The Memphis Model

The police murder of Tyre Nichols has reopened the wounds of 2020 — wounds that were scarcely healed to begin with. The footage (viewable here; obvious content warnings apply) of an unarmed 29-year-old crying out for his mother as he is beaten to death by public officers on a suburban street is as gut-wrenching as it is indefensible to all but the most remorseless police statists.

That leaves three options for everyone else: 1) Dismiss the killing as a one-off “reprehensible act” by five (or possibly six) individuals, as “friend” of the Racket Thomas Chatterton Williams did (because of course he did). 2) See it as yet another example of American cops treating the lives of the people they allegedly “serve” — particularly those of young Black men — as disposable. Or 3) Try to thread the needle and notice there is something broader going on, but insist it has nothing to do with the core mission of the police, and can be solved with a few technical fixes on the margins.

Option three was taken over the weekend by the centrist “Econ blogger” Noah Smith. In a piece titled “Professionalize the police,” he argues that the main problem American cops face is a lack of training. “Is it not common sense,” Smith asks, “that cops who haven’t been properly prepared for the violent and dangerous situations they encounter on a job might resort to escalation dominance and demonstrative displays of aggression because they just don’t know how else to react?”

Let’s move for a second beyond the most obvious problem here: that there has been zero evidence presented that Nichols (like George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and many others before him) posed any kind of danger to the officers who took his life. And let’s put a pin in the question of what kinds of training the Memphis cops had before they initiated their fatal encounter with Nichols.

That’s because, before I could even try to undercut the underlying argument, Smith did it for me. Halfway through he writes: “Surprisingly, I can’t find good causal studies on the overall impact of police training on police brutality.”

That is a glaring omission in a post whose entire argument is more training will reduce police brutality. But the oversight is not Smith’s alone. In 2004, the National Research Council acknowledged: “For many decades it has been assumed that more and better police training leads to improved officer performance,” but that “there is limited evidence available … on the effects of training.” Ten years later, one of that chapter’s authors, Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan, reaffirmed in a new paper: “We [still] know virtually nothing about the short- or long-term effects associated with police training of any type.”

Smith tries to write around that by citing a 2020 study on a specific kind of training — a fairness-based approach known as “procedural justice” — whose findings he calls “encouraging.” But digging into the paper, one’s enthusiasm fades. That study collected data from a four-year training program of the Chicago Police Department, in which nearly 8,500 of the department’s 12,000 officers participated. Those officers reported using force 7,116 times — “ranging in severity from a takedown to a firearm discharge” — within two years after completing the training; a reduction, the study’s authors estimate, of … 6.4%.

Wow. Encouraging.

Meanwhile, in that time, officers who had gone through the training had a total of 6,577 complaints of misconduct filed against them. Of those, the department sustained or settled 573, paying out a total of $22.9 million.

And those are just the cases that CPD thought it couldn’t get away with. It bears noting that the study period overlapped with the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke — a case in which CPD intentionally destroyed evidence to cover up the fact that Van Dyke shot McDonald while he was walking away, then shot him 15 more times while he lay on the ground. Van Dyke was later charged and acquitted of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 81 months in prison on lesser charges, and was released last year after having served less than 39 months. I’m not sure if Van Dyke or the dozens of cops who assisted in the coverup were part of the 75% of the force who received the fairness training. But I suspect at least a few were.

None of those argumentative holes should be surprising, because none of Smith’s proposals are new. There’s an entire section in Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing tracing the failures of “procedural justice” reforms dating back to the 1960s.

“Professionalizing” the police, meanwhile, has been a goal of reformers since Robert Peel built the original London Metropolitan Police (on the model of his colonial Irish Constabulary) in 1829. Americans imported that model (starting with Boston in 1838) in hopes of “professionalizing” what passed for law enforcement until then: the roving ad hoc gangs of night watchmen charged with keeping Native Americans out of cities in the north, and vigilante slave-hunting patrols in the South.

The late 19th and early 20th Century police departments were nearly as corrupt and racist as the informal gangs they replaced. On the eastern seaboard they became tools of urban political machines (Democratic and Republican alike), to be used for whatever purposes their political patrons saw fit, including racketeering, intimidation of rivals, and open voter fraud. In the Progressive era, reformers made stamping out police corruption a primary goal. And to do that, they turned to — yes — the military as an example.

Specifically, the Progressives adopted the military’s command-and-control structures, copied Army manuals, and built the first police academies built on the model of the Army and Navy War Colleges. As Vitale notes in his book, this era also saw the creation of the first State Police, in Pennsylvania, created in 1905 explicitly on the model of the Philippine Constabulary — the armed force created to oversee the then on-going U.S. colonization of the Asian archipelago. The “father of modern law enforcement,” August Vollmer, got his training as a U.S. soldier in the conquest of the Philippines and brought his experiences to bear in the military-style reorganization of the Berkeley and then Los Angeles PDs.

And perhaps you have heard of General Smedley D. Butler of the United States Marine Corps? See Chapter 15 of my book for details on how he implemented Marine-style tactics (and violence) during a two-year stint running the Philadelphia Police Department during Prohibition — to ultimately the chagrin of corrupt Philly politicians, but to the detriment of the city’s working-class Black population above all. (This isn’t just a plug, Butler played a significant role in the militarization of U.S. police, as Vitale and others have recognized.)

Another book worth I’d recommend Smith (and others) read is Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders, which traces the extensive, interconnected history of Cold War-era policing and the U.S. military’s global counterinsurgency. An instructive example is Los Angeles. There, under the banner of “professionalization,” two successive chiefs — William H. Parker III and his protégé Daryl Gates — turned the LAPD from a midsized force into an unaccountable fiefdom, one saw its role as terrorizing “not only organized crime but also racial minority groups, dissidents, especially communists, and anyone who supported these groups, which for Parker meant anyone who criticized the police.”1 (It was Parker who introduced the idea of the "thin blue line" to policing).

Gates in turn invented the military style S.W.A.T. team (originally short for Special Weapons Attack Team, later softened to “Special Weapons and Tactics”) in direct response to the 1965 Watts riots — themselves a response to police savagely beating a Black man after a traffic stop. As Schrader writes: “A rebellion of Black people against police abuse, economic exploitation, and social marginalization demanded, in [Gates’] self-aggrandizing narrative, a revolutionary response of his own.” (Gates, whose personal racism extended to open eugenics, also started D.A.R.E. He was forced to resign as LAPD chief after his military-style response to the 1992 riots that followed the police beating of Rodney King — after, yes, yet another traffic stop.)

We can see the legacy of Gates’ aggressive, militaristic response to threats from below (complete with menacing backronym) in the Memphis unit whose members killed Tyre Nichols. Like the original S.W.A.T., the SCORIPON unit (“Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods”) was meant to restore confidence in the face of a variety of pandemic-era disorders, from a then-rising homicide rate to Police Chief Cerelyn J. Davis’s own perception of erratic driving near her new home. That Davis was probably one of Daryl Gates’ worst nightmares — a Black woman running a city police department — did nothing to alter the structural pattern he helped create: By employing extremely aggressive tactics on “hot-spot areas” in mainly Black neighborhoods, community activists had warned for months that a fatal incident at the hands of a SCORPION unit was only a matter of time.

Far from mitigating police brutality, training has helped foster it. As Smith himself notes in his post, the long process of police militarization has boiled into training, where cops are inculcated with what has become known as the “warrior mindset.” As Seth Stoughton, an expert on that destructive effects of police training, told the New Yorker after watching the video of Nichols’ beating: “The officers here were trying to assert control over Mr. Nichols, not defending themselves, and they were using applications of force that were gratuitous and egregiously unjustified.” (Davis disbanded the SCORPION unit this week.)

Smith’s remedy is to focus on “the right kind of training,” such as “procedural justice” — whose marginal effectiveness in Chicago we saw above. He mocks critics of police training as naïve and short-sighted, singling out activists currently fighting the construction of the new $90 million Atlanta police training facility nicknamed “Cop City” as “leftists for whom raging at the police is just one of a rotating list of standard things to get mad about.”

He conveniently leaves out that one of those activists, 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (known as Tortugita to their friends), was recently shot to death by Georgia State Police while trying to protect the forest that will have to be cleared to build the site. State officials say Tortugita shot the trooper first, but say there is no body camera footage to substantiate the claim. Tortugita’s allies are calling for an independent investigation. Eighteen other activists have been charged under a vague new state domestic terrorism law. Reviewing the arrest warrants, Grist reporter Alleen Brown found that “none of those arrested and slapped with terrorism charges are accused of seriously injuring anyone” and that at least nine “alleged acts of ‘domestic terrorism’ consist solely of trespassing in the woods and camping or occupying a tree house.”

Unable to substantiate the effectiveness of formal training in reducing police violence, Smith takes one last swing at the classroom answer: calling for police departments to require officers to have graduated college. (He confusingly cites the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery as a model, even though that’s a military test generally administered to high schoolers.)

There are two problems there. One, as with police training, there is little data to support it. The same National Research Council publication I cited above said: “The committee finds the available evidence inadequate to make recommendations regarding the desirability of higher education for improving police practice and strongly recommends rigorous research on the effects of higher education on job performance.”

Second, the Memphis Police Department already requires applicants to either have “54 semester hours of study at an accredited college or university” (generally equivalent to about two years), two years of military service, or three years at another police department. And indeed, at least half the officers involved in the death of Tyre Nichols attended college: Tadarrius Bean graduated from the University of Mississippi, Emmitt Martin III attended Tennessee’s Bethel University, and Desmond Mills, Jr., played football for West Virginia State.

One of the photos identified online as Preston Hemphill, the white officer suspended yesterday, shows him in a ROTC uniform — suggesting he at least attended college somewhere — though I wasn’t able to confirm that it was him. According to the MPD’s Facebook page, Hemphill also recently completed the department’s Crisis Intervention Team training program — the so-called Memphis Model that has become a nationwide template for teaching officers to avoid escalation in interactions with people experiencing mental health episodes. It was Hemphill who allegedly yelled, “I hope they stomp his ass,” while waving through two additional police cruisers to join Nichols’ pile on.

Would requiring every cop in America to graduate from college keep them from beating unarmed people to death? Well, having a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement didn’t keep Derek Chauvin from squeezing the life out of George Floyd. So it doesn’t seem like it.

If more training isn’t the answer, and college education isn’t the answer, then what is? I suppose that depends on the question you’re asking. Smith sees it as a question of, essentially, budget balancing: “To believe that violent crime necessitates the murder of innocent people like George Floyd, you have to believe that police brutality is not just an effective method of suppressing violent crime, but also a cost-effective method. And to put it mildly, I don’t see any evidence for that.”

That implies that if, say, pulling an emaciated, unarmed 29-year-old man from his car, screaming contradictory orders and things like “Bitch, put your hands behind your back before I break it,” beating him mercilessly, then watching as he slowly died in the street was an “effective method of suppressing violent crime” that is something that right-thinking people should get behind. That doesn’t seem persuasive to me.

It also requires an extremely limited idea of what constitutes both crime and violence in a society where wage theft and forced homelessness are rampant, most direct interpersonal violence — especially sexual violence — never gets reported at all. According to the New York Times, in its first three months the Memphis SCORPION unit boasted among its chief successes the “seizures of $103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles and 253 weapons.” This in a state where an estimated $213 million was stolen in 2019 alone by wage-law-breaking employers, and where it is now legal to carry a concealed, loaded handgun in public, without a permit, or any kind of training at all.

Police, through their dominance of municipal budgets and the public imagination, have made themselves an indispensable cog in modern American life — providing services like wellness checks and monitoring traffic safety, among other things. They do so at the cost of constantly expanding their monopoly on street violence, while consistently living up to the original goals of police: protecting middle and upper-class private property, tamping down organized dissent, and upholding the racial order of the day. I don’t know what should replace or supplant these cultural behemoths, or how to get to the point where that happens. But it does seem clear that the problem facing police and the society they inhabit isn’t one that a little extra training can solve.