He must have been pretty law abiding…he worked as a FedEx driver, so I doubt that he even had a lot of traffic tickets. And at no point did they ever think he was armed.
He seems to have been a fairly harmless guy, and was actually a skateboarder and spent a lot of his free time on it. I think he simply wasn’t used to police contact and panicked.
Also, I think they were just government-empowered bullies and saw him as weak and an easy target. They wanted to “teach him a lesson” about their power and importance.
There is also the issue of general police and EMS incompetence that the City of Memphis should be looking at.
I have no idea why the cops started out to aggressively. But I feel pretty confident they beat him because they were mad that they SPRAYED THEMSELVES with pepper spray.
Everyone involved in this was incompetent.