Memphis damaged hot spot policing
Harris County Sheriff ’s Office shows a willingness to adapt, move away from a fear-based presence.
Fifteen minutes. That’s how long Assistant Chief Thomas Diaz of the Harris County Sheriff ’s Office believes it should take for one of his deputies to deter criminal activity on a given day, even in a high-crime area.
It shouldn’t necessarily require ripping and running through apartment complexes, armed to the teeth, coated in armor. Or busting down doors. Or highdanger traffic stops where suspects are likely to have drugs and guns.
Although that’s still part of the job, Diaz says that often, fighting crime, even in the toughest Harris County neighborhoods, can just mean one or two deputies in a patrol car, keeping vigilant watch over a neighborhood.
This is an intriguing and hopeful facet of Harris County’s version of “hot spot” policing: a data-driven crime reduction and traffic safety unit operating on the familiar axiom that most crime in a given city occurs in roughly 6 percent of its area. Focusing on these hot spots or microzones is not a novel strategy — most police forces in major cities employ it in some fashion — though the results and tactics vary wildly.
When done right — Dallas being a notable example — hot spot policing can lead to lower crime rates, fewer arrests, and generally more respectful, constructive interactions with the community. When done wrong, as the world saw a week ago with the savage beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers, the consequences can be catastrophic and irreparably damage a police force’s reputation and trust within the community.
The Memphis officers were members of a specialized crime reduction unit — nicknamed Scorpion, since disbanded — tasked with getting a handle on rising homicide rates and reckless drivers in the most dangerous corners of the city. Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who also oversaw a controversial street crime reduction unit in Atlanta, explained the squad’s philosophy in November 2021: “We all have that understanding about being tough on tough people.”
The Scorpion unit lived up to that billing. Residents accused them of hiding out in unmarked cars, using violent tactics and mass pullovers under dubious pretenses with the hope of racking up arrests. Notably, it’s still unclear why officers felt justified to pull over Nichols in a traffic stop before they beat him to death.
Harris County’s 15-minute patrols are part of a more humane approach the sheriff ’s office is testing. The condensed time frame is based on a policing theory known as the Koper Curve, named for Christopher Koper, a researcher at George Mason University who posited that police forces can maximize crimeand disorder-reduction in hot spots by making proactive, 10-15 minute stops at these locations on a random, intermittent basis. Data shows that the likelihood of criminal behavior occurring within 30 minutes after a police drivethrough drops from 16 percent to 4 percent.
“People have gotten used to us being there and have brought things to us like, ‘Hey, we would like to talk to you about X, Y or Z,’ whether it’s to report a crime, family violence or anything else,” Diaz told the editorial board.
Some residents in high-crime neighborhoods such as Cypress Station, in north Harris County, seemed to confirm this last week when a member of the editorial board visited.
“I feel like they could be around more,” America Bailey said as she pushed her daughter in a stroller along a cold, wet street Thursday afternoon. “The hot spot units are not helping this area enough.”
Of course, the stationary patrols are not necessarily representative of the crime reduction unit’s larger tactical strategy. For one thing, “high danger” traffic stops — which led to 7 percent of all fatal police shootings nationwide last year — are still a pillar of the squad’s responsibilities. The unit is charged with proactively policing high-crime unincorporated parts of the county such as Cypress Station, Woodforest and Aldine, and assists federal and state law enforcement partners in executing high-level search and arrest warrants.
On a typical day, they still pull over motorists driving erratically, which is what the Scorpion unit in Memphis was supposed to be doing. But Diaz says there are key differences in how the county’s crime reduction units would handle such a situation.
Whereas the five officers who stopped Nichols were unsupervised and patrolling in unmarked cars, Harris County Sheriff ’s Office requires having a sergeant on scene directly responsible for deputies, and all deputies are uniformed in clearly marked vehicles.
Diaz added that the traffic stops conducted by these deputies aren’t simply a pretext to raid someone’s car for contraband. Roughly 60 percent of their traffic stops end in a warning and 40 percent end in a citation, he said.
“We’re not trying to do zero-tolerance police enforcement,” Diaz said. “When we do traffic stops, the goal is to engage and educate and reduce crashes while simultaneously reducing violent crime in these areas.”
Their results are encouraging. Overall, violent crime — encompassing offenses ranging from sexual assault to robbery to homicide — fell by 9 percent across the seven hot spot zones patrolled by the sheriff ’s deputies from 2021-2022. Homicides alone decreased by 22 percent.
Yet whether these deputies are adequately trained to both reduce crime and improve the community’s perceptions of the police is an open question. Diaz and many other policing experts have noted that, aside from the brutality revealed in the body cam and surveillance footage of Nichols’ arrest, the Memphis officers’ behavior broke just about every procedural protocol they should have been trained for.
Fundamentally, these officers who were hostile from the get-go and barking out conflicting commands, strayed from what we believe should be a guiding principle for all law enforcement agencies, even when conducting arrests: treating people with dignity.
In policing parlance this is called procedural justice training, a method based on four components: giving people a voice, showing neutrality, respect and displaying trustworthy motives. A multi-year study released last March, conducted by scientists at the National Policing Institute in collaboration with four universities, observed officers in hot spot units in three cities, including in the Houston Police Department. These officers were given five days of intensive training on procedural justice, and then observed on patrol over nine months in comparison to a group of officers in the same agency who received no procedural justice training.
The findings are compelling: the areas where the procedural justice trained officers worked saw a 14 percent decline in crime incidents, and a 60 percent decline in arrests. Most importantly, surveys of community members reported fewer instances of harassment and violent tactics. It’s unclear whether HPD, which did not respond to a request for comment, standardized procedural justice training after the study concluded in July 2020.
Diaz acknowledged that procedural justice methods are not explicitly taught to his deputies. He did note that deputies are trained in community engagement and active bystander procedures, which empower his officers to intervene if they observe misconduct.
Still, like most police officers, sheriff ’s deputies primarily receive tactical training. From the moment cadets set foot in the police academy, experts say they are bombarded with the notion that every encounter could be perceived as a potential threat to their lives. Military-style exercises and use of force training often take precedent over deescalation.
That mindset is difficult to unlearn, particularly as officers gain real world experience out in the street where they encounter the threats they were warned about. Combine that with lower standards for hiring officers in the wake of recent staffing shortages — high-crime cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia have waived college credit requirements for police applicants — and you have too many cops who are ill-equipped for high-stress situations.
It’s how you end up with egregious police behavior, including here at home, where we’ve seen rampant problems within HPD’s narcotics operations such as corruption, errant drug raids and absent supervision, or the violent and deadly actions of detention officers in the jail, which the sheriff oversees.
But here’s what gives us hope: the Sheriff ’s Office and HPD are showing, at least in small doses, a willingness to adapt, to move away from fear-based policing and embrace an approach that can actually keep us, and them, safer: it calms instead of inflames, employs reason before force, and brings peace to the streets instead of more trauma.