The appalling conduct of the officers in the tragic death of Tyre Nichols should give us pause and cause us to re-evaluate what it is actually going to take to get a handle on rising violent crime. One thing we have learned, the hard way, is that specialized units designed to be “tough on crime” can end up killing the people they are supposed to be protecting. Where did Scorpion go wrong? For one thing, nobody listened. There were warnings. The people who didn’t heed those warnings, whatever their good intentions, then or now, are responsible. It will be impossible to move forward without accountability.
But there is an even deeper problem. The design and concept of Scorpion was dangerous. The stigma that comes from setting aside one particular place and scapegoating it as the source of crime, instead of seeing crime as a community wide problem, does something to the human psyche, something that just isn’t good. It sends the message that crime is the responsibility of a handful of people who are somehow less than the rest of us because of their zip code. Instead, we need to be sending our cops the message that crime is the responsibility of the entire community.
America seems to be enamored of the approach to crime exemplified by Scorpion. Let’s “get tough,” let’s focus on “troubled areas,” let’s have highly specialized, highly trained, and highly militarized cops. America as a whole needs to come to grips with what it is teaching its police officers by fighting crime the way it does. They learn to see crime as a Black problem, a problem of the ghetto, a problem confined to a few “bad neighborhoods.” It leads to a dehumanizing criminalization, and a powder keg that only needs a spark to set it off.
This should be a moment of reckoning. Let’s hope that Davis will think hard and reconsider the entire approach to crime that led her to create Scorpion in the first place, because it is inherently flawed. The nation does not need anymore specialized tactical elements that target and scapegoat only particular neighborhoods. It needs cops who are listening to the communities they serve. If Memphis wanted to set aside a particular area as a source of high crime, it should have invested in wrap-around schools, community centers, and after school programs. Davis should have told her community, and most importantly her cops, to focus on why that neighborhood has so much violent crime and what the police force could do to partner with the community to find lasting solutions to the problems that community faced.
Memphis needs to take a hard look at itself. It needs to ask itself what the real root causes of crime are. Scorpion was designed to shut down this process. Instead of looking at the reasons certain areas had such high rates of crime, the police facilitated the scapegoating of Black communities, to disastrous effect. The concept was wrong; the results were heinous.
Progressive Without Apology 