type the gold old boy Network or the uh you know back to Blue no matter what and a super defender of police maybe they would think they would be emboldened or empowered to do something they wouldn't do if I was the way I was which which was holding them accountable criminal justice experts agree holding police officers accountable for their actions is key in preventing racial bias and they hope more departments will enforce ethical standards so violent beatings like what happened to Tyre Nichols don't happen again for NJ Spotlight news I'm Melissa Rose Cooper [Music]