Tyre Nichols’ death underscores the troubled history of specialized police units

  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.

Black police officers aren’t colorblind – they’re infected by the same anti-Black bias as American society and police in general

  Once again, Americans are left reeling from the horror of video footage showing police brutalizing an unarmed Black man who later died.

  Some details in the latest case of extreme police violence were gut-wrenchingly familiar: a police traffic stop of a Black male motorist turned violent. But, for many of us, other details were unfamiliar: The five police officers accused of using everything from pepper spray to a Taser, a police baton, and intermittent kicks and punches against the motorist were also Black.

  After pulling over 29-year-old Tyre Nichols for what they said was reckless driving, Black officers in the Memphis Police Department’s now disbanded SCORPION unit pepper-sprayed, kicked and beat Nichols, ultimately to death.

  The Conversation asked Rashad Shabazz, a geographer and scholar of African American studies at Arizona State University, to explore the societal conditions in which Black police officers could brutalize another Black man.