Just days after the release of footage that showed officers beating Tyre Nichols to death, Police chief Cerelyn Davis disbanded the Scorpion Unit, of which the officers had been a part. Like the NYPD’s specialized “Anti-Crime” unit, members of the Scorpion Unit drive around in unmarked vehicles, without police uniforms on.
It’s one of the shadiest police tactics in play right now. It’s obvious that the unspoken (ok probably spoken, at least in the case of NYPD) task for plainclothes units is to sneak up on people to search them for contraband. It’s basically a way for them to go around “stop-and-frisk” rules: you can always say you pulled someone over for “reckless driving” as they did with Nichols.
Beyond the constitutional issues, the problem is that if 5 dudes you don’t know jump out of a car and start chasing and screaming at you, you might … run? Fight? Both? There are many instances documented in lawsuits where the plainclothes NYPD would jump on someone who then understandably thought they were being jumped. Corey Pegues, a former NYPD captain, told me he thinks of them as the “jump-out boys.”
The plainclothes units were disbanded by police commissioner Dermont Shea in June of 2020: six years after they killed Eric Garner; 14 years after they sprayed Sean Bell with 50 bullets the morning of his wedding; 21 years after they shot Amidou Diallo. Mayor Eric Adams almost immediately reinstated the plainclothes unit, renamed Anti-Crime. At the time, Pegues, who said he’d voted for Adams, worried it was only a matter of time till the “jump-out boys” killed someone.
It took Bill de Blasio five years to fire Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Garner. It took Davis two weeks to fire the cops involved in Nichols’ murder. After that, I thought, well, but is she going to do something beyond throw the book at “a few bad apples? Like maybe disband this shady unit?”
Per the Times:
"When [a local activist] told Chief Davis that he also wanted Scorpion disbanded, he said her answer was instant and unequivocal: “Done,” she told him.
The move came after Nichols’ family’s lawyers said multiple men had approached them claiming they’d been roughed up by the unit. In a video for ABC, Nichols’ father said that when he went to get his car washed, the attendant told him he’d been roughed up by the unit.
It’s a terrible idea to glorify cops and politicians. And Davis was the one who started the unit in the first place. But there are two conclusions I can’t help but draw here.
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