After Tyre Nichols Death, Officials’ Moves Reflect a Shift in Handling Police Violence

Ben Crump, a lawyer representing Mr. Nichols’s family, praised the swift timeline but suggested that race may have played a role. The five accused police officers are Black. “We want to proclaim that this is the blueprint going forward for any time any officers, whether they be Black or white, will be held accountable,” Mr. Crump said. “No longer can you tell us we got to wait six months to a year.”

Chris Magnus, who previously led the police department in Tucson, Ariz., said there used to be “an attitude that the less that was shared about various incidents — and certainly those that reflected on the shortcomings or misconduct of the police — the better.”

“I think that contributed to a climate that built of mistrust in the police and a lack of confidence because people felt like they were only being fed information when it was good news,” said Mr. Magnus, now a senior adviser at New York University School of Law’s Policing Project.

In recent years, some police departments have avoided a case-by-case debate on releasing footage and started routinely posting videos of police shootings. Officials in Milwaukee and Phoenix, for instance, release YouTube presentations, which often include footage from body cameras, sometimes clipped and narrated. Some agencies now allow family members of the deceased to watch the videos before they are released to the public.

Kristen Ziman, who retired in 2021 as police chief in Aurora, Ill., said that early in her career, she was told not to comment on police shootings. Doing so, the thinking went, risked compromising criminal or internal investigations.

But in recent years, she said, that strategy became untenable. As high-profile deaths at the hands of the police stoked nationwide protests and as more departments adopted body cameras, expectations shifted. She said the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, which touched off protests and unrest across the country, including Aurora, was a turning point.