This is an opinion column.

Empty Suit.

That’s what they called him. That’s what they called my friend. That’s what they called Carl Williams, a now-retired New York City 1st Grade police detective who served in the nation’s largest city for 33 years.

They called him that because, well, because he wasn’t down with the foolishness. Because he wouldn’t participate in the regular beatdowns of Black men by fellow police officers. By fellow Black police officers. By officers like him.

“I never got caught up in it,” he told me. “I was always on the outside of it. I just never bought into it. I never bought into being abusive to anybody. But I experienced all of it. I’ve seen it and was around it. All of it.”

We spoke not long after the release of repulsive footage of the brutal January killing of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols by five Black police officers in Memphis. Nichols, a skateboard enthusiast was pepper—sprayed, punched in the head, kicked repeatedly, and beaten with a baton after being pulled over and dragged from his car for what thus far seems to be phantom reasons. He died three days later from “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” as was written in a preliminary report.

“He was a human piñata for those police officers,” his mother has said. “Not only was it violent, it was savage.”

The beating took place on January 7, Nichols died three days later. The five officers primarily involved were fired with unusual swiftness and charged with several felonies, including second-degree murder. Two other officers were later fired for their roles in the attack, as were five members of the Memphis Fire Department after an internal investigation revealed they “failed to conduct an adequate patient assessment” of Nichols when they arrived on the scene and found him sitting on the ground and propped against a car bloodied, handcuffed, and rolling in and out of consciousness.

The footage was hard to watch, even for this seasoned journalist. I felt all of the motions almost anyone who watched it felt: anger, revulsion, and aching pain watching a young man—a young Black man—being brutalized by police, again. And a deeper pain seeing it done by other Black men.

Williams felt none of those emotions.

“I’ve seen that before, bro,” he said. “I didn’t feel nothing. Honestly. I’m desensitized, I’m completely desensitized. I’ve seen that — many times. They’d built this up, so I thought, like, they were hitting the guy with an axe or a machete or something like that.”

They hit him with a police baton.

“I’ve seen that a thousand times now.”

Punched him in the head.

“A thousand times, too.”

Kicked him.

“A thousand times.”

We both paused.

“The video was as horrific as Rodney King,” he said. “I’ve seen it. I’ve worked it. I was there. This is nothing new. You had some Black guys that were like, No, that ain’t right. But this is not the first time that happened. And in Memphis? There’s no way [it was the first time].”

Williams blames “the culture of policing,” as he calls it, for the proliferation of police attacks on Black men, and society’s historical fear and loathing of Black men.

“That’s the problem,” he said. “You can be Black, white, Jewish, whatever. It’s the policing. They inculcate into you that you’re different than everybody else. It has nothing to do with race. But they do have a problem with Blacks, as we know, that has been generated forever. The hatred of Black men, it’s everyplace, not just policing.

This exists in every genre, you know—in EMS, the fire department. They feel some kind of way [about Black men] in their head, so they go to a scene with a Black guy in cardiac arrest and they act differently. Doctors do the same thing. Nurses do the same thing. It’s the hatred of Black men. It’s a cultural thing that is just embedded in people because they’ve been fed it all their lives: Black men are bad.”

In Memphis, the officers belonged to a 50-person unit called SCORPION (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods). The unit was disbanded on the heels of the release of the video. Williams said a similar, yet plainclothes street crime unit existed in New York during his tenure. Its motto: “We Own the Night.” It was disbanded in 2002 after a federal investigation accused it of racial profiling after the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo –a street vendor shot 41 times by plainclothes officers who claimed he was going for a gun when he was reaching for his wallet.

A decade later, departmentally based plainclothes street crime units were resurrected—about 600 officers across 77 precincts—to target violent crime, only to be disbanded in 2020 after their officers generated a disproportionate number of civilian complaints and police shootings. In ending the units, then commissioner Dermont F. Shea said the department “can now move away from brute force.”

“That unit was horrific in the Black community,” Williams said. “It was open season. The majority [of cops were] white cops, but again, the Black cops were the worst—to Black people. It is a mentality. They hijack your mentality. Thinking that you are blue versus Black. Oh, it’s deep, bro. It’s deep. It’s deep.”

Another former NYC officer, Roger L. Able, wrote a book called “The Black Shields.” “He points out some Black officers can be more abusive in Black communities than white Officers,” wrote Williams in a text. “Another aspect of the police culture that is an enormous problem is not intervening when our fellow officers go rogue. The practice of ‘See something, say nothing, and do nothing” must STOP!!”

Calls for police reform sprung anew after Nichols’ death, with many calling for Congressional passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It passed the House in March 2021—Dems had the com—but died under the knee of the Senate. Elements of the bill address the transfer of military-grade weapons to departments; require training on racial profiling; implicit bias and intervention; increase body cameras; ban no-knock warrants (see: Breona Taylor) and some chokeholds and create a national database for police misconduct allegations.

The hottest potato is the tightening of qualified immunity, which not protects officers from individual liability, making it all but impossible to levy civil charges.

“The qualified immunity has to go away,” Williams said. “If it doesn’t, [policing] is not going to change. Now, when any cop gets in trouble, the union is going to defend them [criminally], but no matter what they know that qualified immunity is in place, so they’re covered to a certain degree. Nobody could take your house; nobody could take a car. You won’t be there, but your family won’t be ruined.

“When you take away qualified immunity, you’re naked, just like everybody else,” Williams continued. “You can get criminally charged and sued civilly. So, you’re open. It’s the civil part they’re running from. That’s the strength of qualified immunity, which I’m sure had been taught from the inception of policing in this country. Not, there’s no, there’s no fear at all.”

Williams recalled an incident with a fellow Black officer that occurred after making an arrest and taking the suspect into the precinct. “A good friend of mine was very aggressive and abusive to his prisoners when he collared someone,” he said. “I had a collar and we assisted each other out in the street, but when I brought the prisoner into the precinct, he attacked my guy. He was just beating the shit out of him, so I beat the shit out of him because I didn’t understand what that was about. This guy did nothing to him, but he just wanted to just beat the shit out of him.”

For many years, Williams didn’t fully understand why he was called an “empty suit”

“I really didn’t grasp it—didn’t understand what it was all about—until later in my career,” he said. “That’s why police reform is so important. We’ve got to get to the root, to the roots, of it because the start of policing was about policing the slaves. This is from the beginning, and it just transitioned over the years over the years over the years, and this is what we have now: The Black male is the enemy everywhere. Everywhere. It is sad, but it’s what it is.”

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

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Roy S. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as the Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Reach him at [email protected], follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.