The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Scorpion unit s impact
Some who encountered Memphis task force recall fear and shock at the time; find officers’ behavior unsurprising.
For 14 months, officers from the high-profile Scorpion unit of the Memphis Police Department in Tennessee patrolled city streets with an air of menace, zooming up on targets, jumping out of their Dodge Chargers at a dead run, shouting at people to get out of their vehicles, lie down on the ground.
They did it to Damecio Wilbourn, 28, and his brother as they pulled up to an apartment building last February. They surrounded Davitus Collier, 32, as he went to buy beer for his father in May. And last month, they beat Monterrious Harris, 22, outside an apartment complex, where he said he was waiting to spend time with his cousin.
These and other Scorpion encounters typically began over something minor — a tinted-window violation, a seatbelt infraction, a broken taillight or a cracked windshield — and often resulted in officers finding illegal drugs, unregistered weapons, stolen cars and outstanding warrants. Their tactics could be aggressive, according to interviews and records, with arrestees being subdued by baton, pepper spray, stun gun and the brute force of the officers’ fists.
Wilbourn said the Scorpion officers threw him against the car. They chased and eventually pepper-sprayed a frightened Collier in the face. And when officers in balaclavas and hoodies pulled Harris out of his car, he said, they beat him so severely that he was left with cuts and a black eye.
On Jan. 7, three days after Harris’ arrest, several of the same officers involved would go on to swarm Tyre Nichols, pulling him from his car and kicking and beating the 29-year-old amateur photographer with a baton as he begged them to let him go home. He later died at the hospital.
In some quarters of the city, Nichols’ death was shocking, but it was not a surprise. Even as city officials credited Scorpion officers with bringing down violent crime, their presence had spread fear in the predominantly low-income neighborhoods they patrolled, and records show that Black men were overwhelmingly their targets.
Since its formation in November 2021, the specialized squad of about 40 officers that was deployed to deter violence in some of the city’s most troubled neighborhoods was responsible for repeated acts of intimidation, harassment and violence by some of its officers, according to interviews with dozens of people in the community, including several arrested by the unit’s officers.
Young Black men have disproportionately borne the brunt of the Scorpion operations: A New York Times review of arrest affidavits in about 150 of what are estimated to be thousands of cases handled by the unit suggests that the unit’s tactics appeared to rely heavily on the vehicular equivalent of “stop and frisk,” a tactic that civil rights advocates say can drive racial profiling.
In the sample reviewed by the Times, about 90% of those arrested by the unit were Black.
To city officials, the arrests and seizures that the Scorpions tallied on a near-daily basis signaled that the unit was achieving its mission in a city that in 2021 had endured more than 300 homicides. The city soon began touting the Scorpions’ hundreds of arrests and seizures of scores of drugs, guns, vehicles and cash.
“Police have really changed and modified what they are doing under the Scorpion,” Mayor Jim Strickland said on Jan. 11 — the day after Nichols died — while crediting the unit with helping reduce homicides. “It is a team they have really directed at that.”
Within a few weeks, the Scorpion unit would be disbanded and five officers charged in the killing of Nichols.
The dissolution of the Scorpion unit was just the beginning of addressing a larger problem, said Amber Sherman, a community organizer who led recent protests.
“We want a disbandment of every special task force,” Sherman said. Police have long used such units “to overcriminalize low-income, poor Black neighborhoods and to terrorize citizens,” she added.
‘What did I do?’
When Collier went out with his brother and a friend in his father’s car to buy beer for his father on Memorial Day weekend last year, he broke a rule he has known since childhood.
“You don’t ride three, four deep when you’re Black,” Collier said. “You do that, you’re getting pulled over.”
The three men found themselves stopped by Scorpion officers for a seat-belt violation, although Collier said all of them were wearing seat belts. In Collier’s telling, it all unfolded quickly.
One of the officers — Emmitt Martin, among those charged in Nichols’ killing — demanded Collier’s identification. “I said, ‘What did I do?’” They went around in circles. At one point, Collier said, the officer told him that he had found a murder warrant connected with the car. “I told him, ‘No way’ — there is no way there is a murder warrant connected with my 58-yearold father’s car,” Collier said. “That was a straight-up lie,” he said. “It was meant to scare me. It didn’t.”
What did scare him, he said, was that the officers sometimes had their hands on their holsters. Then Martin took out a telescoping baton.
Martin eventually began to pull Collier out of the car, he said — prompting Collier to run.
He said he made that decision for two reasons: He knew he had a warrant stemming from a domestic violence complaint. But looming larger was the fact that he did not want to be arrested on the side of the road, without many witnesses nearby.
He ran toward a convenience store and soon found himself surrounded by at least a dozen people, along with the officers. He was near home; he recognized some faces.
One of the officers in an affidavit gave an account that in its initial stages concurred with Collier’s: The Scorpion officers were on routine patrol when they saw him with no seat belt. When they ran the license plate, it came back as indicating that the car was associated with warrants for a suspended license and various traffic infractions.
The statement also described the foot chase, saying that officers were able to catch up to Collier but that he resisted their efforts to handcuff him, balling his fists and flexing his arms, and that one officer subdued Collier using pepper spray.
In a video Collier supplied to the Times, he could be seen on the ground, with one of the officers on his back. He was already on the pavement and not resisting when he was pepper sprayed, he said.
He faced several charges, including evading arrest and violating the seat-belt law, plus the pending domestic violence case. He recalled serving a night in jail.
When Collier watched the videos of Nichols’ arrest, it felt familiar.
“It didn’t shock me whatsoever,” Collier said. “If they would have caught me by myself, they would have done me the same way.”