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.

Police solve just 2% of all major crimes

  As Americans across the nation protest police violence, people have begun to call for cuts or changes in public spending on police. But neither these nor other proposed reforms address a key problem with solving crimes.

  My recent review of 50 years of national crime data confirms that, as police report, they don’t solve most serious crimes in America. But the real statistics are worse than police data show. In the U.S., it’s rare that a crime report leads to police arresting a suspect who is then convicted of the crime.