The officers charged with beating to death 29-year-old Tyre Nichols were a part of a specialized police unit: Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION – one of several similar units nationwide. These unit officers “frequently wear street clothes and often are involved in a disproportionate number of violent incidents and civilian complaints,” per the Associated Press. The attorney for the Nichols family criticized this style of “saturation-unit policing” in a statement to the media, calling for the disbanding of SCORPION: “These types of aggressive units are used in cities across the country,” and he mentioned Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, DC.
As noted by The New York Times, this approach to policing is not new or isolated. Many cities had these units previously and disbanded them due to the same types of concerns, only to create new ones — as in New York under Mayor Eric Adams, who in 2022 reinstated something similar to the city's former Street Crime Unit.
Memphis’s SCORPION unit was formed in November 2021 with the intention of facilitating “violent-crime reduction,” focusing on “the saturation of hot spot areas throughout the city,” according to the Memphis Police Department. The BBC interviewed “community activists” who said that hot spot focus “contributes to officers' bias and brutality.” But Memphis mayor Jim Strickland singled out the program in January 2022 for making 566 arrests in its first three months of operation.
Its full life cycle was about a year and three months, ending with Nichols’s death. While it was operational, reported The New York Times, the SCORPION unit was accused by Memphis residents of “employing punitive policing in response to relatively minor offenses.” A local organizer with the group Decarcerate Memphis told the Times, “The unit’s main mission had appeared to be conducting mass pullovers in poor neighborhoods that are home to many people of color.” In the wake of Nichols’s death, others spoke to the media about violent interactions with the SCORPION unit, including one just days before the attack on Nichols.
On January 28, the day after the footage of Nichols's beating was released, the Memphis PD announced its would “permanently deactivate” the SCORPION unit. But recent coverage shows that the Memphis unit was just one of many of its kind, some even bearing the same name. Multiple law enforcement agencies in Georgia, for example, have SCORPION units; after the announcement that Memphis would disband its own, Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat called for such units to be renamed. CNN reported that in many cities over the last several years, “even where [these units] have been disbanded, they appear to be making a comeback.”
There are countless stories involving these units, some of which you may recognize but may not have connected to this policing practice:
- Last March, I wrote about the Biden administration’s State of the Union address that called to “fund the police.” Within 24 hours of that speech, plainclothes Philadelphia police officers shot in the back and killed 12-year-old Thomas Siderio Jr. as he ran away.
- The 1999 killing of 23-year-old Amadou Diallo by New York City police was committed by members of the force’s Street Crime Unit. Diallo had been reaching for his wallet; police shot him 41 times. (As stated previously, Mayor Adams reinstated a unit of this kind in 2022.)
- Throughout the 2010s, Baltimore police faced extra scrutiny after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died in police custody, following a “rough ride” that had damaged his spinal cord. Gray’s death launched a civil rights investigation of the force by the federal government. In 2017, it was revealed that Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force unit was an “elite squad gone rogue, taking every opportunity to rob those they were supposed to be policing or protecting, and barely bothering to cover up their deeds,” per The New York Times.
Coincidentally – or very much not so, depending on how you look at it – Memphis's police chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, the mind behind the SCORPION unit, was the Atlanta commander for the force’s infamous REDDOG unit. REDDOG reportedly stood for “Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia.”
“When I heard about the SCORPION unit, the first thing I thought about was REDDOG, as, of course, the killing of Kathryn Johnston,” NAACP Georgia president Gerald Griggs told local outlet 11 Alive. In 2006, the REDDOG unit entered 92-year-old Johnston’s home as part of “a botched drug raid,” and Johnston was shot and killed.
REDDOG was disbanded in 2011 by the then-police chief after a gay bar, the Atlanta Eagle, had been targeted in 2009; patrons accused the police of having “used antigay slurs against them, used excessive force, and searched them without probable cause.” Coverage at the time made comparisons to the historic 1969 raid of the Stonewall Inn.
But in 2021 — the year that followed an increased outcry to defund the police, and the police killing of Rayshard Brooks — Atlanta police launched the Titan Unit, citing a rise in violent crime, immediately drawing comparisons to REDDOG. (SCORPION was launched the same year.) As reporting at the time pointed out, crime rates were significantly lower than even in the 1990s, when REDDOG was launched.
Chief Davis was fired from her role with the Atlanta police in 2008 over her “alleged involvement in a botched sex crimes investigation into the husband of an Atlanta police sergeant,” as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The husband was found to possess “sexual photos of him with underage girls.” Davis was first demoted then fired for her involvement, which she successfully contested, and was later reinstated. In 2016, she left Atlanta to become the police chief in Durham, North Carolina; in 2021, she was hired in Memphis.
In an interview about Tyre Nichols's death and the SCORPION unit, former police commissioner Bill Bratton predictably blamed a lack of training rather than the inherent goal of this kind of approach to policing. But as many have pointed out on social media and television, there has been no shortage of funding allocated to support police training and resources in recent years – indeed, if anything, police departments secured more.
In Atlanta, for example, millions of dollars have been spent to try to build a police training center despite a public outcry against it; the policing of the Stop Cop City movement resulted in the death of forest defender Tortugita a few weeks after Nichols’s killing. Policing units and task forces, as long as they exist, will continue to risk — and take — civilian lives.
Amadou Diallo’s mother, Kadiatou Diallo, told CNN earlier this week, after footage of Nichols's beating was released, “For this incident to happen, on top of all these cases that have happened, saddens me, and my heart is broken.”