By Ian T. Adams and Seth W. Stoughton / For The Conversation
The officers charged in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols were not your everyday uniformed patrol officers.
Rather, they were part of an elite squad: Memphis Police Department’s SCORPION team. A rather tortured acronym for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, SCORPION is a crime suppression unit; that is, officers detailed specifically to prevent, detect and interrupt violent crime by proactively using stops, frisks, searches and arrests. Such specialized units are common in forces across the U.S. and tend to rely on aggressive policing tactics.
As academics who study policing, and as former officers ourselves, we have long been aware of potential problems with such specialized units. Treating aggressive crime fighting as the highest priority in policing can cultivate a corrosive culture in which bad behavior is often tolerated, even encouraged; to the detriment of community relations. Changing that pattern requires wrestling with complexities of policing in modern society.
From Prohibition to the war on drugs: Crime suppression units, sometimes called “violence reduction units” or “street crimes units,” have a long and often sordid history in the United States.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-special-police-units-an-invitation-to-abusive-tactics/
