The obscene funhouse mirror of US policing.

The New York Times has a bewildered story wondering whether Memphis’s SCORPION Unit, implicated in the death of Tyre Nichols, may not have been the best method for maintaining public safety.

Scorpion Unit Emerged as Memphis Police Pursued Get-Tough Strategy

City leaders had praised the new group as a key strategy for fighting crime. Now they are trying to assess whether it was flawed from the start.

I know, let’s start a special unit called COBRA DEATH SQUAD and tell the aggro idiots who volunteer that their mission is to “get tough.” Furthermore, let’s have them drive around in unmarked cars without police uniforms, so a reasonable person might suspect they’re being jumped, panic and run.

The city had for months touted the Scorpion team as key to its crime-fighting strategy, promoting it as nearly an overnight success at a time when the city was posting record homicide numbers. Memphis recorded more than 300 murders in 2021; by comparison, New York City, which is 13 times larger, had fewer than 500.

Just a few days after the Scorpion unit was unveiled, one local television report noted that the Memphis police credited it with making more than 30 arrests, and seizing at least 29 guns and nearly 170 grams of marijuana.

Scorpion’s supposed successes became a talking point for city officials, including Mayor Jim Strickland, who highlighted the unit during his January 2022 State of the City speech and listed its early accomplishments: 566 arrests, 390 of them for felonies, as well as seizures of $103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles and 253 weapons.

So, they maintained public safety by stealing money and cars from people.

It was always a ticking time bomb. So is the Anti-Crime plainclothes unit in New York (a time bomb that previously went off in the killings of Amidou Diallo, Sean Bell, Eric Garner, and others). And so are other units with similar mandates. Dermont Shea disbanded the plainclothes unit during the administration of Bill de Blasio. Shea said the move signified a whole new culture of policing. Then Eric Adams immediately reinstated them when he took office.

There are so many problems with these units. But a major one is that their main metric of success is how much contraband they seize. This has led the NYPD plainclothes squad to illegally stop people, beat the fuck out of them, and also to plant guns they then confiscate. Meanwhile clearance rates for homicides and rapes are abysmally low (as they are in Memphis, FWIW). This is not mere coincidence. Radley Balko in the Times:

As the Memphis P.D. website points out, policing is more effective when there’s mutual trust and respect between police officers and the communities they serve. The police can’t investigate crime unless people in the community are willing to talk to them or to flag problems in the first place. That’s one reason there’s such a strong correlation between cities with persistently high rates of violent crime — cities like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland and New Orleans — and cities with persistent, well-documented histories of police abuse. These cities also tend to have low rates for solving crimes and closing cases, further undermining the relationship between the police and residents.

It’s no wonder Law and Order: SVU has been on TV for 300 years. It’s wish fulfillment. Real police priorities are a funhouse mirror in comparison. The standard Law and Order story arc is: sympathetic victim; dumbass beat cops report on the scene with Queens accents; sensitive, doe-eyed, brilliant Det. Olivia Benson sensitively interviews the victim, etc. In reality, the NYPD’s Special Victim’s Division is understaffed and so bad at engaging with victims the federal government is investigating them. (Also, high-ranking detectives tend to have way worse records than beat cops).

Everyone mocks defund advocates, but how the hell do you fix something like this without drastic action?