“Partulian!” the Master cried weakly from the tower window, “Come here for a moment? I need you.”
Partulian sighed quietly and laid down his quill. The stoop-shouldered badger levered himself up from his stool and shuffled carefully between the stacks of musty books piled on his desk. He glanced briefly at a fanciful collection of elaborate laboratory glassware and the particolored liquid bubbling inside; patted the top of a cage holding a sullen ball of fluff that snapped at his hand. The Master, a gaunt but still imposingly tall panther, stood gazing out of the window.
Partulian cleared his throat. “Yes, Master Kal?”
Kal glanced over at the interruption. “Ah, Partulian. Come here, come here.” He placed one gnarled, grey paw on Partulian’s shoulder and gently led him to the glass. Partulian looked out at the bustling cityscape below; magnificent golden and azure towers whose tops were wreathed in wisps of cloud, gleaming arrows of gravcars zipping in and out of the spires, a rippling carpet upon which rode an imposing tiger calmly smoking a churchwarden pipe. Partulian glanced over at Kal, who was staring out at the scene, once more lost in thought. Partulian cleared his throat once again.
Kal closed his eyes and squeezed Partulian’s shoulder. “Lad, how long have you apprenticed under me?”
Partulian looked curiously at the Master. “One hundred and fifty two years, Master; ever since I completed grade school.”
Kal opened his eyes again, blue and filmed with age but still piercing when he fixed them upon you. “One thousand years ago, magic returned to our world after countless millennia of absence. Our kind has adapted and evolved magic to coexist with and complement our technology and industry, and a new golden age dawned. For seven hundred and twenty of those years, I have been studying the arcana and occult and its intersection with science and engineering. But still there are mysteries that elude me.” He took his hand from Partulian’s shoulder and rested it on the one piece of modern technology in the room, a small silver flex-tablet, and looked at his apprentice sadly.
Partulian sighed wearily. “You can’t get your sudoko game to run, can you?”
Kal shook his head and turned away. “Be a good lad, will you?”
Honestly, this is the least graphic image you’ll see; and it’s been cropped. Keep that in mind before moving forwards.
NOTE: I *highly* recommend following the links in this essay, both to my own and others’ work, on a variety of topics; for the bigger picture and more exposition on the topics presented.)
By now, almost everyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock (literally or Fox news metaphorically) has heard about the death of Tyre Nichols; and has probably seen the video footage released by the Memphis Police Department. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re already over-stressed by the world we live in and its injustices… don’t. It is heinous to anyone’s eyes, and just knowing a summary of what happened is traumatizing enough. I will not link to the videos, but I may use still frames from them to illustrate my points. Be aware.
However… if you are currently or were in Law Enforcement, then you absolutely need to watch the videos. All of them. And do not fucking look away. Especially if you were or are part of a “crime suppression unit”. And if you’re wondering who the fuck I am to cast judgement, I was one of those “jump-out boys” at one time.
This is a sad tale of the drug war, the militarization of the police, us vs. them, dehumanization of the bottom rung of society… and, yes, the Prison Industry, and the inevitable results of decades of this.
January 7th, 2023, at approximately 8:24 PM CST, Memphis PD SCORPION Unit members initiated a traffic stop on 29 year old Tyre Nichols for reckless driving. SCORPION, standing for “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods”, was a crime-reduction effort by the Memphis PD focusing on auto thefts and gang-and-drug related activity. Nichols, according to the official police report, actively resisted being detained and ran from the officers. After a search of Memphis neighborhoods, police found him and attempted to arrest him again; but he once again resisted and responding officers had to employ a number of measures to restrain him; including physical force, OC spray, and TASER. Nichols died three days later in the hospital.
That sounds sort of… clinical, doesn’t it? Dispassionate? Like it was an official summary report?
Well, that was intentional. That’s what official LE press summaries sound like. Hell, just read the MPD’s official press summary after the incident happened:
As officers approached the driver of the vehicle, a confrontation occurred, and the suspect fled the scene on foot. Officers pursued the suspect and again attempted to take the suspect into custody. While attempting to take the suspect into custody, another confrontation occurred; however, the suspect was ultimately apprehended. Afterward, the suspect complained of having a shortness of breath, at which time an ambulance was called to the scene.
That is entirely typical. And had the agency tried to stonewall, refuse to release the footage of the event, might have been all we heard.
But it is a farcically abbreviated version of the truth that paints a completely different picture; and exposes a festering boil that we, as a country, should not have been surprised to find after countless similar incidents over the past few years. What really happened saddens and enrages me…
…but does not surprise me. It’s happened many, many times before, and those incidents garnered this amount of attention… but it still happens.
The initial reason given for the traffic stop was “reckless driving”… but MPD has yet to explain what that driving behavior was, and, indeed, seems to want to forget about the initial stop. Let’s say Nichols WAS driving recklessly… would that warrant the response we see?
No. Absolutely not. Was there a serious safety risk to the officers, they would have utilized a “felony stop” approach. I talked about what that consists of in an earlier article here. I suspect, however, that the most reckless thing Nichols did was probably fail to signal a turn, or perhaps nudged the centerline… if even that. All the officer needs is the slightest infraction to initiate a traffic stop; a simple pretext to give them a reason to pull this person over- a pretextual stop. And, let’s face it, absent any video evidence of the offense, proving that the officer is lying is going to be next to impossible.
So, what did they do, if not a felony stop?
They charged out of their cars, yelling “You gonna get your ass blowed the fuck up!” and “Get your ass outta the fucking car!”
Nichols, not surprisingly, is confused and frightened; and, given the number of different commands being shouted at full volume at him, is slow to comply. The officers continue shouting “Bitch, put your fucking hands behind your back before I break it!”and for him to lie down. Nichols replies he IS on the ground, and they proceed scream “On your stomach!” Then one of them decides to pepper spray him.
Folks, trust me, when you pepper spray someone, it doesn’t just hit the target. It hits everyone nearby, and these guys were crowded on top of Nichols in a group. So it’s no surprise that they all flinch off of him, and Nichols takes that opportunity to get off the ground and run.
“A-HA!” I hear someone yell triumphantly. “He’d be fine if he hadn’t run!”
Convicted Shitbag Dinesh weighs in with a predictable opinion. There’s gonna be a lot of this crap, folks.
OK, fine citizen, let’s put YOU into this scenario. You are pulled over by un-marked vehicles, and, when you stop, find yourself surrounded by people twice your size, pointing guns at you and screaming that they’re going to shoot you. When you do your best to comply with their confusing orders, they shout even louder, threaten to break your arm, and then pepper spray you. Do YOU feel like you’ll be OK if just do what they say… even though that’s what you’ve been trying to do?
No. No, you wouldn’t. You have no idea what you’ve done to piss these guys off, you’re being calm, but they’re growing increasingly more agitated. I’d be terrified that I was about to be killed by a gang of crazy psychos. And keep in mind this all happened in the space of 40 seconds… that is not nearly enough time for the average person, who is suddenly thrust into this situation to process what’s happening.
Side note: One of the officers gives chase as Nichols runs off, but can only make it HALF A BLOCK before having to huff and puff back to his car. For an “elite” unit, I really would have expected them to be in better shape.
But, they do catch up with him again, and here’s where it goes even more egregiously wrong. He is pepper sprayed again, several times. He’s punched in the face with a closed fist. He is kicked in the side and the head repeatedly. And he’s beaten with an expandable baton, several times, while the officer yells “Give us your hands!”
When the show’s over, the officers stand around and talk exultantly about their triumph. They tell each other several times “He tried to go for my gun”- despite their not being one shred of video that shows him trying to do that, or any of them struggling to keep his hands off of their gun. They know the bodycams are recording; this is all post-hoc justification in court.
“A-HA!”Oh, christ, not this idiot again. “He was resisting; if he hadn’t resisted, he’d be OK!”
That is an expandable baton. And the only reason it’s here is officer rage.
Sparky, you sound like you need a refresher on Use of Force,and the response certain levels of resistance call for. For starters, Nichols’ behavior is between Passive and Active resistance… clenching up, moving his hands towards his face instead of putting them behind his back, pulling away. So, Mr. Hypothetical Sealion, allow me to punch and kick and pepper spray the fuck out of you for a few minutes. I guarantee you you will try to protect your face with your hands, no matter what I’m yelling at you.
“But but but, you said he was resisting!”
I see you still haven’t read up on Use of Force. For someone who is merely resisting- not assaulting– you use pressure points, join manipulation, locks and holds, possibly TASER or pepper spray. You are absolutely NOT to use closed hand punches, strikes, or kicks… and ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOT use an impact weapon like a baton. Assuming- and it’s a big fucking assumption- that they had a legal right to detain Nichols, these fucking thugs COULD have gotten his hands behind his back and gotten him cuffed if they’d paid attention to the simplest defensive tactics and handcuffing techniques they assuredly learned in the Academy. That they couldn’t speaks to me not only of their incompetence, but also of their bloodthirsty nature… there was no need for things to have ever gotten to this point if this was just a traffic stop for reckless driving.
“You’ve never worked the mean streets of the big city, brah; you have no idea what it’s like out here in the Urban Jungle.”
Aaaah, Officer Studly weighs in. No, I have never worked a major metropolitan area like Memphis or Atlanta. But I have been by myself with a bunch of methed-out tweaker good-ol boys in the darkest corner of a rural county with the next Deputy 20 minutes away; and you know what I learned? Fighting your way out of every situation is a fucking stupid thing to do and really shortens your lifespan. If you get in a fight in every encounter with the public, maybe it’s not the public that’s out for violence; maybe it’s you.
So, we’ve seen why this response was brutal, unnecessary, and extremely excessive. Is the only encounter like this the SCORPION unit has had? And, WHY was it this way?
For the first part… I guarantee you it wasn’t. For them to be this callous, this violent, you know they’ve gotten away with it many times before. As for the second… well… let’s take a look at special “Crime Suppression” teams.
Take any jurisdiction that is experiencing a rise in violent crime, gun crime, and illegal drug activity. There will be an outcry- sometimes universal, sometimes only
He was a neighbor. But he was viewed as a target.
from the people who have just read about in their safe enclaves- for the police to “do something”. Police have limited options in combating this “epidemic” of crime; they can’t change to social inequities that led people to choose the illicit drug trade as the easiest way of making cash; they can’t provide safety nets and housing; they can’t provide health care. All they can do- and one that meets the expectations of more well off population- is act proactively. “Go forth and arrest everyone you can for guns, for drugs, for violence!”; all with much fanfare and media attention. It’s a quick and easy “solution” to create a specialized unit that exists only to police high crime areas… that tend to be inhabited by the poor and POC.
And, since these are the “mean streets”, these teams need to look aggressive and act aggressively. If you did read that earlier essay on Use of Force, you know that Officer Presence is the beginning of the continuum. You’re dressed in all black, BDUs rather than (what used to be) the normal cop uniform, and ready to respond to violence with violence. You gotta get the jump on these scumbags before they jump you, after all. Law Enforcement already has a problem with the “Us vs. Them” mentality, and the longer you’re in- if you have that outlook constantly reinforced by your Sergeant, your FTO, your peers- the deeper your distrust of the public you are serving becomes. “Protect and Serve; bullshit… I ain’t no Waffle House waitress!”
And- until you fuck up so bad that your unit gains national notoriety- the middle-class suburbanites will applaud your efforts. “Look at how many guns they took off the street! How many drugs! How much money, taken from these scumbag thugs!” All is right in the ‘burbs; the SCORPION unit is keeping the animals at bay. And… you know… the PD sure can use those seized assets… they’re so chronically underfunded… In fact, the Sheriff is having trouble staffing his jail, and running that thing costs the taxpayers so much money… Why don’t we house all these ruffians in the new privately run CoreCivic prison that the Governor and my state Senator brought in?”
You know who isn’t so happy that the crime suppression unit is in the ‘hood?
While I was at my second LE agency, the citizens of the county- well, the well-off vociferous ones, who voted for things like Sheriffs- were very concerned about drugs- meth and crack- and gun violence. To them, the mantra was “Drugs mean guns”; and that was the mantra of Law Enforcement as well. We had home-grown meth labs in the rural part of the county crack being slung in the projects of Winder and Statham, Mexican Mafia members with huge grow houses, even an underground cocaine processing lab; obviously, something’s got to be done! No, no, not legalization and harm reduction programs; that’s too easy.
So, the Narcotics unit worked overtime, snagging low-level users and getting them to flip on their dealer as a confidential informant; and then flipping that dealer to nab his dealer; and so on and so on.
But, you know what? They never got very far up the ladder. A parade of dime-bag dealers who were actually lured from outside the county, and not much else. The public was growing restless. The City of Winder wouldn’t do much in their housing projects; and the dealers on the corner shouted jeers at them when they passed. Obviously, they needed a lesson in respecting authority.
I had the same CSU on my SWAT BDUs as I did my Traffic Unit.
So… let’s take it a step further and create the CSU, Crime Suppression Unit. Made up of members from the Narcotics Unit, the SWAT Team, and the Traffic Unit (gotta get those pretextual stops in somehow), most of their initial activity was supporting narcotics investigations, highway interdiction, and high-risk no-knock search warrants. Random stop-and-talks in high-crime neighborhoods weren’t really on the RADAR at that point; but soon that itch was begging to be scratched. However, there weren’t really neighborhoods out in the rural areas where methamphetamine and oxycontin were an issue; so the whole stop-and-frisk approach wasn’t really viable out here.
But, you know where there was a denser population of higher gun and drug statistics? In the two aforementioned cities; in neighborhoods that were almost exclusively black and poor, and the drugs of the day were crack and marijuana.
So CSU became HEAT; Heightened Enforcement Action Team, and the street-level interdiction began in earnest. Now, this wasn’t a full-time unit- this was a 200-person Sheriff’s Office; we didn’t have the resources for a full-time squad doing nothing but this. But, whenever it was decided that it was time for some Heightened Enforcement, we’d set up an evening and break the unit into 4 or 5 cars to go looking for people to “stop and talk” to. Cruising around the neighborhoods, looking for anyone out after dark, and then pull up, jump out of the car, and ask to talk to them.
That’s all consensual, right? No coercion here.
“Hey, what’s going on? You haven’t seen any illegal activity out here, have you? Hey, can you keep your hands out of your pockets, it’s making me nervous… Say, have you got any ID? You sure are acting suspicious; I’d better frisk you for my safety.” Nine times out of ten, the guy doesn’t have anything; but that tenth might have some weed, or powder, maybe even a weapon… Or they’d run, which was exciting for everyone and you could get in a merry foot-chase that you’d all laugh about at the end of the night… and, more importantly, they knew the Jump Out Boys (as the residents began calling us) weren’t like those pussy City cops; and they’d best respect us.
Respect is earned; and respect from the end of a gun or an ASP baton isn’t respect.
We were always a microscopically thin hair from- if not over, at points- violating civil rights. But in this era of the courts allowing almost ANYTHING to support a Terry Stop, it didn’t matter what you knew; only what you could get away with (“articulate”). I do want to make it clear, we NEVER went to the point of the aggressiveness seen by the SCORPION unit; and, in fact, rarely had to use force (other than that officer presence) at all; beyond the reasonable amount needed to place someone in handcuffs (again, not that SCORPION shit-show).
But if this had been a larger department, with a different culture; and had it operated long enough with impunity…
We might have become them. To be honest, the mentality was already there.
Sometimes these jump-out sessions were spur of the moment. We (the SWAT team) had just gotten finished with an evening search warrant and were about to leave the scene and head back to the SO, when the Captain (who was the team commander) had a flash. “Hey… let’s split up in a couple of cars and do some jump-outs before we call it quits.” Most everyone enthusiastically agreed (as for me, I was tired and ready to head to the house); so we piled into an unmarked car and a dual-cab pickup and headed for the ‘hood. I got into the bed of the pickup- I outranked the other 3 passengers, but at that point I just wanted to take in the air- and lay down amongst the assorted tactical tools.
Just the Jump Out Boys relaxing after a long day of flirting with the 4th Amendment.
I was really tired.
After 30 minutes or so of cruising slowly down city streets, still fully clad in our tactical vests and BDUs, the Captain finally found someone to stop; choosing this time to pull up alongside and question him from the window. The guy was hesitant and resistive- not really surprising, is it?- and I could tell the Captain was about to jump out with 3 others and get to the frisking part. The guy was slowly backing down the side of the truck and had reached the bed when I popped up.
He jumped back and his hands went in the air, eyes as wide as saucers. “Oh, shit! You damn guys are everywhere!”
Yeah, we had a good laugh about it later. Hah-hah, high-fives.
And I’m NOT proud of it; not then and even less so now.
So. What can we do to keep a tragedy like Tyre Nichols (or George Floyd; or Breanna Taylor; or Eric Garner; or Freddie Gray; or…) from occurring again?
That’s a good goddamn question. And not one that I can answer in this essay, without making it a novel, literally.
But we’ll take a stab at it in a future post. Stay tuned…
