potential unrest ahead of the scheduled January 27, 2023, official release of video that captured the arrest and police beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, on January 7, 2023. Nichols died three days later, and five Memphis Police Department officers have been fired and face murder and other criminal charges. President Joe Biden joined Nichols' family in calling for peaceful protests. Several protests at police department facilities in the United States were planned ahead of the bodycam footage and video release to the public. Several state and local governments prepared security measures, such as the Georgia National Guard that was mobilized proactively. Themes and demands "Defund the police" Unlike recent racial protests in the United States before it, the 2020 protests frequently included the slogan "defund the police", representing a call for divestment in policing. The degree of divestment advocated varied, with some protesters calling for the elimination of police departments and others for reduced budgets. Supporters of partial or complete defunding of the police argued that budgets should be directed instead towards community-driven police alternatives, investment in mental health and substance abuse treatment services, job-training programs, or other forms of investment into black urban communities. In June 2020, New York City mayor Bill De Blasio responded to calls for divestment by cutting $1billion of the New York City Police Department (NYPD)'s $6billion budget and directing it instead to city youth groups and social services, a reduction of 17 percent. The cut mostly involved shifting some responsibilities to other city agencies, with the size of the force barely changing. The city council in Minneapolis voted in June to "end policing as we know it" and replace it with a "holistic" approach to public safety, but by September 2020, the pledge collapsed without implementation. An increasing number of community groups had opposed the pledge, a poll from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune showed that a plurality of residents, including 50 percent of black people, opposed decreasing the size of the police force, and city councilors cited alarm from business owners and residents in more affluent areas of their wards who feared for their safety, as beliefs anticipating an immediate end to the police department proliferated. Incremental reforms of a type that the city's progressive politicians had denounced were pursued in lieu of the pledge. The Black Visions Collective, an activist group seeking police abolition, called past reforms "weak" and stated, "It is