Memphis is hardly alone. In the early 1970s, Detroit officials responded to a surge in street violence with a program called Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets, or STRESS. Early on, the units — which often, like SCORPION, included Black officers — gave politicians bragging rights to a record of arrests and gun confiscations. But behind that record were rogue cops with a cowboy mentality. They were accused of planting evidence, physical abuse and corruption. Over a two-year period, the units killed at least 22 people, almost all of them Black. The city eventually ended the program after a STRESS unit raided an apartment where five Wayne County sheriff’s deputies — all Black — were playing poker. The resulting shootout left one deputy dead and another permanently disabled.
In the 50 years since, a similar story has played out in cities across the country, with remarkable consistency. Perhaps the most infamous was the Los Angeles’s Rampart scandal of the late 1990s, which involved a unit called Community Resources against Street Hoodlums program, or CRASH. More than 70 officers were implicated in planting guns and drug evidence, selling narcotics themselves and shooting and beating people without provocation.
Around the same time, the results of an investigation into Los Angeles’s Special Investigations Section — which had killed so many people it earned the nickname “Death Squad” — caused the city to pay out about $125 million in settlements to victims and court costs.
A decade earlier, Chicago created the Special Operations Section, or SOS, in response to rising crime in that city. By the mid-2000s, whistle-blowers and official investigations accused SOS officers of armed robbery, drug dealing, planting evidence, burglary, “taxing” drug dealers and kidnapping. One member, Keith Herrera, told “60 Minutes” that SOS officers pulled over motorists without cause, confiscated their keys, then broke into their homes and stole from them. The head of the unit — only one of numerous scandal-plagued elite units in the city’s history — eventually pleaded guilty to hiring a hit man to kill Officer Herrera.
And it was officers from the N.Y.P.D.’s Street Crimes Unit — their motto: “We own the night” — who shot and killed the unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo after mistaking his wallet for a gun. Though the unit was officially disbanded, later incarnations would take the lead in the city’s notorious Stop-and-Frisk policy, and would be implicated in some of the city’s most notorious police killings, including the deaths of Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Kimani Gray. A 2018 investigation by The Intercept found that though these units comprise just 6 percent of N.Y.P.D. officers, they were involved in more than 30 percent of fatal shootings by police officers. The street crimes units were again disbanded following the George Floyd protests in 2020. But last year, in response to a sharp rise in crime, Eric Adams restarted them.
Scandals involving elite police units have also hit Indianapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Newark, Pomona, Milwaukee, Greensboro and Fresno, among others. Most recently, eight officers from a unit in Baltimore were convicted and imprisoned after allegations that they robbed city residents, stole from local businesses, sold drugs, and carried BB guns to plant on people.
The evidence is overwhelming: Giving roving teams of police officers added authority, elite status, a long leash and a vague mandate is a formula for abuse.
Radley Balko
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