Tyre Nichols beating raises scrutiny of ‘elite’ police units
A car with dark tinted windows circles the block a few times before swerving onto the sidewalk. A handful of armed plainclothes police officers jump out and order everyone out of a double-parked car so they can search it, striking terror in the seconds before red and blue lights flash or an officer yells “police.”
A similar scene plays out in dozens of cities across the country every day.
The beating and death of Tyre Nichols by five former Memphis police officers who were members of an anti-crime task force has renewed scrutiny on such squads, which frequently wear street clothes and often are involved in a disproportionate number of violent incidents and civilian complaints. Memphis police officials — after initially defending the SCORPION unit — permanently disbanded the team Saturday just hours after the release of video that showed immediate and prolonged aggression from its officers.
Police department leaders across the country bill the specialty squads as “elite” units of officers sent into neighborhoods as a direct response to an increase in specific crimes, often arguing they are a tool to dedicate additional resources.
But policing reform advocates and people who live in the Black and brown neighborhoods that these units usually patrol often say the officers employ aggressive tactics sometimes bordering on brutality, have little oversight and use pretextual stops of cars and pedestrians alike to search for larger crimes.
“Obviously it’s a complicated issue, and they are responding
to a tangible problem being whatever crime of the day they are formed to address — guns, gang violence, narcotics. But Memphis is not an outlier here,” said Hans Menos, vice president of the Triage Response Team at the Center for Policing Equity. “I don’t see any other option we have as a country but to say this is not working. This is leading to pain, injury and death.”
Menos, who led Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Commission, the former civilian oversight arm of the police department, said the units often are judged only on results without questions about how those were gained.
Less than a year before Nichols was killed, four officers from a similar plainclothes unit in Philadelphia tasked with getting illegal
guns off the street initiated a stop in an unmarked car of two juveniles on bikes.
Department leaders have said the officers turned on their flashing lights before 12-year-old Thomas T.J. Siderio, allegedly fired a shot at the car. One of the officers chased down Siderio, fatally shooting him in the back as he fled. Prosecutors who charged that officer with murder said the boy was unarmed when he was shot.
But there were warning signs in Philadelphia that task force officers were acting aggressively or recklessly for months before the shooting — including car wrecks and citizen complaints.
Police leaders in several departments have argued that the high number of complaints and violent incidents in these squads are due to the exact work they are asked to do — interrupt patterns of dangerous crime often involving guns or drugs.