A painful new report from the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division found the Memphis Police Department engaging in a pattern of discriminatory policing, targeting Black people and the disabled with violence and ignoring the constitutional rights of Memphis residents, particularly Black people.
It is the same brand of police behavior uncovered by other investigations in other majority-Black cities, including Baltimore. Records of incidents show police target minorities and poor neighborhoods with increased checkpoints, over-policing and violent overreaction during police interdictions, leading to injury and death, including the murder of Memphis resident Tyre Nichols, who died early last year after being stopped in traffic, allegedly for “reckless driving.” Officers hurled Nichols to the ground and pepper-sprayed and tried to tase him. When Nichols fled the violence, police pursued and tackled him. Officers kicked and punched him in his head and beat him with batons. The victim died three days later. There is no proof of reckless driving, neither did Nichols have a criminal record.
A jury convicted officers who hadn’t already pled guilty of federal felonies related to the death. It additionally convicted Officers Demetrius Haley and former MPD officers Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith for attempting to cover up their bad behavior by omitting material information in reports and providing misleading and false statements to the MPD—a common practice Memphis residents call “testi-lying.”
In that brutal aftermath, the DOJ has discovered the Memphis Police Department “engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force, conducting unlawful stops, searches and arrests and discriminatory policing of Black people and residents with behavioral health disabilities.”
Federal investigators determined Memphis police officers “regularly escalate situations and use severe, excessive force against people suspected of nonviolent offenses, including traffic violations or shoplifting.” They discovered one incident where officers pepper sprayed, choked, kicked, and fired a Taser at an unarmed man with mental illness who had tried to swipe a $2 soft drink from a gas station.
Investigators determined “MPD’s decision to emphasize traffic stops in its enforcement strategy—while failing to properly supervise officers and review this strategy for impact—has allowed for regular use of excessive force with impunity.” Additionally, they found police made “unconstitutional traffic stops” driven by overenthusiasm for traffic violations.
Supervisors, they learned, rarely review traffic stops for meeting constitutional standards and even measured officers’ “productivity” based in part on the number of stops and citations they generated. Supervisors tabulate officers’ totals at the end of each month to ensure they are making enough stops, and discipline them if they fail to meet productivity averages for their shifts. Should officers end up in a disciplinary hearing, supervisors will be lenient with them, if they have a proven record of pounding out traffic stops and citations at a crazy rate.
Investigators also revealed officers were blindly spraying the public with unlawful arrests for “disorderly conduct” as if watering rosebushes, even when victims were complying with officers’ instructions and not threatening or dangerous. One incident involving a traffic stop for improperly displayed tags led to officers arresting a 20-year-old Black driver for “disorderly conduct” and failure to obey police officers even though the man followed instructions. The young man had been standing in the street speaking with officers when an officer ordered him out of the street. The man grumbled and did as commanded, but an officer grabbed and handcuffed him anyway. And because he was grabbed, the cop determined he needed to be taken into custody.
“He gotta ride because we put our hands on him,” recordings show. The young man was (of course) released from jail the next day, and prosecutors declined to pursue any charges.
The amount of violence MPD unleashes upon the city’s Black population gets its own report section. The DOJ uncovered several ugly incidents, including the report of an officer grabbing an 8-year-old Black boy with behavioral health issues and throwing him onto furniture.
“Memphis police officers handcuff children as young as 8-years-old even when they pose no safety risk,” the report said.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young disagreed with the DOJ’s recommendation for a Justice Department deal to enact police reform, claiming the city has already made countless “positive changes” in the two years since cops beat Nichols to death.
“We believe we can make more effective and meaningful change by working together with community input and independent national experts than with a bureaucratic, costly, and complicated federal government consent decree,” Young said at a news conference, and warned similar consent decrees in cities like Chicago “have exceeded $500 million” and “$100 million” in neighboring New Orleans. Crime rates, he added “have risen under such decrees.”
Critics say the Memphis PD can’t be trusted to impose lasting changes upon itself without federal supervision, however.
“We support Mayor Young. However … we have no trust or confidence in leaving corrections to the people involved in the unlawful conduct, the persons who failed to supervise them, or those who stood by and said nothing while the unlawful conduct occurred. We need DOJ involvement,” said Shirley Bondon, executive director of the Black Clergy Collaborative of Memphis.
Other organizations, including MICAH Memphis and Just City, signed a letter agreeing with Bondon.
The DOJ could sue the City of Memphis for refusing to sign the reform agreement, but Mayor Young can now run out the clock as the police-friendly Trump administration prepares to take the White House in January. Trump, who lobbied heavily for the execution of five innocent Black men for the rape of a New York White woman (and who is now getting sued by the men for lying to the public and defamation) is not known for embracing justice issues in over-policed, minority neighborhoods. Trump was the president who had peaceful protestors tear gassed to clear a DC area for a photo-shoot with a Bible.
Young insists Memphis does not have the budget to embrace federal reforms, however, and told reporters he would have been just as leery of signing a DOJ agreement if Harris had won the presidency.
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