When the Memphis Police Department released harrowing video footage last Friday of the death of Tyre Nichols, everyone from the US president down made impassioned pleas for calm and peaceful protests.

The Tyre Nichols case, which sees five Black former police officers accused of murder, is sadly only the latest in a long line of examples in which the US police handling of incidents has resulted in serious injury or death to members of the public.

Until last week, the sad catalogue of deaths stretching over many decades has been inextricably – and unquestioningly – linked to racism, and the fact that police violence in America disproportionately targets African Americans, who we are told are being policed, indicted and incarcerated at staggering rates.

In the preamble to the release of the Nichols video, commentators from all walks of American life cited the tragedy as yet another example of how police brutality is targeted at Black Americans, from within an organisation that has a deeply ingrained and long historical antipathy to Black people, and immigrants of any kind.

Unfortunately for this highly established narrative, the officers who confronted Tyre Nichols were also Black. Great effort was made to explain this nuance by contending that these Black officers were acting as the product of a White racist culture within policing, rather than agents of their own decisions. For those at the other end of the argument, the Nichols video was cited as evidence that police brutality has little to do with racism.

When incendiary incidents are seeped in entrenched attitudes and prejudices, it can be very hard to discern the truth, and the reasoning for such occurrences. There’s no question that America has a critically serious problem with its policing methods – there’s been a steady year-on-year increase in the number of people shot dead by US police in the course of their work, with 981 fatalities in 2017 climbing steadily to 1,061 last year. In contrast, there was only one UK fatal police shooting across 2020/21. Some of this undoubtedly reflects the relative sizes of the two countries, and of course the fact that US police – and the public – are armed routinely.

Far more significantly, there are fundamental differences between the structures in UK policing and those in the USA, again much of this reflecting both the size of the Union, and its evolution.

Policing in the US is conducted by some 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, employing more than 800,000 officers. Each of these entities operates unilaterally, with differing structures, powers, responsibilities and even unique roles and departments. They certainly all have differing recruitment policies and training methods. There’s also some evidence to suggest that many forces are less than discerning in their initial choice of recruits, and training does little to rectify this.

There have been recommendations that US police forces should require at least a two-year college degree for employment. Recent research has even gone so far as to suggest that ‘more educated’ police have been responsible for unarmed US citizens dying at a rate two times lower than their counterparts. For me, the notion that academic intellect is an guarantor of much improved behaviour just plays straight into yet another universal social prejudice – that the heavily educated are somehow more civilised than the rest of us!

Whilst I wouldn’t for a moment dispute that there’s still a really fundamental race problem in American, and most other societies, I do take issue with the prevailing argument that tragedies like the Tyre Nichols killing can be averted by merely addressing racial attitudes.

If you can bear to watch the Tyre Nicols video clips, it can hardly be argued that five Black men setting upon another Black man is a marker of racial prejudice. It seems that these men stopped Nichols for a very routine traffic violation, but their subsequent behaviour became irrational, unnecessarily aggressive, disorganised and ultimately fatal. What the Nichols video really reveals is the issue of the power that some individuals hold over others, a lack of basic humanity and love for our fellow human beings and – at a practical level – a woeful lack of proper training.

Listening to the many narratives and analyses coming out of the Tyre Nichols case, I couldn’t help but see parallels to some of the responses to the clergy abuse problems that have beset our Catholic Church in recent decades. An urgency to recruit, lax vetting procedures, and an utter conviction that training and the system would stop unsuitables reaching the streets created a perfect storm of inadequacies. Even after the failings of any such system are exposed, a flawed analysis of the problems leads readily to new safety protocols unrelated to the core problem being relied upon heavily – and oftimes dangerously.

In simple terms, a failure to identify the correct reasons for a problem invariably leads to inadequate and ill-framed solutions.

In trying to quantify the reasons for police brutality in the USA, categorising the problem as primarily a race issue clouds a far broader reality that it’s not just racism that’s endemic across American police forces, but a general tendency towards violence. So, whilst creating greater diversity in police forces may sound like a solution, if the deeper mechanisms of candidate selection are not addressed this problem simply won’t go away.

In the Catholic Church the old large-volume seminaries have gone, so the door to priesthood has narrowed significantly. Lessons have been learned, and more erudite scrutiny and monitoring of applicants has done much to prevent subsequent catastrophes. But there are still many deep and troubling questions – not least the fundamental problem of how an institution so particularly and profoundly devoted to the care and protection of the human person could have come to deliver into society such contrary characters? Future prevention is to be applauded, but rigorous and candid retrospective analysis is also required if we are to sleep soundly.

So it will be with the many and disparate American police forces. Rooting out racism and creating diverse institutions with rigorous checks and procedures will help to create a better employee and public profile, but it will take something far more candid and thorough to eradicate the increasing tendency to violence in a society where guns are a right, aggression has become endemic and any casual encounter on any street has the potential to become fatal.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and political theologian