‘Crime Suppression’ Policing and Excessive Force at the Memphis Police Department

During the first three and a half years of the Biden administration, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department reported its findings from three law enforcement investigations and announced one consent decree. In the first two weeks of December, the division matched that record, issuing three reports of investigative findings—from Memphis, Tennessee; Mt. Vernon, New York; and Worcester, Massachusetts and announcing a negotiated consent decree with the city of Louisville, Kentucky. In January, after what appears to have been a holiday lull, the Justice Department has so far announced a negotiated consent decree with the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the findings from its investigation of the Oklahoma City police department. It is clear that the division is trying to complete as many pattern-or-practice investigations as possible before President-elect Trump’s inauguration.

Given the previous Trump administration’s hostility towards police accountability, and positions Trump took during his most recent campaign, we can expect another hiatus in the Civil Rights Division’s law enforcement investigations during the upcoming administration. But for those interested in how best to navigate police reform in the coming months and years, there is already much to learn from the division’s recent releases.

One key lesson comes from the division’s most expansive recent findings report, involving the Memphis Police Department (MPD). That report, especially in combination with previous investigations of police departments, makes a compelling argument for ending—rather than trying to improve—the crime suppression policing that killed Tyre Nichols, and instead moving to problem-solving approaches that research and experience show prevent crime more effectively and with less abuse.

Findings of Excessive Force at the Memphis Police Department

The division opened its investigation of MPD in July 2023, six months after members of MPD’s “SCORPION” crime suppression unit killed Nichols, a 29-year-old Black FedEx worker. Even with that brutal beating in mind, the findings are horrific, and they recount patterns of abuse far beyond Nichols’s death.

Federal law authorizes the attorney general to seek the relief necessary to eliminate a “pattern or practice” of law enforcement conduct that violates constitutional or other federal rights. The Memphis findings report amply makes the case for such relief. It describes a police force in which officers routinely violate the law and hurt people, with no accountability. “Excessive force is routine in MPD,” the report states, before laying out what routine excessive force looks like. The investigation found that MPD officers regularly escalate encounters involving nonviolent offenses, “punch[ing], kick[ing], and tackl[ing] people moments into an encounter without justification,” and use unreasonable force against unarmed people who pose “no threat.”

In one example, the report recounts how officers pepper sprayed, kicked, and fired a Taser at an unarmed man with mental illness as he tried to leave a gas station after having initially attempted to take—and then left behind—a two-dollar soft drink. As the report notes, by the end of the encounter, the man was face down in handcuffs and screaming in pain, while “at least nine police cars and twelve MPD officers had responded to the scene of this attempted shoplifting of a soft drink.” The man was arrested and served two days in jail for theft and disorderly conduct.

According to the report, Memphis officers use force and arrest people who protest their treatment or curse at police. They use deadly force without justification or after unreasonably putting themselves in harm’s way. Some officers seem to be asking for somebody in charge to save them from themselves, as recounted in this incident:

After officers tried to stop a car for driving with expired tags and failing to stop at a stop sign, they followed the driver to her home and forced their way inside while her young child stood by, crying. No exigent circumstances demanded they enter the woman’s home, and the officers had no justification to use force to push their way inside for a nonviolent traffic infraction. After the incident, one officer reflected, “In the grand scheme of things, this does not seem like it was worth it.” The officer said, “If it starts with ‘mi’ and ends in ‘eanor,’ it’s not worth it.”

The findings indicate that the SCORPION unit’s treatment of Tyre Nichols was not an aberration. Police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, community members, and other advocates all reported to the Justice Department that SCORPION “persistently” mistreated people. Prosecutors told the Justice Department that there were “outrageous” inconsistencies between SCORPION unit body-worn camera video and arrest reports and that their cases “would be laughed out of court,” if the prosecutors didn’t dismiss dozens of criminal cases.

The report also makes clear that “[t]hese problems go beyond the scorpion unit.” Indeed, the report recounts an incident in which an officer on the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) (tasked with responding to people in mental health or other behavioral crisis) used a Taser on a 13-year-old. Twice. Another CIT officer was known to his own supervisor as “Taser Face” because of his penchant for using the weapon against people in mental health crisis.

The Justice Department’s investigation found little accountability for any of this. The report recounts an officer twice using unreasonable chokeholds, failing to report it both times, and supervisors either “ignore[ing] or not noticing[ing” when they conducted their reviews of these force incidents. Even when police used force against people who were restrained, supervisors nearly always approved it. Among such cases, the report describes an officer who hit a handcuffed man in the face and torso with a baton eight times; officers kicking a woman in the chest three times while she was handcuffed in the back of a squad car; officers punching a man in the throat while he was handcuffed to a chair; and officers repeatedly permitting police dogs to bite or continue biting people, including children, who were nonresistant and attempting to surrender (including one person who was sleeping). The report quotes a letter that local prosecutors sent to MPD noting that they had “seriously considered recommending criminal charges” against an officer who delivered “more than one dozen closed fist punches to the face” of a teenager who had already been shot by another officer and hit in the head three times with the butt of a handgun. “We trust that you will handle this as an internal matter,” prosecutors wrote. The Justice Department found no evidence it was, and the officer is still working for MPD.

The report documents officers and supervisors standing by and doing nothing as other officers use force for clearly punitive reasons. One of many examples of punitive force involves a man who was arrested for domestic assault and cuffed but “calmly” refused to get into the back of the squad car. The officer, apparently enraged by this, grabbed the man by the shirt, bashed him against the frame of the car and then hit him twice with a baton as he shoved him inside. When the man began to kick the squad car door, the officer screamed, “Kick my motherfucking door again!” When the man obliged, the officer climbed on top of the man inside the car, pepper sprayed him in the face at close range, and then dragged him out of the car, placing him in a chokehold for 20 seconds before putting him back into the pepper-spray-doused squad car and rolling up the windows. The man said he could not breathe. The officer responded, “I don’t give a fuck.” The man’s family screamed at officers to stop. And the other officers on the scene the entire time did nothing. The use of force review found no violations of policy. Incidents like these are perhaps not surprising, given a department culture in which a field training officer would find it worth their while to tell a Justice Department civil rights investigator, “We’re not excessive enough with these criminals. We baby them.”

The misconduct recounted in the Memphis findings report will make your skin crawl and your heart ache. In addition to the generally violent culture it documents, the report demonstrates how MPD’s once nationally renowned program for responding to persons in behavioral crisis has become callous. MPD’s treatment of children is also sickening. The report includes what appears to be a still from body-worn camera footage that shows a small boy—just eight years old—being led away in handcuffs by police.

Explanations and Causes of Excessive Force

Amid these stark descriptions of violence, perhaps the most striking aspect of the report is how the division links the widespread patterns of abuse it found to Memphis’s decision to “saturate” certain Black neighborhoods with intense street-level enforcement, both by specialized units like SCORPION and through recurring patrol initiatives:

Memphis has relied on traffic stops to address violent crime. The police department has encouraged officers in specialized units, task forces, and patrol to prioritize street enforcement. Officers and community members have described this approach as “saturation,” or flooding neighborhoods with traffic stops. This strategy involves frequent contact with the public and gives wide discretion to officers, which requires close supervision and clear rules to direct officers’ activity. But MPD does not ensure that officers conduct themselves in a lawful manner.

When noting that Black people are treated more harshly than white people who engage in similar misconduct in Memphis, the report asserts:

Racial disparities in Memphis are driven by the police department’s unsupervised enforcement of low-level, discretionary offenses without proper review and controls. Other strategies, like improved violent crime investigations and community-based violence prevention programs, would more directly serve MPD’s and the City’s public safety mission without resulting in unnecessary disparities.

The type of enforcement that the Justice Department says led to the patterns of misconduct in Memphis can be termed “crime suppression policing.” This policing approach heavily relies on traffic and pedestrian stops, often pretext stops, that lead to intrusive and demeaning searches, frequently followed by citations or arrests for overwhelmingly low-level offenses. So-called crime suppression policing is used so frequently in areas deemed “high-crime” “hot spots,” that it is often called hot spots policing, even though there are other ways cities can (and sometimes do) police crime hot spots. Sometimes cities dedicate entire units to crime suppression policing—like the SCORPION unit in Memphis—but crime suppression policing can be adopted more broadly as well.

In Memphis, prioritizing a crime suppression approach meant that in the roughly five and a half years the Justice Department examined for its investigation, MPD made 866,164 traffic stops and issued 296,685 traffic citations. These figures represent twice as many traffic stops and three times as many citations as the Nashville police department over a similar period (tellingly, Nashville is a larger city than Memphis, but it has a smaller police force). Further, the vast majority of these stops were of Memphis’s Black residents, and disproportionately so. As many scholars, perhaps most notably Devon Carbado, have pointed out, the sheer frequency of these compelled interactions expose Black people not only to “the violence of ongoing police surveillance, contact, and social control but also to the violence of serious bodily injury and death.” Nichols’s killing, and the entire Memphis findings report, bear out this argument.

As if creating a culture of needless, routine police violence were not enough, the crime suppression policing strategy also pushes officers to conduct stops, searches, and arrests that are unlawful and may actually undermine public safety. In Memphis, the report notes, officers can face discipline if they fail to generate sufficient stops and citations, and, conversely, this type of “productivity” can be grounds for leniency in disciplinary hearings. As one supervisor told Justice civil rights investigators, “two tickets a day keeps the lieutenant away.” The report notes, “Officers made stops to generate stats, rather than to address public safety needs.” Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department found that Memphis officers were “routinely failing to justify stops with reasonable suspicion.”

Many of these questionable stops, which number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, are far more intrusive than the kind most people in the United States have likely been subjected to. The report documents MPD officers performing body cavity searches in public during stops. It reports officers stopping drivers for infractions like tinted windows, then cuffing and putting the drivers in the back of squad cars while they search their car. “You seem sweet,” one officer told a woman who reported she had never been in handcuffs before the officer frisked her, cuffed her, and detained her in the back of his patrol vehicle for 25 minutes while he wrote a misdemeanor citation.

We don’t know how often searches like these turn up any contraband or evidence because MPD doesn’t bother to track when they frisk or search people, or what they find when they do. Indeed, the report has a whole section titled “MPD Does Not Assess Whether Its Practices Are Lawful And Effective” (spoiler alert: they are neither). Even Memphis’s chief, Cerelyn Davis, seems to think that whether someone is found to actually have violated the law is relatively unimportant, attempting to justify seizing the cars of purportedly reckless drivers by arguing, “[W]e want to take your car, too …. Even if the case gets dropped in court …. You might be inconvenienced for three days without your car. That’s enough.” This statement not only discounts the potentially life-altering effects of seizing someone’s vehicle but also seems steeped in the idea that it is the job of the police to mete out punishment.

Actors throughout Memphis’s criminal legal system know that MPD officers do not feel particularly constrained by what is legal. One prosecutor told the Justice Department that some MPD supervisors do not review arrests and might not even have the training to recognize whether probable cause exists. A judicial commissioner told the Justice Department that they must “often” remind officers that probable cause is needed to conduct a search or an arrest. A judge expressed frustration that MPD officers are sometimes unable to articulate probable cause in their arrest reports. The Justice Department writes that judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys all raised concerns about MPD’s “over-reliance on ‘high-crime areas’ as a justification for stops.”

Put more colloquially, Memphis police conduct a lot of bogus stops and searches, and everybody knows it. Nichols’s killing is an extreme example of the consequences of this stop-and-search policing approach, but the report makes clear that unnecessary violence is all too common and that people in some Memphis neighborhoods are subjected to degrading, dehumanizing detentions and searches every day.

The MPD Findings Report in Context

The Memphis findings echo those in other Civil Rights Division findings reports. The Louisville, Kentucky, report described how the VIPER crime suppression unit, and its rebrand, the Ninth Mobile Division, which focused on “hot spots” of violent crime by stopping people for minor traffic violations and other low-level offenses, were found by federal and state courts to have violated residents’ Fourth Amendment rights. The Baltimore, Maryland, findings report found that the patterns of unconstitutional conduct “result[ed] in part from [the Baltimore police department’s] ‘zero tolerance’ enforcement strategy,” which attempted to “suppress crime by regularly stopping and searching pedestrians and arresting them on any available charges, including discretionary misdemeanor offenses.” Justice’s report of the Lexington, Mississippi, police department investigation similarly demonstrates how aggressively policing low-level offenses in order to generate revenue created a culture rife with unreasonable force, retaliatory stops, lawless arrests, race discrimination, and First Amendment violations.

Collectively, these findings reports document the role that suppression policing plays in creating a police culture in which abuse thrives and accountability withers. They explain how suppression policing incentivizes a culture that gives little consideration to whether police conduct violates the law or hurts people and that demands outputs like stops and arrests without stopping to wonder—much less evaluate—whether those outputs lead to desired outcomes such as improved public safety or police legitimacy.

The Memphis report posits that “close supervision and clear rules” that keep policing within legal limits can stem the corrosive impact of crime suppression policing. But the collective weight of the Civil Rights Division’s investigations of law enforcement agencies points to several reasons why it may make more sense to eschew crime suppression policing entirely: Rather than tinker with its machinery, cities should replace suppression policing with problem-solving approaches.

First, policing that programmatically relies on stops and searches—that is, uses stops and subsequent frisks or searches as an organizational strategy or tactic to police certain people or certain areas—is probably not just in tension with constitutional policing but also incompatible with it. This conclusion is consistent not only with the findings of the Justice Department’s investigations of police departments but also with the findings by federal courts in cases like Floyd v. City of New York, where the court found that the New York Police Department’s programmatic use of stop and frisk violated the Fourth and 14th Amendment rights of a whole class of Black and Latine residents, and the Bailey class action in Philadelphia, where a rate of stop and frisks even higher than in New York City during the same time period motivated the city to settle a similar lawsuit alleging Fourth and 14th Amendment violations. A host of other scandals involving crime suppression units spanning decades, including particularly high-profile abusive units like LAPD’s Rampart Division CRASH unit, and Memphis’s “Red Dog” unit, which Chief Davis supervised and which was later sued and disbanded, also support the same conclusion. Despite decades of disbanding and rebranding, with perennial new and improved training and supervision, crime suppression units, the epitome of suppression policing, remain reliably abusive.

Perhaps one of the reasons that consent decrees take so long to implement, and result in change that sometimes seems ephemeral, is that they have not been willing to shut down one of the root causes of an abusive policing culture: programmatic reliance on aggressive stops and searches as part of “proactive policing.” The Bailey case hints that such a shift would be worthwhile: After 10 years of enforcement of that decree failed to move the needle sufficiently on constitutional violations, in what started as a pilot program and then expanded citywide, the judge overseeing that decree ordered police to first ask people to cease the offending behavior before forcibly detaining and questioning them. The plaintiff’s most recent report showed that this has resulted in significant improvement in the portion of stops supported by reasonable suspicion (nearly 90 percent) as well as an increase of the percentage of frisks conducted lawfully. The rate at which those frisks turned up contraband also improved.

Second, even if the Justice Department is right that a consent decree can brute-force crime suppression policing into complying with the law, consent decrees might be less onerous and intrusive if agencies choose to adopt another policing approach instead. One can imagine, for example, a consent decree that requires law enforcement agencies to adhere to one requirement—“do not create units whose work relies on proactive stops and searches”—rather than dozens of requirements designed to ensure that crime suppression officers are selected, trained, assigned, supervised, and held accountable appropriately.

Most important, replacing rather than trying to fix crime suppression policing is likely to be more effective at reducing policing harm and restoring police legitimacy. As the Civil Rights Division has found, and as many communities have always known, police conduct can adhere to the law and still cause grievous undue injury. Indeed as numerous scholars like Paul Butler and Devon Carbado have argued, in many respects the Fourth Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, facilitates abusive policing, rather than constrains it. This means that a police department can reform its crime suppression team so that it meets every line of a Justice Department consent decree, and every letter of the law, and still cause significant harm and result in costly scandals and lawsuits.

While they do not often say so in mixed company, police and local government officials are well aware that crime suppression policing reliably results in rights violations and abuse. Some of these officials frankly just do not care all that much. But most do care, and yet they continue supporting crime suppression policing because they (or the public that supports them) think that there is no better way to protect public safety effectively, especially in crime “hot spots.” These officials hope that the right policies and supervision can keep abuses (and lawsuits) to a minimum but have resigned themselves to living with the pain caused (to other people) by crime suppression policing.

Officials and the public that supports them often do not realize that, as experience and a growing body of research demonstrate, there is a better way to protect public safety, even in crime hot spots: Policing that relies on problem-solving approaches is more effective, and less harmful, than policing that relies on stops and searches.

Problem-solving approaches aim to change the underlying conditions and situational dynamics that cause problems to recur in hot spots. These approaches use evidence-informed strategies and usually involve police working in conjunction with other city services and community stakeholders, including tenant organizations, government and nongovernment health service groups, schools, and local business owners. The police enforcement role is far less focused on stopping, searching, or arresting people. The best responses to violence, crime, and disorder combine this type of problem-solving policing with non-police responses. This is what the Memphis findings report is getting at when it says: “Other strategies, like improved violent crime investigations and community-based violence prevention programs, would more directly serve MPD’s and the City’s public safety mission without resulting in unnecessary disparities.”

Whether a Justice Department consent decree should require the dismantling of crime suppression policing rather than its reform is, at the moment, an academic question, given that Memphis’s political leadership is opposing outside oversight from the Justice Department, and the incoming Trump administration will not force the issue. But in the absence of Justice Department requirements, Memphis and other cities are still free to replace crime suppression policing with more effective—and less inherently abusive—approaches.

The Civil Rights Division’s findings reports have once again illuminated a path toward better policing. Unfortunately, at least right now, there will not be an opportunity for the division to help ensure Memphis takes that path. Fortunately, the people of Memphis can still organize and pressure their government to do the right thing. That is, after all, the only thing that has ever brought about real change anyway.