Dr. Adkins noted that the police had made a number of reforms over the past two years, ranging from a ban on chokeholds to de-escalation training. “We set all these things up and were pleased that they were done,” he said. “This comes as a huge shock to us that these five would commit this.”
Van D. Turner, Jr., a mayoral candidate and former Shelby County Commissioner who is president of Memphis’ NAACP chapter, said he believes the city had managed police-community relations better than many other places in the years following Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He noticed that the majority of the nearly 2,000-strong force is black, just like the population of the city. “It hadn’t really been bad,” he said of police-community relations. “Obviously this” – Mr. Nichols’ death – “is putting a strain on the relationship and I think this is something that can be healed and get better over time.”
The five officers charged with Mr Nichols’ murder had all been hired in recent years – between 2017 and 2020.
As the city phased out the police retirement plan in the middle of the last decade, agents left en masse. Mark LeSure, a former Memphis police sergeant who will retire in 2021, said pay cuts and other bureaucratic issues had driven many of the corps’ veterans into retirement, filling the ranks with inexperienced officers. Officers landed in specialized equipment, such as the Scorpion unit, much earlier in their careers than was customary in the past.
Adding to the potential danger is the nature of a specialized team such as the Scorpion unit. It was launched after Mr. LeSure had left the force, but former colleagues had told him that it had a mandate to aggressively deal with suspects of criminals, and that members were supposed to be on the street doing what they could to make arrests. .
“People man, that’s what happened. They let their emotions get the better of them and there was no experienced officer to stop them,” said Mr. LeSure in a telephone interview. “Usually things are different when there are vets because we have that experience of saying, ‘I understand you’re angry, but you have to stop. You can’t do this, it’s not right.'”
Steve Eder and Mark Walker reporting contributed. Julie Tat contributed research.