Memphis’ question: Can we have tough policing without brutality?

SCORPION hit the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, in late 2021 in unmarked cars, some without standard-issue dashboard cameras.

The police crime-suppression unit, divided into four, 10-person teams, racked up hundreds of arrests in months. It targeted suspected drug dens, gun smugglers, and reckless drivers who had grown brash during the pandemic.

SCORPION’s sting was effective, city leaders said. The acronym stands for Street Crimes Operation To Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, and by late last year, the crime wave had begun to subside. Democratic Mayor Jim Strickland hailed its achievements in his 2022 State of the City speech. In a city where leaders had embraced post-George Floyd police reforms, the changes seemed significant. Was Memphis on to something?

On Saturday, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis permanently disbanded SCORPION. Hours earlier, the United States watched in horror as a video released by the city showed five of the unit’s officers beating Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old motorist, so badly that he died from his injuries three days later.

The demise of SCORPION shows a chief and a city trying to find a balance between addressing serious crime and reforming how U.S. policing is done. It comes as nationwide police reforms in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis officer collide with a wave of rising crime that began during the pandemic. And Memphis is a microcosm of how America is struggling to find aggressive, effective policing that doesn’t tip into brutality.

“There is a balance that has to be struck with gun crimes on the rise,” says Andrea Headley, an expert at Georgetown University on equity in the criminal justice system. “The desire for people to want to feel safe in their communities is real. At the same time, there is clear evidence around some of these aggressive units that they historically have been shown not to work.”

Memphis’ crime wave

When the SCORPION unit was forged, Memphis, like many other American cities, had seen troubling spikes in violent crime.

In 2020, more than 18,000 violent crimes were reported in the city – 1,359 for every 100,000 people, three times the national average. The pace quickened in early 2021. And in 2022, Memphis was forced into a four-hour citywide lockdown while a mass killer prowled the streets, ultimately killing four.

Memphians like Aaron Foster aren’t shocked by the numbers.

As a homeowner off Lamar Avenue – a largely Black area dotted with catfish joints and barbecue pits – Mr. Foster sees crime daily. A few feet away, police are investigating why an abandoned van is wrapped around a power pole.

Crime, he says, can feel omnipresent. But he also has friends who have been on the receiving end of harassment and violence from SCORPION.

Mr. Nichols likely ran because he was scared, says Mr. Foster.

“Look, here he is, driving home in one of America’s most dangerous cities, and all of a sudden there are guys all over him,” says Mr. Foster. “Yeah, there are police lights, but he doesn’t have time to react. Suddenly he’s on the ground; then he’s up and running. Looking at what happened, who can blame him for running?”

“People will only have the boot on their neck for so long until they strike back,” says Mr. Foster.

SCORPION is one in a long tradition of crime suppression units in the U.S., many of which have ended in infamy.

• Detroit had its 1970s-era STRESS unit. One white officer, Raymond Peterson, killed at least five Black suspects in 1971 alone. He once called Detroit’s streets worse “than a jungle.”

• Atlanta’s Red Dog crime suppression unit notoriously fired 39 shots while breaking into the house of an 82-year old woman in 2008. She had fired a shot at them as they entered her house during a no-knock drug raid filled with errors, including falsifying evidence, according to investigations. The unit was shut down in 2011. Memphis Police Chief Davis ran the Red Dog program for a time when she was at the Atlanta Police Department.

• More recently, Washington’s RIP (Robbery Intervention Program) unit engaged in so-called jump-outs, where officers sped up to cars and jumped out, guns drawn. Last year, an investigation by The Appeal secured a trove of internal emails that show that militarized, tough-on-crime policing was championed throughout the ranks even after the public was told such tactics had ended.

The video of Mr. Nichols’ beating points to the chronic problem with such efforts: Police officers can become empowered by impunity.

“These kinds of units, because of their nature and autonomy that they’re given, they have a propensity to violate citizens’ constitutional rights,” says David Thomas, a former police officer who is now a forensic expert at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.

A better model?

The idea behind such units can have merit. Before it fell to budget cuts in the early 2010s, Memphis had Operation Blue CRUSH (Crime Reduction Using Statistical History), which tapped specialized units drawn from across the force to focus on hot spot areas.

The Blue CRUSH unit had a tough-on-crime aspect, sociologist Phyllis Betts told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 2021. Its intent, however, was to “mobilize and connect with people in their neighborhoods.”

That, she told the paper, is “true community policing.”

The idea came from Ms. Betts’ husband, criminologist Richard Janikowski, whose parents fought Nazis as part of the Polish resistance in World War II. His work was guided by a concern for people living in marginalized and crime-ridden neighborhoods.

During the past decade, his ideas expanded nationwide. Studies have found that the hot spot policing pioneered by Blue CRUSH can work. Such efforts resulted in statistically significant reductions in crime, according to a 2018 report by the National Research Council’s Committee on Proactive Policing.

“When you have targeted police intervention with certain people or certain places, that can be effective,” says Professor Headley of Georgetown University. “But when you broadly incentivize police to make lots of arrests in certain areas, that usually leads to overpoliced communities. That harms people and doesn’t often lead” to less crime.

“That is the real tension here: Did it have to be this aggressive?”

The key is accountability, adds Professor Thomas of Florida Gulf Coast University. “There needs to be strict oversight, and the edict should be quality over quantity, because you want convictions and you want those convictions to stand so that people understand what you are doing and support what you are doing,” he says.

“The greatest tragedy in policing,” he adds, “is that the profession has never learned from its mistakes.”

“Fists don’t work”

One Memphis woman worries about the hot spot approach. She asked that her full name not be used because of her work with local law enforcement.

She says smaller crimes, including traffic infractions, dominate online neighborhood bulletin boards. She lives near Cooper Street, a business district lined with schools and churches. Residents would call 911 nearly nightly as cars clocking over 60 mph raced down the street.

“People would be woken up by sirens, and in a neighborhood like this they would complain,” she says. “That would create a hot spot or an impression of a hot spot.”

Chuck Wenzler, a small-business owner on Madison Avenue, has seen the crime wave hit him personally. He had his motorcycle stolen. It was found stripped days later.

He agrees police should be tough – but to a clear point. Twenty years ago, a friend landed in a hospital for a year after being beaten by police. “Fists don’t work,” he says.

Various factors in Memphis offered some hope SCORPION might be different. It enjoyed bipartisan support. And the Memphis Police Department had shown it was open to change. It adopted much of the “8 Can’t Wait” campaign, which demanded eight police reforms in 2020.

Before her hiring, Chief Davis was president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. She testified to Congress in support of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which she said would address “the continued desecration of what I’ve always thought to be a noble profession.”

Residents have generally applauded Chief Davis for moving quickly to fire the officers. And activists and civic leaders have supported the move to disband SCORPION. But as recently as Friday, she was not willing to give up on the idea entirely.

She told The Associated Press, “The whole idea that the SCORPION unit is a bad unit, I just have a problem with that.”