The Scorpion and the Frog

Reflections on the police killing of Tyre Nichols

Former president Trump used to thrill his rally audiences by reciting a piece of doggerel called “The Snake”. I’m not linking to it, but it’s easy to find on YouTube. In his telling, which he said was about immigrants, the snake is taken in by a kindly women who cares for him. At the end of the story, he bites her and leaves her to die, telling her “you knew I was a snake when you took me in”. The message was that the snake’s character was not only vicious but immutable. The xenophobia on the immigration question lies right on the surface for everyone to see.

Trump’s poem has remarkable similarity to a Russian fable, The Scorpion and the Frog. In this rendering, the frog comes across a scorpion by the side of the river. The scorpion implores the frog to take him across on his back. “No, you’ll sting me”, replies the frog. “I’d never”, retorts the scorpion. The frog relents and then halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him. “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both die.” says the frog. “It’s in my nature” replies the scorpion before they sink into the river.

The Memphis police officers now charged with the beating death of Tyre Nichols were part of a special crime-fighting unit called the “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Police in Our Neighborhoods”, or SCORPION. Radley Balko explains why the unit was created:

The ‌teams, which included four groups of 10 officers each, would saturate crime hot spots in the city in unmarked cars and make pretextual traffic stops ‌to investigate homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and carjackings.

The first thing that stood out to me about the SCORPION reporting was the use of unmarked cars. Rather than relying on police cruisers to patrol a neighborhood (which might aid in community trust), this squad relied on the element of surprise. Nichols’ car was blocked both front and back by the unmarked cars, which would be unnerving to say the least.

Allegedly, Nichols was stopped for reckless driving but there is no evidence as to what that meant or if anyone was in danger. The reality is that the officers could stop anyone they wanted if they could justify a cause later in their reports. Eugene Robinson described it in the Washington Post:

Too many officers of all races and ethnicities, imbued with a culture of us vs. them, do not see a Black man who has a broken taillight or makes an illegal U-turn as a citizen who made a mistake. They see him as a threat to police dominance and control — and therefore as someone who must be subdued, humiliated, cowed, put in his place.

Once Nichols was stopped, the SCORPION officers began making multiple, often contradictory demands. An analysis by the New York Times found that the officers made 71 commands in 13 minutes. Some were impossible to comply with given their inconsistency with other demands. David Kirkpatrick, writing in The New Yorker describes how things quickly get out of control:

Convinced that they risk their life each time they stop such a driver, many officers approach each encounter prepared for a life-or-death struggle. Few may be as hyper-aggressive as the officers who killed Nichols, but their fear and belligerence can still evoke a reciprocal urge in a driver to talk back or flee, sparking a deadly cycle.

Both Balko and Kirkpatrick write about the ways in which these problems are endemic to specialize police units. Here’s a relevant passage from Balko:

These units are typically touted as the best of the best — teams of highly experienced, carefully selected officers with stable temperaments, who have earned the right to work with less supervision. It isn’t difficult to see the dangers of telling police officers again and again that they are “elite,” but what’s really remarkable is how far that ideal is from the reality. As Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles deputy police chief and former SWAT officer, once told me, “The guys who really want to be on the SWAT team are the last people you should be putting on the SWAT team.” These units tend to attract aggressive, rules-skirting officers who then bring in like-minded colleagues to join them.

I’ve written before about the HBO series “We Own This City”, written by The Wire creator David Simon about a specialized unit in Baltimore. That unit, designed to intercept drugs and guns, eventually brought about an FBI investigation resulting in the conviction of several members of the unit. As I’ve also written, this story is a rarity in the world of law enforcement entertainment. More often than not, we celebrate the “not quite by the book” officer who manages to get the bad guys.

It’s an open question as to whether aggressive officers self-select into a unit like SCORPION or if the culture of the unit brings out aggressive control tendencies. It is, of course, continually reinforcing. This is not to absolve the officers for their actions (or those after the fact who did nothing to assist). It does, however, suggest that these specialized units need some rethinking.

David Fitch, theologian at Northern Seminary near Chicago shared this on his SubStack today.

The police forces of our cities might be described in this way. They are there perhaps created for good (some prelapsarian theologians think the instruments of government were there before sin came into the world). But they overstep. We ask them to do redemptive work. We allow them to think too highly of themselves. They begin to think they are a power unto themselves. They resist all accountability. They go rogue. And power like this, power over, power that is coercive, power that relies on unilateral force, can go rogue. And it is like being possessed. It is demonic.

Whenever we give a specialized police unit the power to think that they will single-handedly and proactively “clean up the streets”, we create the possibility of events like what happened in Memphis. Or wrongful shootings anywhere.

Because units like SCORPION create such in-group loyalty, they are often self-justifying even while they know what happens. It is striking to consider the initial report made by the officers. They describe the stop for reckless driving and then say that “a confrontation occurred”. After Nichols flees toward his home, they say “another confrontation occurred.” Then they called the ambulance due to Nichols’ “shortness of breath”.

As we know from the horrific videos, “the confrontations” always had Nichols on the receiving end. There was never a matter of equal power nor were officers ever seriously at risk. But once things started spiraling, there was nothing to bring them back.

It’s the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog.

We know this is the case because the Memphis police chief didn’t call for reforms in the way SCORPION operated. She didn’t request additional classes in de-escalation. She dismantled it immediately. Because the violence is in the nature of these specialized units.