On Friday evening, January 27, the city of Memphis watched 67 minutes of body camera footage that most people couldn’t finish. By Saturday afternoon, Memphis Police Chief CJ Davis had permanently deactivated the SCORPION unit. Five days later, neighborhoods across the city are still trying to figure out what that means for them.
The five officers charged with second-degree murder in the death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx worker, were all members of SCORPION. The acronym stood for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods. The unit had roughly 50 officers assigned to it, and its job was simple on paper: flood high-crime areas with aggressive enforcement targeting auto thefts, gang activity, and drug operations. In practice, what that looked like depended on which side of the patrol car you were standing on.
The protests that followed the footage release were, by most accounts, remarkably peaceful. Crowds gathered at the National Civil Rights Museum on Mulberry Street, marched along Beale, and held vigils at the spot near Raines Road where Nichols was beaten. Memphis didn’t burn. That fact alone says something about this city.
What SCORPION Actually Did
Chief Davis created the SCORPION unit in October 2021, during the worst year for homicides Memphis had ever recorded. The city logged 346 homicides that year. Something had to change, and Davis, the first Black woman to lead MPD, bet on aggressive saturation policing in the neighborhoods where the violence was concentrated.
SCORPION officers worked in plainclothes, drove unmarked cars, and operated with wide latitude. They targeted hot spots: the strip of Frayser Boulevard between Hollywood and Watkins, the blocks around Raleigh-Millington Road where auto thefts had tripled, the corridors of Whitehaven south of Shelby Drive where carjackings spiked in late 2021. Orange Mound saw SCORPION patrols regularly, particularly around the intersection of Park and Lamar.
City officials credited the unit with helping bring homicides down to 302 in 2022, a 12.7% decline from the record year. The numbers were real. The question that nobody in city government wanted to answer was whether the tactics producing those numbers were sustainable, or legal, or worth the cost in community trust.
Now we know the answer.
The Gap in Enforcement
Talk to people who live in the neighborhoods SCORPION patrolled and you’ll hear something that doesn’t fit neatly into any political narrative: they’re relieved and worried at the same time.
I drove through Frayser last Tuesday morning. At a gas station on Thomas Street, a property manager named Gerald told me he’d already called two security companies since the weekend. “I’m not sad they shut that unit down,” he said. “What they did to that young man was evil. Full stop. I also know what happens when the police pull back from these streets.”
That tension is everywhere. In Raleigh, a strip mall owner on Austin Peay Highway told me he’d seen SCORPION officers chase a suspect through his parking lot in November, scattering customers and knocking over a display sign. He was furious about it at the time. This week, he’s pricing security cameras and asking a friend who runs a guard company about overnight patrols.
Whitehaven residents I spoke with described a similar split. One woman near Graceland said SCORPION officers had been rude to her teenage son during a traffic stop last summer, demanding he exit his car for no reason she could see. She called the disbandment “overdue.” Then, in the next sentence, she asked whether MPD had a plan for the drug house two blocks from her home that SCORPION had been watching.
Orange Mound, one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the country, has its own complicated relationship with aggressive policing. Residents there have been stopped, questioned, and searched by officers for decades. The anger over what happened to Tyre Nichols is personal and deep. So is the fear about what happens when enforcement disappears from intersections where gunshots are routine after dark.
Private Security Phones Are Ringing
Three private security company owners I talked to this week confirmed the same thing: their phones have been busier than usual since the footage dropped.
“Started Monday morning,” one told me. He runs a mid-size operation with about 30 guards, mostly covering commercial properties in the Hickory Hill and Cordova area. “I got four calls before lunch. Two were apartment complexes, one was a church, one was a gas station. All of them said the same thing: ‘We need somebody visible on our property.’”
The pattern is familiar. When public confidence in police drops, the private sector picks up the slack. It happened after Ferguson in 2014. It happened after George Floyd in 2020. Property managers and business owners don’t wait for policy debates to resolve themselves. They call a security company and sign a contract.
The difference in Memphis right now is that the demand isn’t coming from downtown corporate offices or East Memphis retail centers. It’s coming from the same neighborhoods that SCORPION patrolled, from small business owners and landlords who operate on thin margins and never budgeted for private security because MPD was supposed to handle it.
Whether those businesses can actually afford contract security is a different question. An unarmed guard running 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shifts costs roughly $20 to $25 per hour in the Memphis market. That’s $700 a week, minimum. For a gas station on Frayser Boulevard clearing $3,000 a month in profit, the math doesn’t work.
The Accountability Question
The five former officers, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith, were fired on January 20 and charged with second-degree murder on January 26. A grand jury indictment will follow. The Shelby County District Attorney’s office has signaled it’s treating this case with maximum seriousness.
Beyond the criminal case, the disbandment raises a question that police departments across the country have been dodging for years: can you run an aggressive crime suppression unit without creating the conditions for exactly this kind of outcome?
SCORPION was modeled on similar units in other cities. Memphis wasn’t inventing something new. Hot-spot policing, saturation enforcement, plainclothes drug and gun suppression teams: these tactics have been the go-to response for high-crime cities since the 1990s. They produce results on the stat sheet. They also produce stops, searches, and confrontations at a rate that makes encounters like the Tyre Nichols beating statistically inevitable.
Chief Davis said Saturday that she made the decision to permanently deactivate the unit “in the best interest of all.” What she didn’t say, and what nobody at City Hall has said yet, is whether MPD has a replacement strategy for the neighborhoods that SCORPION was supposed to be protecting.
What’s Missing From the Conversation
Most of the national coverage has focused on the officers, the footage, the charges, and the protests. That’s understandable. The footage is horrifying, and accountability matters.
What’s getting less attention is the operational vacuum. SCORPION wasn’t just a branding exercise. Those 50 officers represented a concentrated enforcement presence in specific neighborhoods. They made arrests, executed warrants, recovered stolen cars, and interrupted drug operations on a daily basis. Some of those operations were probably conducted professionally. Some clearly were not. All of them have now stopped.
MPD hasn’t announced how it plans to redistribute those officers or replicate the unit’s function through other means. Precinct commanders in Raleigh and Frayser are working with the same staffing shortages they had before SCORPION launched. The department is already down several hundred officers from its authorized strength, a problem that predates the current crisis and will almost certainly get worse as recruiting becomes harder in the months ahead.
The private security industry isn’t a substitute for police. Security guards can’t make arrests for felonies, can’t execute search warrants, can’t pursue suspects across neighborhoods. What they can do is provide a visible presence, deter opportunistic crime, report incidents, and make employees and customers feel safer at specific locations.
For the small business owners I talked to in Frayser and Whitehaven, that might be enough. For the residents who live on the residential streets between those businesses, where SCORPION officers were the primary deterrent against open-air drug dealing and gun violence, private security won’t fill the gap.
Where Memphis Goes From Here
The city is grieving, and it should be. What happened to Tyre Nichols was a failure at every level, from the officers who beat him to the supervisory chain that allowed a unit to operate with minimal oversight in vulnerable neighborhoods.
The work ahead is harder than disbanding a unit. Memphis has to figure out how to reduce violent crime in neighborhoods like Frayser and Orange Mound without replicating the tactics that led to a 29-year-old man’s death. That’s not a slogan. It’s an operational problem, and right now, nobody at MPD or City Hall has presented a credible answer.
In the meantime, the phones at private security companies will keep ringing. Property managers will sign contracts. Guards will start showing up at gas stations and apartment complexes that never had them before. It won’t solve the underlying problem. It won’t bring Tyre Nichols back.
It’s what Memphis does while it waits for someone to come up with something better.