After beating Tyre Nichols, the SCORPION police unit came under fire

In early 2022, with violent crime on the rise in Memphis, Mayor Jim Strickland laid out his ideas for keeping the city safe.

On top of his plan: increase funding for the Memphis Police Department, promote and reward officers, and continue using the city’s newly formed SCORPION Unit, a specialized group of four 10-man mobile teams that use data to target high-crime areas to combat homicides. and other violent crimes.

Strickland said that in just a few months the device was made. 566 arrests and over 250 weapons seized.

But the fast strike unit, which received his applause almost exactly a year ago, is now under consideration by the chief of police since five of the 40 SCORPION officers were charged with murder in have 7 beating tyre nicholswho died a few days later. The SCORPION unit, which stands for “Street Crime Control Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods”, was reportedly inactive after the violent confrontation.

The alleged assassination by SCORPION officers – and the planned Friday video release the details of Nichols’ beating have heightened criticism of specialized crime-fighting groups across the country and could lead to the dissolution of SCORPION.

“From Baltimore to Chicago to D.C., units like the unmarked SCORPION cars—regardless of what they are called—cause consternation in minority communities,” Nichols family attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said in a letter to Memphis. The police department is demanding that the unit be disbanded.

Activists and defense attorneys in Memphis said the SCORPION unit is notorious for its brutality and known for targeting poor neighborhoods.

“Basically, they are preying on low-income Memphis,” said Amber Sherman, a Black Lives Matter chapter organizer in Memphis.

The SCORPION division was created when Memphis was experiencing a particularly alarming rise in homicides.

In 2021, the city recorded 342 homicides, the most in its history. The SCORPION block was implemented in October of the same year.

At the time, law enforcement officials described the unit as essential to fighting uncontrolled crime.

“It’s important to us that every member of the community feel like they can go to the grocery store or live in their own home without having their house shot at or the shooting that often happens on the streets and on the driveway. So we launched the SCORPION division,” Assistant Chief Sean Jones said when the division was launched in 2021.

The Memphis Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the unit.

Critics accuse the members of SCORPION of various abuses.

Just days before Nichols’ violent arrest, Memphis resident Cornell Walker said he was approached by a group of SCORPION officers that included some of those now blamed for Nichols’ death.

Walker said that when he and his friend, who were sitting in a friend’s car, were first approached by officers, they thought they were being followed by “young guys” who wanted to steal the car. Walker claimed to have seen Officer Emmit Martin III exit an unmarked police car.

“I need to see your mother…hands, or I will blow your mother…heads,” Walker said, Martin yelled at him and his friend.

Walker didn’t realize at first that they were police officers until he saw their badges and the word “SCORPION” on the backs of their shirts.

Martin walked up to their car and pulled Walker out, pointing the gun straight at his head from just a foot away, Walker told The Times. The officer took him to a police car, where other police officers also had weapons. Walker says he saw Martin, Justin Smith, and Demetrius Haley, three police officers at the scene. now blamed on Nichols case.

“I said I came here for pizza,” Walker said. “He [Martin] never explained why he stopped the car.”

According to Walker, neither Walker nor his friend were arrested in the course of the incident.

Walker was so dismayed by his experience that he called the Memphis Police Department’s internal affairs division the next day, according to cell phone records provided to The Times. But he claims that the sergeant ignored his complaint.

“He [the sergeant] kept making excuses. I was pulled out at gunpoint. With these people dressed as undercover cops. What should I feel? I didn’t even know it was the police,” Walker said. “I felt like [what happened to Nichols] could have been prevented … If internal affairs had taken action, I think it might have prevented it.”

Johnny Graham, a 50-year-old Memphis resident, recalled his skirmishes with the SCOPRION unit, whose members, he said, tried their best to stop him several times.

“They think they have the right to stop you for no reason,” Graham said, recalling one such stop in East Memphis.

After being pulled over by an unmarked police squad, Graham said that he and his wife were humiliated by standing and watching the police search his car in front of passing motorists.

“We’ve been telling you all this all along why it took someone to get killed” for people to notice, Graham asked.

These are not “bad apples” in the department at all, he said, the fact that officers “conveniently” used such force in front of their colleagues suggests the problem went deeper than one unit, he said.

“The officers didn’t just get up that morning and say, ‘You know what, I’m just going to throw all my training out the window.’ No, they do it,” he said.

Josh Spikler, a former public defender and co-founder of criminal justice advocacy group Just City, said Memphis recently reduced the amount of time officers must serve on the police force to join the SCORPION unit. He pointed out that all five of those accused in the murder of Nichols had served less than five years, which, he said, testified to the poor discipline of the specialized unit.

Spikler also criticized the chief of police, saying that she should be held accountable for “the great part that politics and directives have played in this death.”

Janie reported from Memphis, Goldberg and Qualley from Los Angeles.