Later on today, city officials in Memphis are set to release what is, by all accounts, a gruesome video showing five officers beat 29-year-old Tyre Nichols to death.
Ahead of the release of the footage, the family’s attorney, Ben Crump, held a press conference demanding real change and not the usual bullshit about a few bad apples.
“Police officers you have a duty to intervene when you see a crime being committed,” he said.
“They want reform with these charges,” he declared about Nichols’ family.
He singled out the Scorpion Unit, a special force the five officers had been a part of. He said that after Nichols’ death, others had come to him describing abuse at the hands of the Scorpion Unit (the stupid and violent names law enforcement gives “special units” surely don’t help quell officers’ sense that they operate above the law).
From the BBC:
Scorpion - which stands for "Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods" - is a 50-person unit with the mission of bringing down crime levels in particular areas.
The police chief has now ordered a review of all specialised police units.
This is not the first time the Scorpion unit has attracted controversy.
It was launched in October 2021 with a focus on high-impact crimes such as car thefts and gang-related offences.
But some community activists say its focus on hot spots within the city contributes to officers' bias and brutality.
Antonio Romanucci - a lawyer for the family of Mr Nichols, who was black - accused the unit of misconduct in the latest incident.
"They were in unmarked cars, why are they conducting traffic stops?" he told CBS, the BBC's US partner.
At today’s press conference, Romanucci called them, “Oppression units. They wind up oppressing the people we care about the most: our children. Our Black sons and daughters.”
Crump said another man had been brutalized by members of the Scorpion Unit recently—they pulled him over when he was on his way to pick up a pizza, screamed profanities, and shoved a gun against his head. He’d reported the incident to internal affairs, twice. He never heard back. “If they had responded to him we might not be here today,” Crump said.
In 2013, Radley Balko published “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” The book traces, brilliantly, the militarization of US police: From the SWAT teams founded in the 1970s to the Bear Cat armored vehicles the federal government hands out to tiny departments in Bumblefuck, Iowa. It’s a mindset, a culture, bolstered by military grade weapons that migrated over from America’s Forever Wars. The New York Times had an interview with working cops recently. A surprising thing is that many said they didn’t think more funding, as promised by President Joe Biden, was a good thing, because the top brass squandered it on shiny new toys, rather than cultivating better-trained officers.
I like to interview Frank Serpico for stories. Once, he told me something really interesting: the abuses he exposed in the 1970s, which led to the Knapp Commission about the NYPD (and earned Serpico a bullet to the head) were mostly about corruption: crooked cops that shook people down to line their pockets. But, he told me, today’s officers are terrifying because of the lethality of weapons they have.
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