It’s not easy to watch members of the Memphis, Tennessee police department beat Tyre Nichols to death while he  vainly cries out for his mother. Fortunately, the officers have all been charged with second-degree murder and other offenses, so we don’t have to argue about whether what they did was in some way warranted. Perhaps that will come in a future trial, but at least for now there’s a consensus that Mr. Nichols did nothing to provoke such a response. But the lack of obvious motive is one of the more troubling aspects of this tragedy.

It’s well known that running from the cops invites an illegal beat down, yet the confrontation was violent from the beginning. The first moment of the tape shows Nichols being angrily ripped from his car, yelled at and manhandled. Then he’s pepper sprayed and tased, prompting enough terror that Nichols decides to make a break for it. Perhaps the fact that the cops succeeded in pepper spraying themselves helps explain why their anger exploded from an unexplained rage to a murderous all-out assault.

Throughout the two confrontations, the cops seem much more interested in abusing Nichols than in actually restraining him and putting him in cuffs, yet there’s nothing on the tape to explain this. The first moments of the traffic stop are not captured, so the key clues could be missing, but if Nichols was initially disrespectful or uncooperative, there’s no sign of it in the video that was released.

The Memphis police department says the officers explained the stop as a response to “reckless driving,” but they also say that they’ve reviewed plenty of video footage along his route and cannot corroborate that Nichols was speeding, swerving or doing anything else reckless. Was he pulled over for no reason at all?

If so, it would be nice to know that.

You can see that people want to use this tragedy to bolster their preexisting beliefs. Some say that because both the officers and the victim were black, it proves that police violence isn’t always motivated by racism, while others say it proves that racism in police departments is so deep that it infects even officers of color. Some say it proves existing reforms have been counterproductive, while others say it proves that we have to completely rethink how we go about policing our roads and communities. Some are encouraged that the officers were quickly fired and charged with murder, while others wonder if either of those things would have happened to white officers.

With opinion so divided, I don’t know that learning the motive could possibly help answer these questions. For one thing, nothing Nichols might have done would justify the way he was treated, so the question comes down to why the police thought it was okay to use that level of violence under any scenario. I suppose if they explained it in their own words, it might help us get some valuable insight.

On the other hand, perhaps they don’t even really know themselves.

Something was obviously wrong with the culture these cops were operating within, and it’s doubtful that Nichols’ treatment was an aberration, even if it was an extreme case. I think it’s clear what a whole lot of things had to be wrong for an incident like this to take place. One was the methods of the specialized unit the cops belonged to:

The Memphis police officers charged with the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols were part of a specialized unit that had been formed a little more than a year ago to help halt a surge of violence in the city.

The unit — called SCORPION, or the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit — was designed as a 40-officer group that would deploy in neighborhoods, with a focus on crime hot spots. The officers have often operated in unmarked vehicles, making traffic stops, seizing weapons and conducting hundreds of arrests.

The unit was such a key part of the city’s crime-fighting strategy that Mayor Jim Strickland touted it in his State of the City address a year ago, at a time when the city was tallying record homicide numbers.

On the surface it makes perfect sense to develop a strategy to combat a rise in homicides by focusing on hot spots where crime rates are high. But if this means the cops are making high stakes risky traffic stops then perhaps they’re under an unhealthy amount of stress. If it means that they’re encouraged to make stops without probable cause, that’s another obvious problem. When stops are illegal from the outset, it encourages further illegality, and when every stop could turn deadly for the police, they may have a tendency to see threats that don’t exist, or to treat the drivers as less than human. These factors will affect black cops just as much as white cops, and better training can’t overcome a fundamentally flawed mission.

I hope we get more clarity on the facts of this case, but we should already be able to agree that it wasn’t a simple matter of a few bad apples. We need to look deeper.

The way black people are treated by police in this country is an ongoing tragedy and trauma, and the death of Tyre Nichols is just the latest proof of this.