This first sentence of the New York Times’ coverage is textbook promotion of the hidebound narrative sprung from the progressive obsession with race: “Five fired Memphis police officers have been charged with murder in the death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man hospitalized after a traffic stop early this month.”
The story elaborates that the Biden Justice Department, at the agitation of “activists,” is opening a civil-rights investigation into the matter. Prosecutors are apparently scrutinizing it under Section 242 of the federal penal code. That civil-rights provision makes it a crime for people acting willfully and under color of law (e.g., on-duty police officers) to deprive others of their federal rights or subject them to discriminatory treatment by reason of their “color, or race.” Hence the Times’ emphasis on the fact that Nichols was a “Black man.” Section 242 further instructs that if death results, as it did in Nichols’s case, the offending police officers “may be sentenced to death” or to life imprisonment.
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