Eagle Trace Drive: a traffic stop scene of a Black man whose car was pulled from a car by a Lasinia officer
Eagle Trace Drive is a quiet road with a plant-filled median that is a mile and a half from the site. Police vehicles flashed their lights as the cars inched forward, and sirens wailed in the distance.
“I’m never going to get home,” said Cheryl St. James as she sat in her car. “I want to get home. I can’t believe this is happening in my neighborhood. It is scary.
The project manager said that he left to get something to eat when police arrived, and that he saw them about 5 pm. He tried to get back to his house, but couldn’t because he was watching a movie. He said he walks on the Greenway, but may stop because of it.
She added that there are too many victims of gun violence in the country. “We have to wake up. I don’t want other mayors standing here at the podium with their hearts breaking because people in their community died.”
In her spare time, she is a retired police captain in Maryland. She is the founder of The Black Police Experience, which promotes the education of the intersection of law enforcement and the Black community. She is a professor of criminal justice at Howard University and Montgomery College in Maryland. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. At CNN, you can read more opinions.
Since Nichols’ death, the backlash has been relatively swift. The five Memphis officers involved in the beating are accused of murdering and kidnapping the person who died. The unit they were part of was disbanded, and state lawmakers representing the Memphis area began planning police reform bills.
On January 7, officers pulled Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, from his car during a traffic stop and forced him to the ground, shouting threats before spraying him in the face with pepper spray. The Memphis police chief said they have not been able to verify claims that he had been driving recklessly when he was stopped.
He was placed in handcuffs and left laying on the ground until a stretcher came to the scene. Nichols was eventually hospitalized and died three days later.
The Memphis Police Department No longer Has the SCORPION Unit: A Story from a Captain who Lost Her Son, James J. Nichols
Based on my 28 years of experience as a former police officer and captain, it was clear to me that the officers lacked supervision, showed little professional maturity and escalated a situation into what would eventually become a deadly encounter through gross negligence and a complete disregard for human life.
Through tears, the mother said the officers charged with her son’s death “brought shame to their own families. They brought shame to the Black community.”
The association’s current stance is unusual. It did not defend the officers directly, but it did say that they were doing a difficult job and that they had to make split second decisions. We have come to expect of police unions that these responses are meant to shield officers accused of wrongdoing from accountability.
The fear of rising crime has led to calls for more police officers, despite the fact that efforts to push for reform in the aftermath of George Floyds death have been largely replaced. President Joe Biden put forward the idea of 100,000 additional police officers as part of his Safer America Plan last year and an appropriations bill for the year of 2023 allocates $324 million to hire more police officers.
I know that crime prevention is achieved through trusting relationships between the police and community they serve, rather than increasing the number of police officers. The SCORPION unit was created to protect communities from over-policing, but it was not intended to terrorize them. The Memphis Police Department announced on Saturday that it will no longer have the SCORPION unit.
The bill passed under Democratic rule in 2020 and 2021, mostly along party lines. But it never went anywhere in the Senate, even after Democrats won control in 2021, in part, because of disagreements about qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being sued in civil court.
States and localities have introduced new policies and legislation to fight police corruption. Law enforcement has conducted training time and again and revised policy over and over, and yet we still have too many unnecessary deaths at the batons, feet, hands, fists, and guns of police.
This article has been modified to accurately reflect the writer’s experience; she has 28 years of combined experience in law enforcement, not just as a captain.
Nichols’ death comes as many police departments in the US have been reeling from an exodus of officers due to resignations and retirements and scrambling to attract new recruits. The staffing crisis has been exacerbated by high-profile cases such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd that have put policing under scrutiny and made it a frequent target of protests and moves to decrease funding.
President Joe Biden referenced the failed legislation in his statement about Nichols on Friday, and many leaders – from the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio – are acknowledging a potential role for federal legislation.
The Congressional Black Caucus is requesting a meeting with Biden this week to push for negotiations. The chair of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation urged the House and Senate to start talks and work with them to end police violence in communities disproportionately affected by it.
Gloria Sweet-Love, the Tennessee State Conference NAACP president, called on Congress to step up during a Sunday evening news conference in Memphis. “By failing to craft and pass bills to stop police brutality, you’re writing another Black man’s obituary. The blood of Black America is on your hands. Stand up and do something.
A State of the Union: Implementing the 2019 New Jersey Proposed Laws that Eliminate Racisibility and Criminal Investigations for Local Law Enforcement
The legislation was originally brought in 2020 and again in 2021 to make it illegal for police officers to escape consequences for their actions if they move to another jurisdiction.
It would ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, and it would overhaul qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that critics say shields law enforcement from accountability.
The fact sheet states that the legislation would save lives by banning choke holds and no-knock warrants, and mandate that lethal force be used only as a last resort.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina spent some six months trying to hash out a deal that could win 60 votes in the Senate, but talks were stymied by a number of complicated issues.
Booker said in the spring of 2021, that they weren’t making progress at the table. “In fact, recent back-and-forth with paper showed me that we were actually moving away from it. The negotiations were stopped before they began. The work will continue.
The second anniversary of Floyd’s death was when VP Biden signed a more limited executive order to reform policing. It took some actions that federal officers can take, including attempts to prohibit chokeholds, expand use of body-worn cameras, and restrict no-knock warrants.
The president can’t force local law enforcement to adopt his measures; the executive action lays out levers the federal government can use to encourage them to get on board.
At President Joe Biden’s speech to the State of the Union it was obvious that even though his intentions remain high, actual solutions for police reform have remained elusive for so many years.
State officials have been initiating investigations into local police departments, recognizing that the federal government can’t take on every case nationwide.
The Memphis Police Failed Their Oath to Protect and Serve Tyre Nichols, a 29-Year-Old Memphis Officer Charged with the Crimes Involved
Protesters once again took to the streets over the weekend to decry police brutality after the release of video depicting the violent Memphis police beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, and more gatherings and vigils are planned for Sunday.
“All of these officers failed their oath,” Nichols’ family attorney Ben Crump told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. “They failed their oath to protect and serve. Were any of them trying to protect or serve Tyre Nichols?
Demonstrators marched through New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, among other cities across the nation on Saturday, raising signs bearing Nichols’ name and calling for an end to abuses of authority.
The community doesn’t need to see it when White police officers commit crimes against citizens, but they need to see it when they are.
The five former Memphis officers charged in Nichols’ death also are accused of assaulting another young Black man just three days before the fatal police encounter, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
In the weeks since a video of the brutal beating of Nichols was released, there has been no information about the training of the five former officers facing murder charges.
The attorney for one of the officers indicted, Mills Jr., put out a statement Friday night saying that he didn’t cross lines “that others crossed” during the confrontation.
Memphis Police Reform: A Case Study of a Tyre Nichols-Memphis Officer Behaving Like a Lambda
All five officers were members of the now-scrapped SCORPION unit, Memphis police spokesperson Maj. Karen Rudolph told CNN on Saturday. The unit put officers into places where police were watching out for violent crime.
But disbanding the unit without giving officers new training would be “putting lipstick on a pig,” city council chair Martavius Jones told CNN Saturday.
Two Memphis Fire Department employees were relieved of duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation into their involvement in the care of Nichols. And two deputies with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office have been put on leave pending an investigation.
A pair of Democratic state lawmakers said Saturday that they intend to file police reform legislation ahead of the Tennessee General Assembly’s Tuesday filing deadline.
The bills will seek to address mental health care for law enforcement officers, hiring, training, discipline practices and other topics, said Rep. G.A. Hardaway, who represents a portion of Memphis and Shelby County.
While Democrats hold the minority with 24 representatives compared to the Republican majority of 99 representatives, Towns said this legislation is not partisan and should pass on both sides of the legislature.
This footage of Tyre Nichols is hard to ignore, because you won’t want to do anything about it. If a dog was beaten like that, what would happen? Towns said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/us/tyre-nichols-protests-sunday/index.html
Remembering Tyre: A GoFundMe for a Humane and Responsible Way to Reformize the Children’s Policing
As for national legislation, Crump called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the Democratic-controlled House in 2021 but not the evenly split Senate.
US Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, called for Congress to revive national police reform legislation and said the previously stalled legislation was a good starting point.
The starting point is the right one, as the chairman of the crime subcommittee has been working on it for years. I think he and Sen. (Tim) Scott should sit down again quickly to see if we can revive that effort, but that in and of itself is not enough. He called for a discussion about policing in a humane and responsible way.
The 29-year-old was a father and the baby of his family. He was a “good boy” who spent his Sundays doing laundry and getting ready for the week, his mother said.
A GoFundMe created by Nichols’ mother has raised over $1,085,600 as of Sunday afternoon. The money raised will go towards Wells and her husbands mental health services and their time off from their jobs according to the page. It also adds that they want to build a memorial skate park in honor of Tyre and his love for skating and sunsets.
My baby’s goal was to make it home to be safe in my arms. Tyre was unarmed, nonthreatening, and respectful to police during the entire encounter!”
Memphis elite police unit disbanded after Diallo, Floyd, Floyd: A saddening loss for a black man and a Latino
From New York to Atlanta to Los Angeles, these so-called elite units have been involved in their own scandals where citizens have been harassed, abused and even killed needlessly. But even where they have been disbanded, they appear to be making a comeback.
A couple of decades after Diallo’s death, New York reassigned hundreds of plainclothes officers away from another anti-crime unit. It was after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 that mass protests led to a revision of the stop-and-frisk policy that targeted both Black and Latino people.
“We want people to be treated fairly,” she told CNN on Monday. “For this incident to happen, on top of all these cases that have happened, saddens me and my heart is broken.”
He said on CNN that he would not second-guess the decisions made in Memphis but added that units do not create abuse. Abusive behavior creates abuse.”
Davis was no stranger to elite police groups, having worked as commander of special operations for the Atlanta Police Department, overseeing teams including the RED DOG unit. After years of complaints, the red dog was shut down after a raid on a gay bar which resulted in a lawsuit by patrons.
Memphis’ SCORPION unit also received praise and was popular because it was called the “Red Dog unit”, which stands for Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/us/memphis-scorpion-elite-police-units/index.html
What do young black men think about special units? What do they teach us about the SCORPION unit and how we are preparing for the future?
You have to look at what they are doing after the unit is up and running, if you put a unit like that on the street in this environment.
“These units can get out of control really quickly. He said if you aren’t paying attention to the supervision part, you have a problem. You have to be constantly watching what these special squads are doing to make sure that this type of behavior doesn’t happen.
He told Hunt the culture is the other side of it. What message are you sending to the officers who are part of the SCORPION unit, and to the community?
“One of my first meetings I went to as a new police commissioner in Boston, I went to Mission Hill and listened to a group of 200-300 young black men who told me our units were jumping out of the cars and tipping guys upside down to see if a gun would come out. I went back and met with the gang unit after that, and I made it very clear that this was not the mission that I wanted accomplished. You cannot make people who are between the age of 15 and 25 a suspect.
Because of a lack of officers and low recruitment, some cities are scaling back on their special units.
Others are reimagining them. The Atlanta police department set up a Titan Unit in the summer of 2021 to deal with violent crime, and another in March of 2022 to deal with repeat offenders.
Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope: The story of Tyre Nichols, the ominous killing of Darrius Stewart and Martavious Banks
Editor’s Note: Rev. Dr. Rosalyn R. Nichols is the president of the Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH), a coalition of community and faith-based organizations in Memphis, Tennessee. An executive director at MICAH is Rev. Ayanna Watkins. The views expressed here are the authors’ own. Read more opinion on CNN.
Tyre Nichols may no longer be with us in the physical sense, but his story is not over. In our faith traditions, we trust that Tyre lives on as we continue to say his name and fight for change in his memory.
In the days leading up to the release of the video footage showing Tyre’s last moments, Memphis felt unnaturally quiet. We were wrapped around by a tense, uneasy quiet. A list of effects of police violence on the community goes on and on, including Darrius Stewart, who was shot and killed in 2015 and Martavious Banks, who was shot and survived in 2018). But this time, it was different. It felt ominous and the eyes of the nation were on us.
We saw the image of a battered man in the hospital bed after seeing the video, despite not having seen it yet. The descriptions from his family’s lawyers about what had occurred to him at the hands of law enforcement were terrible. We understood that his mother could barely watch the first minute of it. So, without seeing, we knew.
Still, it seemed the city had entered a tense pause. Waiting to see if this time would be different. Would this case of death-by-policing lead to any substantive accountability or any lasting change in law enforcement? Do we dare to hope there might actually be #JusticeForTyre, when there had not been true justice for so many before him?
We knew that it was time to fight for our lives when the videos were released. That’s what we’ve continued to do in the days since.
We started our work with that question and it has guided our work ever since. In the months after the fatal police shooting of Darrius Stewart, a coalition was formed. A working group formed to call for greater transparency from the MPD. The Justice and Safety Alliance as well as Decarcerate Memphis have joined forces with MICah to promote transparency in data as well as improve voter engagement towards public safety.
As of 2020, MPD policies and procedures are posted online. The 2019 training synopsis MPD shared with us reveals at least some of the rot in the tree. In new officers training, most of the training is spent on firearms training alone. patrol procedures and officer survival take up 123 hours. Conflict resolution and de-escalation are only 10 minutes of the 26 hours that are spent on Interpersonal Communication. If a budget is moral, then a training manual is a culture-creating document. And we can plainly see where MPD has placed its priorities.
We have also long called for Memphis’ Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) to have subpoena power. The one body that should have true community oversight in cases of police conduct has been so systematically disempowered, it is left to make recommendations that MPD is essentially free to ignore. An ordinance was recently proposed that would require reporting on what happens to CLERB recommendations received by MPD – as a step toward greater accountability from MPD and authority for CLERB.
The death of the 29-year-old Black man comes at a critical juncture in American law enforcement, as departments across the country – including the Memphis PD – struggle to recruit qualified officers and fill shifts, lure candidates with signing bonuses worth thousands of dollars, and at times curtail standards and training in a desperate bid to strengthen patrols amid rising gun violence, according to law enforcement experts.
“That is a recipe for disaster,” said Kenneth Corey, a retired NYPD chief who once ran the training division. We have seen it before. You were unable to fill seats. You lowered standards. You have a scandal and use of force. And when you look at the individuals involved you say, we never would have hired this guy once upon a time.”
When she arrived, Shields told me, the department was in worse shape than she imagined. There were dozens of internal-affairs files backed up on her desk, some dating back years, some with disturbing complaints about current officers. Shields said that the department had no official matrix. She found inadequate facilities, lack of audits of body-camera footage to identify officer wrongdoing, as well as a continuing exodus of officers, because of the city’s longstanding policy requiring officers to buy their own guns. Special victims unit, a key unit in the department, was rife with internal sexual affairs that had an effect on their productivity. Shields was troubled to learn that the city’s detectives had an abysmal clearance rate, well below the national average. She learned that they had been trying to solve cases without DNA because the state lab system, woefully underfunded, took more than a year to return test results. After Shields allowed the homicide unit to contract with a private lab, the clearance rate went from 35 percent to 52 percent.
It is important to look at the background of those officers over time. The hiring process will be important, he said. “In this case we don’t know enough yet.”
In January 2021, Haley was commissioned as an officer. He is a former correctional officer. His attorney has not respond to requests for comment.
Martin, 30, joined the department in 2018, according to the records. He will plead not guilty, according to his attorney, William Massey, who said: “No one out there that night intended for Tyre Nichols to die.”
Mills, 32, a former jailer in Mississippi and Tennessee, joined the department as a recruit in March 2017, the records show. He, too, plans to plea not guilty, said Blake Ballin, his attorney, who described Mills as “devastated” and “remorseful.”
Memphis Police Law Enforcement Against a Rank-Number Violation Effort and a Case Study of Tyre Nichols
The city is accused of failing to prevent or address an alleged pattern of policing abuses by the SCORPION unit, which it claims operated like a gang of vigilantes. Police did not comment on the lawsuit.
Davis said that training for the unit was not an issue. She said it wasegos and a “wolf pack mentality” that contributed to the killing.
“Culture is not something that changes overnight. You know, there is a saying in law enforcement that ‘culture eats policy for lunch.’ We don’t want to just have good policies because policies can be navigated around,” she said. “We want to ensure that we have the right people in place to ensure our culture is evolving.”
It was the murder of George Floyd that made prospective police applicants think twice, is this a job for me? Wexler said.
You compounded a challenging environment to find a police officer with the killing of Tyre Nichols.
The former Memphis police lieutenant and recruit said that it had gotten to the point where sergeants were acting lieutenants. Over a period of time, hundreds of people did it because there were not enough supervisors. Many people ran out the door.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/us/tyre-nichols-memphis-police-law-enforcement/index.html
Why did the Memphis Police Officers Beat Nichols to Death? “Where was the supervision?” A Comment on “An unorthodox cop’s reaction to a video of a cop being bullied to death”
A lot of departments in the country are offering signing bonuses of between $25,000 and $30,000. “You’ve got a national shortage of applicants which has forced police departments to do unprecedented things like offering signing bonuses and, in some cases, modifying the standards for hiring.”
There is a strong correlation between the higher standards for new recruits and the lower incidence of bad behavior.
“We know from decades of research that the number of cops meeting higher qualifications, most notably a college degree, matters far more than anything else, for the number of civilian complaints a department gets,” Umbach said.
Quality of supervision and the quality of officers has been a problem in the Memphis Police Department and other agencies nationwide.
Police sergeants watch that video and their first thought is, “My God, where was the supervision and why did they think this was okay?”
Davis said that if you pepper-spray someone or tase someone, you have to call a supervisor. That is just policy. I don’t know why they didn’t.
Law enforcement experts said it was too soon to say what contributed to the behavior of the officers who beat Nichols to death.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/us/tyre-nichols-memphis-police-law-enforcement/index.html
What do we really ask of the Miami police officers? How they recruit, train, train and train; how many hours do they need to make a living?
“The standards kept dropping and dropping to bring people in,” said Davis, who was in charge of recruiting. They begin to throw money at people to lure them in.
He said the first thing they asked them was how much money they had. How much time did they have to stay on the job? Do I have to do a year? Two years? Nobody is trying to make a career out of it. It was the money.
When you were an officer at the Memphis Police Department you felt like you accomplished something, and now it isn’t the job that it used to be. “It’s not that kind of job anymore.”
In the late 1980s, nearly 10% of the officers in the Miami Police Department were suspended or fired after a corruption scandal involving rogue officers who became known as the “River Cops.” Nearly 20 former officers were convicted on various state and federal charges, including using their police powers as a racketeering enterprise to commit murder.
In 1990, an investigation into the hiring and training of police officers in Washington, DC by the General Accounting Office found that a hiring rush during the previous decade – prompted by a wave of drug and gun violence – led to cutting corners on recruiting, background checks and training.
He added, “What we ask of our cops is that they think like lawyers, speak like psychologists, and perform like athletes but we pay them as common laborers. A New York City police officer can make $42,000 per year, which equates to about $20 an hour. It also means that at McDonald’s they could be making $15 dollars an hour with none of the stress, trauma or risk.”
When the cops showed up, she told me: We need more police in the city, not less police officers,” Ms. Lightfoot said
“We have to be bold in looking at long entrenched problems, particularly on poverty and systemic inequality,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “We’ve got to look those in the face and we’ve got to fight them, and break down the barriers that have really held many of our residents back from being able to realize their God-given talent.”
Ms. Bass was a community organizer who witnessed the riots after the Rodney King verdict; Mr. Adams drew attention to police brutality after being beaten by the police as a teenager.
Ms. Bass was a leading player in the effort to prevent excessive use of force by police after George Floyd’s death, and also promoted anti-bias training for officers. The measures were approved by the House but it was stalemated in the Senate before President Biden issued an executive order to approve some of them.
The police department is needed to be successful in the city. It is important that the department is the best trained and understands that legitimacy in the eyes of the public is the most important tool that they have.
I first met Shields in late 2021 as she sat at a conference table in her office, surrounded by half-packed boxes. The police headquarters building had been mostly evacuated because of a lot of violations, including sewage leaking from ceiling tiles. That week had been busy for Shields. A news conference announcing the arrest of two teenagers for the murder of another student and a car theft with a 6-year-old boy in it, were all related to a triple shooting. At a public meeting, a Black councilwoman had nearly burst into tears, pleading with Shields to fix the department because “we can’t take any more.” People living in the midst of violence want more police presence, Shields told me, but they don’t want heavy-handed tactics.
Shields was wondering the same thing. As she followed along with supervisors’ group texts, she kept waiting to hear that officers were taking action, but a half-hour passed, then another. After protesters dragged a picnic table and patio chairs into the intersection, Shields began blowing up the calls of her commanders questioning why they were allowing such lawlessness. After protesters dispersed, the furniture was moved back to the sidewalks. The next day Shields called a meeting with unit supervisors, who explained that their officers were afraid to take action, worried that no one would have their backs if something went wrong. She told me it was eye opening. These people did not want to work. They didn’t want to work. She needed to move carefully after it drove home. “I realized, there’s no way in heck we can go out and just be tackling violent crime, because if one thing goes wrong, this whole thing is going to blow.”