Saturation units like the Memphis Police Department’s disbanded SCORPION unit have often been touted as a way to address high-crime areas, but Roland Patterson says such units need a drastic overhaul.

He describes them as units with poor supervision that create a blend of circumstances essentially providing kerosene for volatile situations, just waiting for a light.

Patterson doesn’t live in Memphis. He lives in Baltimore County, Maryland, and serves on the local NAACP’s legal redress committee.

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“They (such units) evolved and, you know, the nature of these task forces, my research indicates, is that the most aggressive police officers are identified for (them),” Patterson said. “The most aggressive police officers are then placed together on these task forces, so that they are mutually reinforcing — magnifying, if you will — each other’s aggression.”

That’s his description of the Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore, arguably the most infamous specialized policing unit in recent years.

And it sounds familiar to descriptions of MPD’s SCORPION unit, particularly as seen in the stop of Tyre Nichols — “jump out boys” making pretextual traffic stops and finding ways to pull people over or initiate contact in hopes of finding a gun or drugs.

The Nichols case has intensified the national debate on using highly aggressive tactics to battle violent crime and the pretexts that are often used.

In the case of Nichols, reckless driving was the pretext, although MPD chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis said she didn’t see evidence of reckless driving on the body camera footage from the stop.

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The five officers initially charged pled not guilty at arraignment, but multiple investigations into the unit and the department as a whole continue.

Most of the officers from the unit ultimately were placed in other specialized units within the Organized Crime Unit of MPD, according to reporting by The Institute for Public Service Reporting. The head of the unit, Col. Prentiss Jolly, retired one day before the announcement of an internal investigation.

MPD officials said Jolly’s retirement was planned.

”I would say that that’s a pretty quick transition, given what’s gone on with SCORPION unit and the fact that they have been moved to another tactical unit,” Van Turner, a Memphis mayoral candidate and former Shelby County Commissioner, said of action against the involved officers and the unit.

“It’s something that we have to analyze and be concerned with. Obviously, these (officers reassigned) were not the officers who were indicted and who are now in the court system.

“However, if we are taking a good look at what is going on, I think it is important that we track this and we just not allow one group to move to another group and they continue the same culture. ... It is concerning.”

‘Saturating the area’

In Memphis, window tint, reckless driving or stops as part of “enhanced enforcement” were the tactics typically used by members of the SCORPION unit.

The Daily Memphian has analyzed roughly 1,000 affidavits provided by Just City through a data scrape. Nearly 10% of affidavits mention window tint as a part of the traffic stop. Within the affidavits, there are mentions of window tint 92 times and 31 mentions of resisting arrest.

Click here to view the interactive data visualization.

The Daily Memphian requested the departmental policy on job recommendations and requirements for officers to apply for the now-disbanded unit to see who was preferred for the job. That request was denied because city officials said there are no responsive records for that request.

“I think it’s critical. We have to understand how those officers were chosen, how they were deployed in our county and what was expected of them from their direct supervisor,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City. “What was the excuse of ... their direct supervisors, and whether it was written down as policy or not. It’s part of the culture; it might as well be policy.

“And, I think, what we’re uncovering with some of these affidavits is that there ... were definitely some patterns and some ways that they were policing that were inspected.”

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Roughly 5% of the records mention reckless driving, the reason Nichols was pulled over.

There is only one mention of pepper spray being used and three mentions of a chemical agent being used — a seemingly low number of mentions considering Memphis Fire Department chief Gina Sweat told Memphis City Council members there had been requests to use pepper spray 140 times in the past six months.

Shelby County District Attorney General Steve Mulroy announced previously that several arrests made by the unit were under investigation to ensure the stops were done constitutionally.

Most of the stops identified and mapped out by The Daily Memphian were made in the most impoverished areas of the city.

“It’s something that we’ve been saying for years. I’m not just talking about SCORPION right now ... (I’m) talking about the broader patterns and practices of policing in Memphis and Shelby County over the past several years ...” said Rev. Earle Fisher of the Black Clergy Collaborative.

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Of the affidavits checked, nearly a third of the cases are still active, but 10% were guilty pleas and roughly a third were listed as nolle prosequi, meaning the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute for a variety of reasons. Only 11 cases had been dismissed as of the data scrape.

“This is a specialized unit,” Fisher said. “These are people who are supposed to be more sophisticated than the average law enforcement officer, and to tell me (roughly) 35% of these cases are fruitless. This is bad.”

While activists and community leaders have called for an external pattern and practice investigation into the department by the United States Department of Justice, questions remain on what the protocol of the unit was and why the other officers were moved to other specialized units.

“I think that those are questions that merit an answer from MPD.... So like others, I would like to know, what was the reasoning behind it,” City Council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas said. “And until we get an answer, then we really have nothing to say one way or the other. I have no recourse of action because we don’t know what caused that.”

She added: “If (we were) able to get a response ... at least local legislators will know which way to go. We have to know what’s going on in our jurisdiction and the reasonings for what has been done so we can get to the root of the problem. And that’s what we’re trying to get to.”

Analysis: A timeline of how Tyre Nichols traffic stop became violent

Studies have shown specialized units like SCORPION can diminish relationships with community members in the areas where stops are occurring.

“The concept of recognizing that the way police interact with people and (are) applying things procedurally, like just treatment of individuals, is just as important as being effective against crime,” said Tammy Kochel, criminology professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

“So making sure that officers are interacting with citizens, that they’re giving them an opportunity to share with police what’s going on rather than just the police being authoritative and imposing some sort of tule or action on them” is important, she said.

“We know that (saturation patrols) can be effective … but how police are behaving in those locations is also very important to successful policing and successful outcomes.”

The Daily Memphian previously identified seven other officers in the unit, in addition to those involved in the Nichols case, who had been served with various infractions. Now, the identities of the entire unit have been confirmed but personnel files have not yet been provided by the city.

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Two officers in SCORPION were placed on administrative leave in June 2022, according to POST records obtained by The Daily Memphian, but MPD officials would not confirm why they were placed on administrative leave.

MPD officials did not respond to questions for this story.

Bill Dries contributed to this story.