Scorpions in the Grass

Premier journalist for The Trace Josiah Bates tells the intimate story of a police killing that riled the nation, uncovering along the way the sinister, city-to-city spread of elite police forces that have devastated Black and Brown neighborhoods.

On January 7, 2023, twenty-nine-year-old Tyre Nichols was severely beaten by police during a traffic stop. The five officers involved were part of Memphis’s now-disbanded Scorpion unit, a specialized task force formed to combat violent crime and car thefts—supposedly to keep the community safe. But three days later, Tyre died of his injuries, and amid nationwide calls for police reform, one question in particular arose: Just who are these units meant to protect?

Told in its entirety for the first time, with rigorous on-the-ground reporting and heartbreaking testimony from family and friends, Nichols’s story cracks open the history of elite policing, starting in 1970s Detroit, and moving through major cities like New York City and Atlanta, Los Angeles and Portland, where officer-involved murders of unarmed Black teenagers went ignored as the war on drugs raged. Usually dressed in plain clothes and waiting in unmarked cars, these officers would bait and profile civilians with little to no oversight, rarely facing consequences. 

Nichols’s murder was not just one unfortunate error, Bates argues, but the latest casualty of an escalating strategy of policing that has dangerously transformed the way American cities are patrolled—and paved the way for the violence and impunity with which other government agencies like ICE now operate.