Consider This from NPR - Specialized Police Units Are In The Spotlight, Again

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

The Memphis Police Department has disbanded its special SCORPION unit, after five of the unit's officers were involved in the death of Tyre Nichols. But similar units are still operating across the U.S.Specialized police units are often created after a spike in crime, as officials come under pressure to do something about it. The units often operate with little oversight and develop a reputation for using aggressive tactics.We speak with journalist Radley Balko, author of "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces." He has studied police tactics and whether special units work to keep communities safe.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. We have come into this place locked in solidarity across the nation and world to celebrate the life of Tyree Nichols, a good person. Hundreds of people gathered inside the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis on Wednesday for the funeral of Tyree Nichols. The 29-year-old died days after he was severely beaten by Memphis police officers following a traffic stop.

Five officers were fired and have been charged with second-degree murder, among other crimes. Here's Rev. Dr. J. Lawrence Turner, senior pastor of the church that hosted Nichols' funeral. A beautiful soul, a son, a father, a brother, a friend, a human being, gone too soon, denied his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Denied the dignity of his humanity. Denied the right to see the sun set another day. Family members spoke through tears at the service. Nichols' sister, Kiana Dixon, said her brother was a peaceful man. Even in his demise, he was still polite.

He asked him to please stop. His older brother, James Lazare, told a story about how he was supposed to be named Tyree before their mother changed her mind. Years later, his little brother got the name. And I used to always joke with him, like, man, you keep messing with me, I'm gonna take my name back. And he'd be like, no you ain't, that's my name. Nichols' mother, Rovon Wells, pleaded with elected leaders to pass police reform. There should be no other child that should suffer the way my son and all the other parents here

have lost their children. We need to get that bill passed. Because if we don't, that blood, the next child that dies, that blood is going to be on their hands. Yeah. that blood is going to be on their hands. We've heard similar pleas from the families of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Breonna Taylor, who were also victims of police violence. Their families attended the funeral, standing alongside Nichols' loved ones. The Reverend Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy, noting that all five of the officers charged with murdering Nichols were themselves black. He said it was a travesty that Nichols was killed in the same city

that had been so important in the civil rights movement, the same city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. You beat a brother to death. There's nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us that fight to open doors, that you walk through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight for to get you through them doors. Consider this. The five officers who beat Nichols to death were members of a specialized police unit. And while Memphis has disbanded that team, others like it still operate in cities across the U.S.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, February 2nd. app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The special Memphis police unit known as Scorpion had officers operating in areas where crime is high. They dealt with things like illegal gun possession, carjacking, and homicides, among other crimes. Paul Butler is a law professor at Georgetown University and author of the book Chokehold, Policing Black Men. When he spoke to NPR recently, he described what he sees as best practices for these kinds of specialized units. The officers should be highly experienced and carefully selected, not based on their aggression or number of arrests made, but for their ability to work with the communities

they're supposed to serve and protect. He says another best practice is having one police officer at the scene take charge and be the only one giving clear commands. That did not happen in the case of Tyree Nichols. He was giving confusing, contradictory commands, lying on the ground. When he was already lying on the ground, show us your hands. When officers were restraining his hands, what the cops seemed to have been doing is creating a narrative for the video to try to justify their violence. We generally see these units created when crime goes up, and in particular when there's a lot of coverage and pushback to crime going up, and police and civic officials

feel pressure to do something to show that they're taking crime seriously and that they're doing something about it. Radley Balco studied police tactics for his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, the Militarization of America's Police forces. And so they create these crime suppression units that are generally given a lot of leeway, less supervision. They tend to take a very aggressive sort of confrontational approach to infiltrating these neighborhoods where there's a lot of crime and they're given a long leash to sort of do whatever they need to do to suppress it. I asked Balco if there's a record of violence associated with these kinds of police units in cities beyond Memphis. There is. I mean, this is the same story over and

over and over again. You can go all the way back to the 70s with these units in Detroit called stress units that were eventually disbanded after, you know, scandals in which they've been accused of abusing people, racially profiling, being corrupt. They've killed somewhere between 22 and 24 people. We see it in Chicago with units called SOS. We see them in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Newark, and then most recently in Baltimore with the elite gun crimes unit, which was disbanded a couple couple years ago. And since then, I believe eight officers involved in that unit have since been convicted of various crimes and sent to prison. Setting aside the abuses, if it's possible to do so, is there data suggesting that these units

actually successfully reduce crime? Not really. I mean, it would be difficult to even find that data or to come to any sort of conclusion because crime data tends to be really dirty. A lot of the data we have on use of force, for example, comes from police reports themselves. So we're relying on officers to self-report, which I think the problems for that are pretty self-apparent. But crime data in general, it's unreliable. You can use it to detect trends, but in terms of detecting sort of if this particular unit had an impact on crime, it's difficult to say. And there's a reason that when city officials and police leaders tout these units,

they tend to tout raw numbers like arrest numbers or numbers of guns seized. And that's because that's the only real metric that they have. And we do know that telling, that basing an officer's job performance based on the raw number of arrests they have is not particularly productive. It leads officers to just sort of go out and round people up regardless of how serious the crimes they're committing are. It's not the best allocation of resources. You know, Memphis officials, the Memphis mayor did say in his State of the City address that last year that crime had gone down in Memphis and credited the Scorpion unit for that. But crime went down in most cities in the country in 2022 after a significant spike during the first couple of years of the pandemic. So it's not at all clear that the Scorpion unit was the reason for that. So if we imagine the scenario where these kinds of units tend to be established, crime is going up in a city, there's pressure on the mayor and other elected officials to do something.

If the warrior cop is not the solution, what is? What would you like to see a mayor do in that scenario? That's tough. I mean, I realize as far as you're for somebody like me to say what doesn't work instead of what does. One thing we do see is in cities that have consistently high crime rates, places like Memphis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, those cities also have a long and documented history of police abuse. And I think those two issues go hand in hand. They also tend to have very low clearance rates, particularly in minority communities for serious crimes. Clearance rates meaning solving crimes. Right. So, you know, if you live in one of these cities and you're a member of a minority community, you look at that and you say, okay, well, you've got these units that are harassing people in my neighborhood, harassing me, my friends, my relatives.

Crime is, they're not solving any crimes. Am I going to trust the police? Am I going to call the police when I have a problem? Am I going to trust the police? Am I going to call the police when I have a problem? Am I going to talk to them and volunteer information in an investigation when I'm not sure they're going to be able to protect me? You know, trust is a very key component in police being able to effectively keep communities safe and solve crimes.

And when you have units like this that are kind of running roughshod through neighborhoods, that doesn't build trust. It undermines it. That's journalist Radley Balco, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, the Militarization of America's Police Forces. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. This message comes from Indiana University. I'm Ari Shapiro.