The story of policing in Memphis has often mirrored in miniature the story of policing across America over the last decade.
In 2015, an officer shot and killed a 19-year old Black man after a traffic stop. The following year, Black Lives Matter protesters occupied a major bridge over the Mississippi River, leading to an impasse that the police chief helped break by linking arms with the protesters. The next year, the police squared off with protesters seeking the removal of statues of Confederate generals. And in 2018, the Memphis Police Department was found to have been spying on activists.
Yet after all those conflicts, the city had largely kept tensions from spilling onto the national stage.
There were several reasons for this. Its police force was less wedded to stop-and-frisk tactics than the New York Police Department, or to pretextual traffic stops than the police in Ferguson, Mo. Memphis, a predominately Black city, has a long tradition of Black police chiefs. And in a city with one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, the police have a deep reservoir of support.
But Memphis is now the flash point in the country’s ongoing saga over policing, after five police officers were charged with beating to death a man who had tried to run away from them. Police footage of the fatal beating — described by the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation as “absolutely appalling” — was released Friday evening. The city was bracing for protests.
The man who died after being beaten by the officers, Tyre Nichols, was reed-thin and 29 years old. He worked at FedEx, had a 4-year-old son and still skateboarded when he could. On Jan. 7, Mr. Nichols ran from the police after being pulled over for a traffic stop. While it is not uncommon, following a chase, for officers to punch or kick someone after catching them, the violence that ensued once officers caught Mr. Nichols was so shocking that Memphians said one needed to reach back to 1971 to find a parallel.
Mr. Nichols called out for his mother in what are believed to be his final words.
The five officers, who were indicted on second-degree murder charges Thursday, had been assigned to a new unit with an acronym that emphasizes subdual: Scorpion. It stands for “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.”
Commissioned in late 2021, the roughly 40-person unit was modeled after the aggressive anti-crime squads that in many big cities patrol neighborhoods deemed to be high-crime in unmarked cars, on the lookout for gang members or any sign of criminal activity. Such units typically rely heavily on car stops and stop-and-frisk tactics. In Memphis, city officials were eager to tout the unit, claiming it was racking up arrests. The very day after Mr. Nichols died as a result of his injuries, the mayor publicly credited Scorpion with helping bring about a slight drop in the city’s homicide rate in 2022.
But with Mr. Nichols’s death, it has already come at a cost, said Earle Fisher, a Memphis pastor and community activist who was among those caught up in the earlier surveillance by the Memphis police.
“The mayor and police director put that unit together in the fall of 2021, and you don’t even have a year-and-a-half go by before there’s at least one dead body,” Mr. Fisher said.
The fact that five officers stand accused, he said, meant that the incident reflected the culture of policing within the unit.
“This doesn’t fall in the bad apples category,” he said. “If two is company, and three is a crowd, then five is a system and a structure.”
Little has yet emerged about the five officers. One of them, Desmond Mills, went to high school in Connecticut and played football at West Virginia State University, according to news reports.
Another, Demetrius Haley, appears to have been a correctional officer before joining the police force.
In 2016, a lawsuit by an inmate at the Shelby County Division of Corrections claims that three guards, including one by the name Demetrius Haley, had beaten him up. The inmate, Cordarlrius Sledge, told NBC News that he had been trying to hide a contraband phone in the moments before officers strip-searched him. Two officers, including Mr. Haley, began punching Mr. Sledge and a third officer picked him up and slammed him down, according to the handwritten complaint Mr. Sledge filed in federal court. As he came down, Mr. Sledge’s head hit the sink and he was knocked unconscious, Mr. Sledge claimed. The guards denied hurting Mr. Sledge in a brief answer filed in court.
The lawsuit was later dismissed on procedural grounds.
By Friday, the five ex-officers in Memphis — they were fired following Mr. Nichols’s death — had been released on bail from Shelby County jail within a day of being booked.
Mr. Fisher, the pastor, noted what many Memphians have been discussing in recent days: All five of the officers charged in Mr. Nichols death are Black. To Mr. Fisher, the race of the officers was only evidence that the entire system of policing needed drastic reform. “All are indoctrinated one way or another,” he said.
But it was a shocking fact to others in the city.
“Here you have five African American men who know the plight of African American men,” Jopie Merriweather, 57, said during a midafternoon coffee break. She has lived in Memphis her whole life and described the killing as shocking, in part because the community’s relationship with the police department is not as bad as it is in other cities. “How dare you do that to one of your own?” she said.
Others expressed surprise that their police force was now at the center of the national reckoning over race and policing. To find another incident with clear parallels, a number of civic leaders and pastors cited a 1971 case: law enforcement officers, all but one of them white, were involved in the fatal beating of a Black teenager in a ditch following a car chase. The killing set off days of protests and clashes.
That occurred some two generations ago, some three years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis.
And many civic figures said they thought the police were doing a relatively decent job of navigating the tumult of the last decade, and were slowly making necessary changes.
“For the last few years, we’ve been quite quiet, and dormant, and proud of the fact that we haven’t had any serious situations,” said Pastor Bill Adkins of the Greater Imani Church, and a member of a recent mayor-appointed panel on “reimagining policing” to help push forward the changes. When it came to relations between the community and police, he said, “we’d been doing pretty well in Memphis in recent years.”
Dr. Adkins noted that the Police Department had in the last two years instituted a number of reforms, ranging from a ban on chokeholds to de-escalation training. “We got all these things instituted and were satisfied that had been done,” he said. “This comes as a huge shock to us that these five would perpetrate this.”
Van D. Turner, Jr., a mayoral candidate and former Shelby County commissioner who is president of Memphis’s N.A.A.C.P. branch, said he believes the city had navigated police-community relations better than many places in the years following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. He noted that the majority of the nearly 2,000-strong force is Black, as is the city’s population. “It hadn’t been really bad,” he said of police-community relations. “Obviously this” — Mr. Nichols’s death — “is a strain on the relationship and I think this is something that can be healed and get better over time.”
The five officers charged with Mr. Nichols’s murder had all been hired in recent years — between 2017 and 2020.
When the city scaled back the pension plan for the police in the middle of the last decade, officers left in droves. Mark LeSure, a former Memphis police sergeant who retired in 2021, said pay cuts and other bureaucratic issues had driven many of the force’s veterans into retirement, leaving the ranks to be filled with inexperienced officers. Officers landed in specialized outfits, like the Scorpion unit, far earlier in their careers than had been typical in the past.
Adding to the potential peril is the nature of a specialized team like the Scorpion unit. It was launched after Mr. LeSure had left the force, but he had been told by former colleagues that it had a mandate to aggressively go after suspected criminals, and its members were supposed to be on the streets, doing what they could to make arrests.
“Human beings man, that’s what happened. They let their emotions get the best of them, and there was no veteran officer there to stop them,” Mr. LeSure said in a telephone interview. “Usually when vets are there, things go differently because we have that experience to say, ‘I understand you’re mad but you got to stop, you can’t do this, it isn’t right.’”
Steve Eder and Mark Walker contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research.
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