San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Elite crime teams dwindle, then re-emerge
For many familiar with the ebb and flow of policing in the United States, the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols by five police officers in Memphis, Tenn., after a routine traffic stop last month was reminiscent of tactics used in the 1990s era of gang warfare and crack cocaine, when special crime-fighting units, acting with bravado and impunity, were unleashed in high-crime neighborhoods.
Atlanta’s infamous Red Dog unit was responsible for a series of scandals, including the shooting death of a 92-year-old grandmother in a botched raid, before it was shut down in 2011. Elite police units were involved in some of the most notorious episodes of police misconduct in the 20th century, from the brutalizing of Amadou Diallo in New York to the Rampart Division scandal in Los Angeles, when officers stole drugs and money, beat suspects and even pulled off a bank robbery.
In more recent times, though, in the age of Black Lives Matter and high-profile police killings that provoked nationwide protests, policing began to center on the mantra of reform and accountability. Some of the elite units were disbanded, or ordered to operate less aggressively. The murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis in 2020 led to nationwide protests and calls for defunding the police.
Rise in crime
But the past two years have seen yet another significant shift in policing in many U.S. cities, experts say, as the calls for reform and accountability have given way to demands for aggressively confronting a new nationwide rise in violent crime.
Cities like Memphis are once again commissioning specialized crime-fighting units to tackle the spikes in crime that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic, a strategy that has had some success in bringing down homicides, thefts and other crime in targeted neighborhoods but that risks returning, critics say, to the problems of the past.
The Scorpion unit in Memphis, five of whose officers are now charged with murder in Nichols’ death, quickly developed a reputation for pretextual traffic stops and aggressive treatment of detainees after launching in November 2021, and the department announced last month that it was disbanding the unit.
The new or revamped units in Denver, New York, Atlanta, Portland, Ore., and elsewhere are a reflection of how much has changed since the racial justice protests of 2020.
“When we have tragedies like Michael Brown and George Floyd, it’s all about justice and fairness and people’s lives matter and we’re here to protect and serve and we’re going to get this right,” said Shean Williams, a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta who represented the family of Kathryn Johnston, the grandmother who was killed in 2006 by agents of the Red Dog unit.
But as violent crime rose in 2020 and 2021, he said, the mindset changed: “Now we’ve got to show the numbers.”
In 2020, about three weeks after George Floyd’s death, New York’s police commissioner at the time, Dermot F. Shea, announced the disbanding of the department’s anti-crime units, plainclothes teams that had been involved in numerous police killings, including the death of Eric Garner in 2014.
Shea described the move as “a seismic shift in the culture of how NYPD polices this great city.” A year ago, facing rising crime rates, Mayor Eric Adams announced he was restoring a version of the units, declaring, “we will not surrender our city to the violent few.”
In Chicago, the police department has launched and quashed several specialized units over the years, either as a result of scandal or because they created tensions with their aggressive tactics. The most recent units — the Community Safety Team and the Critical Incident Response Team — launched in 2020 and are still in operation, although the department declined to answer questions about their size or mission.
‘We need answers’
Anthony Driver Jr., president of the city’s civilian police oversight board, said his group had questions about the units even before Nichols’ death in Memphis, and is pressing for more information.
“We have concerns and we need answers,” he said.
Atlanta’s renewed use of specialized units — which have operated under the names Apex and Titan — has come under scrutiny in the wake of Nichols’ death because Cerelyn Davis, the Memphis police chief, once worked in Atlanta and oversaw the Red Dog unit, which was blamed for a series of policing abuses, including the killing of Johnston, for which three officers were sentenced to prison.
“If anybody in the Memphis government would have reached out to Atlanta, we would have told you that Red Dog is not a good idea,” said Gerald Griggs, the president of Georgia’s chapter of the NAACP.
‘Hot spot’ policing
The new or rebranded units are sometimes variations of a strategy known as “hot spot” policing, a tactic that has been shown to produce small but measurable reductions in crime. Denver, for example, saw a reduction in homicides and shootings in three of the five “hot spots” targeted by new police units last year, when the city saw an overall reduction in homicides of 15 percent.
Unlike the Memphis Scorpion team, the “impact teams” in Denver work closely with community groups and regular patrol teams, said Doug Schepman, a Police Department spokesperson.
The number of homicides in Memphis dropped the year after the Scorpion unit was launched, from 346 in 2021 to 302 in 2022, according to the Police Department. In early January, Davis credited the drop to several factors, including the department’s focus on tracking down violent fugitives, the visibility of police in high-crime areas and wraparound services in the community. It remained unclear how much the Scorpion unit factored in.
The ability of such teams to produce major and long-lasting reductions in crime has not been shown, many crime experts said. The steep decline in crime across the country that began in the 1990s, some studies have shown, was attributable less to the “stop and frisk” policing and vehicle stops that accompanied some of the earlier hot-spot strategies and more to large overall increases in police staffing, greater rates of incarceration and the end of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.
Some of the cities bringing back specialized police teams say they will be able to avoid the mistakes of the past with strict controls, better training and stronger oversight.
Portland, Ore., disbanded its Gun Violence Reduction Team that had long been accused of over-policing Black neighborhoods, but as the city’s homicide numbers rose toward record levels in 2021, a new unit was formed: the Focused Intervention Team. This time, though, it was developed with a community oversight group devoted exclusively to the intervention team.
“We get the opportunity to weigh in on what they are doing, what they have done and how they go about doing their work,” said Ed Williams, a pastor who chairs the group. He said there have been some disagreements, with officers wanting to pursue hunches, while the oversight panel has wanted them to focus on using data and actionable information to decide which neighborhoods they work in and whom they decide to stop.
“They were feeling that we were holding them back,” Williams said. “And to some extent, we were.”
Some people in the community have said they are worried that there will inevitably be potential harm to Black and Latino residents with this type of policing — if not yet, soon.
Many activists in Atlanta say that the specialized police units, whatever they are called, remain synonymous with aggression and intimidation.
Clark White, an activist with the Atlanta Community Press Collective, said he could not shake the memory of an Apex officer manhandling the mother of a Black man accused of marijuana possession in a video that went viral.
“When police came out with Apex, they said it would be a departure from the violent nature of Red Dog,” he said. “But they’re still engaging in these same tactics.”