Why aren’t Suppression Units in Memphis and elsewhere? How Memphis disbanded a SCORPION unit after an arrest of a Memphis man
However, I know from experience that crime prevention is achieved through trusting relationships between the police and the community it serves, rather than feeding a broken system more police officers. There is no trust in suppression units like the SCORPION unit, which were formed to protect communities from over-policing and not to frighten them. (On Saturday, the Memphis Police Department announced it will permanently disband its SCORPION unit.)
Memphis moved quickly to shut down its SCORPION unit when five members of the squad were charged with murder for beating Tyre Nichols after stopping him for an alleged traffic violation. But across other major American cities, such teams remain common.
The Black Police Experience: The case of Tyre Nichols, a Memphis officer who fatally beat a black officer with a baton
The police captain of Montgomery County, Maryland, is a woman. The Black Police Experience was founded by her to promote the education of law enforcement and the Black community. She is also a professor of criminal justice at Howard University in Washington, DC, and at Montgomery College in Maryland. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.
The conduct of the Memphis police officers who were charged with fatally beating Tyre Nichols is revolting in its brutality and disheartening in revealing just how little the needle of police reform has moved in decades.
Nichols, who struggled to his feet and ran off, was found minutes later. The police body camera footage and the footage from the public safety cameras show the officers punching, kicking, and striking Nichols with a baton before forcing him against a car.
The officers were milling around and no one was there to assist them after the beating. It took an ambulance more than 20 minutes to arrive on the scene, and Nichols, who suffered “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to preliminary results of an autopsy commissioned by attorneys for his family, died three days later.
My 28 years of experience as a former police officer and captain shows that the officers lacked supervision, exhibited little professional maturity and were reckless with human life, ultimately leading to a deadly encounter.
The Black community has been traumatised by the damage done to their community and the fact that the five officers are all black. Members of the Black community often expect Black officers to be their vanguard.
The association’s current stance is unusual. It did not defend the arrested officers outright or say that they were just doing a difficult job that required them to make split-second decisions – responses we’ve come to expect from police unions that so often help shield officers accused of misconduct from accountability.
Efforts to push for reform of the police force have been scaled back, partially due to fear of rising crime and the hiring of more police officers. President Biden proposed funding for 100,000 new police officers, as part of his Safer America plan, in a bill that included $324 million to hire more police officers.
Efforts to bring about the end of qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being held personally liable for violating a person’s rights, have not succeeded in Congress despite the name of George Floyd.
States and local jurisdictions have tried to tackle police misconduct through new policies and legislation. Law enforcement has conducted training many times and revised policies many times, yet we still have a lot of unnecessary deaths from batons, hands, fists, and guns.
The article has been changed to reflect that the writer has 28 years of experience in law enforcement, not just as a captain.
The elite units have been implicated in their own scandals where citizens have been harassed, abused and even killed. Even though they have been dismantled, they seem to be making a comeback.
A couple of decades after Diallo’s death, New York reassigned hundreds of plainclothes officers away from another anti-crime unit. That followed mass protests against the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and marked what then-Commissioner Dermot Shea said would be one of the last chapters of the controversial stop-and-frisk policy that overwhelmingly targeted Black and Latino people in the city.
“We want people to be treated fairly,” she told CNN on Monday. I am sad and my heart is broken for this incident to happen on top of all these other cases.
On Monday, he told CNN This Morning that he wouldn’t second-guess the decisions made in Memphis, but instead said that units don’t create abuse. Abuse is created by Abusive behavior.
Davis was the commander of special operations for the Atlanta Police Department, overseeing teams including the RED DOG unit while he was there. RED DOG was itself shut down in 2011 after years of complaints, including the filing of a federal lawsuit by patrons of a gay bar after an aggressive raid.
Atlanta’s RED Dog unit, which was said to stand for Run every drug dealer out of Georgia, was politically popular, as was Memphis’s SCORPION.
Charges and Charges in a Spectacular Unit with a Multiple-Spy Police Officer: Kasie Hunt on CNN Newsroom
“If you put a unit like this out on the street in this environment and you look at a number where they’re pulling in 170 or 180 people into custody every month after the unit gets started, you’ve got to take a closer look at what they’re doing – what those charges are, what the probable cause is, what the reason for the stops is,” he told Kasie Hunt on CNN Newsroom on Monday.
“These units can get out of control really quickly. He said that if you aren’t paying attention to the supervisors, then you have a problem. “You need to be constantly monitoring what these special squads are doing out there to make sure this type of aberrant behavior doesn’t occur.”
He said that the culture was the other side of it. “If you’re calling it the SCORPION unit, what message are you sending to the officers who are in it and to the community… Scorpions sting.”
One of the first things I did as a police commissioner was to go to Mission Hill, where I was told by a group of young black men that our units were jumping out of cars to see if a gun would come out. I went back and met with the gang unit after that, and I made it very clear that this was not the mission that I wanted accomplished. Everybody between the ages of 15 and 25 should not be considered a suspect.
A shortage of officers and low recruitment is why some cities are scaling back on these special units.
Others are reinventing them. In the summer of 2016 Atlanta set up a Titan Unit to target violent crime and in March of 2022 it was announced that it would also be focused on repeat offenders.