The whole country was horrified last year when five Memphis police officers were seen viciously beating Tyre Nichols, a 29-year old Black motorist who’d run from them on foot. Nichols died three days later, on Jan. 10, 2023, and the officers on tape were fired and charged with murder.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday it is investigating the patterns or practices of the police department in Memphis, Tennessee, nearly seven months after the violent beating of Tyre Nichols by five officers after a traffic stop.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Civil Rights Division made the announcement in Memphis. Federal authorities will use the investigative tool to look collectively at the Memphis Police Department’s use of force and stops, searches and arrests, and whether it engages in discriminatory policing.

Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old Black man who was brutally beaten by Memphis police officers after a traffic stop earlier this year, died of blunt force injuries to his head, autopsy results released on Thursday from the Shelby County Medical Examiner show.

A judge in Tennessee has blocked the release of some 20 hours of additional video and audio recordings of the beating death of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers in January.

Those recordings, along with other reports and personnel files related to an administrative investigation by Memphis city officials, had been slated to be released Wednesday.

Tyre Nichols’ death seemed only to confirm a portrait of Memphis as defined by crime and poverty. But in all their city’s contradictions, Memphians see something else, too: promise.

Last January in his State of the City address, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland walked to the lectern with a binder of good news. 

One of the former Memphis police officers charged in connection with Tyre Nichols' death allegedly took photos of the bloodied and beaten driver and sent it to several people, according to newly released state records.

Details: Demetrius Haley is accused of using his cellphone to take "two photographs while standing in front of the obviously injured" Nichols after he was handcuffed and propped against a police car during the Jan. 7 incident, per the documents obtained by the New York Times.

Members of Congress gave a standing ovation to the parents of Tyre Nichols during the State of the Union address in one of the most bipartisan and dramatic moments of the night.

RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’s mother, and her husband, Rodney Wells, Nichols’s stepfather, were present for the address a week after the funeral for the 29-year-old Nichols, who died after being brutally beaten by Memphis police officers during a traffic stop.

As President Biden spoke her son’s name, RowVaughn Wells applauded him and could be seen telling him, “Thank you.”

American communities need robust law enforcement, and the vast majority of police officers are public servants performing dangerous work with dedication. The footage of Memphis police officers killing Tyre Nichols in early January, however, is all the more unbearable because Americans have seen the likes of it so many times before. Too many Americans today live in fear that they may suffer abuse or excessive force at the hands of police officers who are sworn to protect them.

That the death of Tyre Nichols — young, Black, just trying to get home — came at the hands of Memphis police officers was a familiar refrain in the nation’s seemingly endless lamentation of racism and police brutality aimed at Black people.

This time around, though, it was five Black officers who were fired and charged with second-degree murder in the horrifying Jan. 7 beating that was caught on video and led to Nichols’ death in a hospital bed three days later.

Q: What do you call it when five black cops brutally beat a black man to death, in violation of their oaths, their duties, and all respect for the sanctity of human life?

A: White supremacy.