What Is the Memphis Police SCORPION Unit?

The Memphis police officers charged with the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols were part of a specialized unit that had been formed a little more than a year ago to help halt a surge of violence in the city.

The unit — called SCORPION, or the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit — was designed as a 40-officer group that would deploy in neighborhoods, with a focus on crime hot spots. The officers have often operated in unmarked vehicles, making traffic stops, seizing weapons and conducting hundreds of arrests.

The unit was such a key part of the city’s crime-fighting strategy that Mayor Jim Strickland touted it in his State of the City address a year ago, at a time when the city was tallying record homicide numbers.

Now, that unit has been involved in a fatal encounter that Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who created the team in the fall of 2021, called “heinous, reckless and inhumane.” Five officers have been charged in Mr. Nichols’s death, and Chief Davis has ordered a review of SCORPION.

On Friday, Antonio Romanucci, a lawyer for Mr. Nichols’s family, said units that saturate neighborhoods under the guise of crime-fighting end up oppressing young people and people of color, often operating with impunity. He said the family was calling on the Memphis police department to disband the SCORPION unit immediately.

“How will the community ever, ever trust a SCORPION unit?” he said. “The intent was good. The end result was a failure.”

Specialized crime-fighting teams have long been the subject of scrutiny in cities around the country because they often target people of color and utilize tactics such as pretext stops, in which officers may stop someone for a minor violation and then use the opportunity to look for more serious crimes.

Memphis police reported in an initial statement that officers stopped Mr. Nichols for suspicion of reckless driving on Jan. 7 and that a “confrontation occurred” as the officers approached the vehicle. Mr. Nichols was taken to the hospital in critical condition and died three days later.

An independent autopsy found that Mr. Nichols “suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to preliminary findings released by his family’s lawyers, who said Mr. Nichols told the officers that he just wanted to go home.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, said the SCORPION unit has used excessive force before, adding that a man reported being confronted by the unit — and being threatened with an officer’s gun — while he was going to get pizza just a few days before Mr. Nichols’s death. Another man, age 66, also described being brutalized by the unit and had photos of his injuries, Mr. Crump said.

“We believe that this was a pattern and practice, and Tyre is dead because that pattern and practice went unchecked by the people who were supposed to check that,” Mr. Crump said.

He called on federal officials to investigate such teams and their tactics.