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<\/picture> <\/div>\nOn Friday, the city of Memphis, Tennessee, released footage<\/a> of five cops killing Tyre Nichols. The video is as appalling and heartbreaking<\/a> as expected<\/a>. (You know it’s outrageous when even the National Fraternal Order of Police couldn’t muster a defense<\/a>.) The video shows the officers senselessly beating Nichols, who was ostensibly pulled over on a traffic stop, as the 29-year-old is utterly defenseless and compliant with their demands (at least, when these demands weren’t completely impossible or contradictory<\/a>).<\/p>\n Now comes the part of the cycle where everyone calls for reforms.<\/p>\n It’s hard to look at a situation like this and think that anything could make a difference<\/a>. Many popular reform ideas\u2014hire more black cops, make police wear body cameras, give them better gun training, ban the use of chokeholds\u2014aren’t applicable. (The cops were black, they were wearing cameras, and they killed Nichols without using a chokehold or firing a bullet.) Perhaps policing just attracts psychopaths. Perhaps the culture of policing is just so bad that it turns ordinary men into monsters. Neither of those options seems like a problem fixable through mild reforms.<\/p>\n But there are a few specific changes that could make a difference.<\/p>\n Get rid of secretive “elite” policing units like the SCORPION squad.<\/b> The officers who killed Nichols were part of Memphis’ “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods” (SCORPION<\/a>) squad, which was tasked with swarming crime “hot spots” and making pretextual traffic stops in order to try and stop or investigate serious crimes. “The SCORPION program has all the markings of similar ‘elite’ police teams around the country, assembled for the broad purpose of fighting crime, which operate with far more leeway and less oversight than do regular police officers,” writes<\/a> Radley Balko:<\/p>\n Some of these units have touted impressive records of arrests and gun confiscations, though those statistics don’t always correlate with a decrease in crime. But they all rest on the idea that to be effective, police officers need less oversight. That is a fundamental misconception. In city after city, these units have proven that putting officers in street clothes and unmarked cars\u200c, then giving them less supervision, an open mandate and an intimidating name shatters the community trust that police forces require to keep people safe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Units like these don’t just suffer from a lack of transparency and use tactics likely to spawn violence. Their rhetoric attracts “police officers who enjoy being feared,” Balko notes, and it positions these officers as both elite and beyond the normal rules. There are all sorts of horror stories about similar units, such as Detroit’s STRESS unit (“Over a two-year period, the units killed at least 22 people, almost all of them Black”) or Los Angeles’ CRASH unit (“More than 70 officers were implicated in planting guns and drug evidence, selling narcotics themselves and shooting and beating people without provocation”).<\/p>\n Memphis has now disbanded the SCORPION squad<\/a>. Let’s hope it stays disbanded<\/a>. And let’s hope other cities follow suit.<\/p>\n Reduce the role of policing.<\/b> The group DeCarcerate Memphis is calling for not just disbanding units like the SCORPION squad but getting cops out of traffic management in the first place and ending the use of unmarked cop cars. “These non-reformist reforms reduce the role and power of policing, rather than simply changing the colors of the people committing the harm,” writes<\/a> Guardian<\/i> columnist Derecka Purnell.<\/p>\n Stop buying police propaganda. <\/b>The initial Memphis Police Department statement about Nichols’ death bears little resemblance to the horror and brutality that five officers actually visited upon him. Here’s how the department described the situation at first: “a confrontation occurred,” and “afterward, the suspect complained of having a shortness of breath.”<\/p>\n How many police press releases will be written up as fact -no caveats and no scrutiny – by journalists across the country tonight? tomorrow? next week? https:\/\/t.co\/se6VGhKqTN<\/a><\/p>\n — Wesley (@WesleyLowery) January 28, 2023<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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