Death of Tyre Nichols

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, it is with great honor I rise today to coanchor this CBC Special Order hour with Chairman Horsford, the chairman of the CBC, and Ms. Kamlager-Dove of California.

For the next 60 minutes, we have a chance to speak directly to the American people on issues of great importance to the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress, the constituents we represent, and all Americans.

Today, we will be speaking on the death of Tyre Nichols.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today--after the horrifying murder of yet another young, Black man at the hands of police--outraged because nothing has worked.

``They need more police training,'' we said.

But so-called elite squads like SCORPION already require extra training over and above the basics.

``They need more diversity,'' we said.

But every single one of the five officers we saw mercilessly beat an unarmed and compliant Tyre Nichols was Black, just like him.

``They need more accountability,'' we said.

But even the advent of body cameras hasn't stopped officers from pummeling our sons--and sometimes our daughters--to death over mere traffic infractions.

Just throw in a few shouts of: ``Stop resisting'' to try and fool our eyes from believing what we are clearly seeing.

We tried all those things--more training, more diversity, and more accountability--and yet Tyre Nichols is dead. He was dragged out of his car and attacked by a swarm of men twice his size, exhausting themselves and then coming back to beat him again.

Reforming these so-called elite squads is not enough. It is time to end them altogether.

These units often attract and recruit young, aggressive officers drawn to the prospect of less supervision. They slap an intimidating name on the team, like SCORPION or STRESS or CRASH--which in the nineties stood for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums--because these units aren't about forging bonds with the communities they serve. They are about instilling fear.

They descend on low-income, usually minority neighborhoods looking to make pretextual stops in search of drugs or guns. That is not a secret. It is a tactic sanctioned by the Supreme Court itself. An officer can stop anyone for whatever reason he wants. He doesn't even need to know which law he suspects you of breaking, Mr. Speaker, so long as he can develop a reason after the fact--reasons that are often minor, trivial, and unrelated. Things like a busted taillight or partially obscured traffic tag are sufficient for these stops.

This is formal policy in police departments across the country. For example, the New York City Police Department admittedly trained its officers to ``stop and question first, develop reasonable suspicion later.''

What results is a constant state of alert. Black and Brown males worry about being pulled over for a minor traffic stop that can spiral out of control. Police officers worry because they are understandably taught that there is nothing more dangerous than to walk up to a stranger's driver-side window at night. Both sides of the confrontation are on edge.

And for what?

So that an officer can peek inside the car for contraband and ask for so-called consent to search the car, despite many drivers feeling like they can't say no.

These pretextual traffic stops aren't bearing much fruit. A study found that stop-and-frisk searches in New York City produced drugs or guns in less than 2 percent of the cases. What it does is breed contempt between the police and the people they are sworn to protect. African Americans are five times more likely to have their vehicles searched, and a Black man has to hit the age of 50 before his chance of being pulled over lowers to that of a young White man.

As the father of five Black sons, I am all too familiar with the talk parents are duty bound to give their Black and Brown children about how to deescalate interactions with the police.

As a former prosecutor, I saw firsthand how communities can be ravaged by fear in the face of violent crime and threats to public safety. Those communities should not also be afraid of the men and women in uniform whose job it is to defend them. Police can't investigate crime if victims and witnesses don't trust them enough to come forward. These squads running roughshod on our streets are contributing to a breakdown in that trust. It isn't leading to better results, but it is contributing to the unjustified killing of our kids.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis did the right thing by shutting down the SCORPION unit. But we must not wait until the next murder of an innocent man gets national attention before we shut down these roving elite squads across the country.

Professor Christy E. Lopez, the co-chair of the D.C. Police Reform Commission, made the case brilliantly in a recent Washington Post editorial titled: ``Cities should get rid of their toxic crime- suppression units.''

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record this article by Christy E. Lopez. [From the Washington Post, Jan. 31, 2023]

Cities Should get rid of Their Toxic Crime-Suppression Units (By Christy E. Lopez)

Last week, after five Memphis police officers were charged with murdering their son, Tyre Nichols's family called for the dissolution of Scorpion, the specialized policing unit to which those officers were assigned. On Saturday, Memphis made the right decision and announced it would shut the unit down.

Now, other cities should follow Memphis's lead and disband their own analogous--and outdated--units.

In my decades investigating law enforcement agencies, and studying what makes them prone to causing unnecessary harm, I have consistently found that units such as Scorpion are a key factor. And they are not unusual. Most mid-size to large cities have a unit--or several--akin to Scorpion, focused on areas considered to be crime ``hot spots'' or on a particular task such as seizing drugs or guns.

These teams have various names orbiting around buzzwords like ``crime suppression'' or ``violence reduction.'' In the communities they police, they're often just called ``jump outs.'' Regardless of the name, they are all under official direction--pressure, even--to aggressively police areas deemed high-crime, nearly always majority Black or Latino, often using traffic and pedestrian stops as an excuse to search people and their belongings in the hopes of finding guns or other contraband.

It's possible that Scorpion was a particularly bad specimen of this family of aggressive policing units: As one police chief noted, the name ``speaks volumes about the mission of the unit and the mentality of the officers.'' That ``Scorpion'' was an acronym for ``Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods'' is a mockery of genuine concern for community well-being.

But this tolerance for inflicting community pain in the name of community protection is a thread that runs through these teams going back decades. In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department's ``special investigations section'' was an ``elite'' unit known both for the extraordinary number of people it killed in shootouts and for its practice of allowing community members to be victimized so it could make better arrests. During a Justice Department investigation of the New Orleans Police Department in 2010, a police official told investigators that the community viewed street crime ``task forces'' as ``jump out boys, dirty cops, the ones who are going to be brutal.'' These task forces finally were ended in 2020 after the federal monitor showed they operated with little supervision, made stops with ``questionable legal basis,'' didn't document their work and endangered citizens.

An investigation of the Baltimore Police Department's notoriously corrupt and violent Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) found that although created in 2007, its abusive tactics had roots dating back to at least 1999. Yet the GTTF was not disbanded until eight of its officers were indicted in 2017.

In Washington, the D.C. Police Reform Commission (which I co-chaired) recommended in 2021 that the Metropolitan Police Department suspend its crime-suppression teams and gun recovery unit until it could provide data showing its effectiveness. The department has not done so, although late last year, it suspended one crime-suppression team after seven of its officers were put under investigation. A month ago, a former officer from another team was convicted of second-degree murder for a 2020 car chase that killed Karon Hylton-Brown (another unit officer was found guilty of obstructing justice).

These units can't be fixed. Their problems go beyond issues with selection, training or supervision. The premise on which they are based ensures they will fail communities. Everything we know teaches us that, to be effective, policing must center community well-being and fair treatment. But these units are focused on stats: arrests made, guns and drugs recovered, even overtime hours worked. This incentivizes policing that takes full advantage (and then some) of the broad discretion under law--including pretext stops and discretion to jail that is broader than a judge's--to detain and search people based on little more than a hunch, a profile or where they live. It's an approach that has been shown time and again to be inefficient, alienating and confrontation-provoking, even as its impact on crime is uncertain.

I have talked with many police officers who are ambivalent about--or even resentful of--these units, which generally do not respond to calls for service. This leaves regular patrol officers to pick up the slack--and often, the pieces of community relationship broken by interactions with the specialized units. These patrol officers live the mixed messages given by police and city leadership: They are sternly admonished to build trust and take action only where public safety requires, even as they see leadership encouraging (and promoting) members of crime-suppression teams. They watch as the relationships they built with community members go unnoticed and the latest gun and drug bust earns a commendation. Heavily policed communities will tell you exactly how this contradiction plays out: ``The police are everywhere,'' I often have been told, ``until you need them.''

Suppression units also become petri dishes for cultures of impunity. As long as they ``produce,'' making arrests and bringing in contraband, chiefs can ward off unrealistic expectations that policing solve social problems. But facilitating this kind of ``production'' has always, in my experience, gone hand-in-hand with indulging lax adherence to law and policy, discounting or glossing over misconduct complaints and generous overtime approval.

These units reflect and reinforce the worst aspects of warrior policing. The cost-benefit analysis makes no sense once you recognize that we have underestimated their harms, and the benefits they offer could be better achieved through services that respond more directly to community needs and work to reduce the root causes of crime.

Disbanding Scorpion was likely a little too little, and certainly a little too late. Other communities should not wait for an act of searing violence before rethinking this approach. It's time to recognize the harm these units cause-- and put an end to them and the approach to policing they embody.

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Mr. IVEY. Finally, I think the time has come to end pretextual stops completely because they are just racial profiling hiding behind legalese and little more than a subtle way to circumvent the constitutional rights of Black and Brown males.

Pretext stops allow police to stop cars even though they lack even reasonable suspicion to think that an actual crime is, has been, or is about to be committed.

They allow police to pressure drivers into a so-called consensual search so that they can avoid the need to obtain a warrant to search the car. As we have seen yet again, these pretextual stops frequently escalate into young men being killed or seriously injured not because they broke the law but because they have been targeted for aggressive police tactics that aren't directed at other communities.

So, Mr. Speaker, I urge President Biden to use his executive authority to put an end to this practice at the Federal level, and I urge State and local officials--mayors, police chiefs, and county executives--to put an end to this practice all over the country.

Kamlager-Dove).

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Mr. IVEY. Jackson Lee).

Ms. JACKSON LEE. Mr. Speaker, let me thank the distinguished gentleman from the great State of Maryland, Congressman Ivey, and the distinguished gentlewoman from the great State of California (Ms. Kamlager-Dove), for leading such an important Special Order. Let me also thank Chairman Horsford for immediately capturing the pain and sentiment of the American people.

When I say that, I am speaking of all the American people, Mr. Speaker, because I believe more than any part of our constitutional rights, the right to be free and safe in this Nation is one that Americans crave. For no matter whether they are in the beauty of Utah, in the richness of Mississippi, in the smart and urban life of New York, or in the beauty of the West Coast, Republican or Democrat, Independent and any other affiliation, we are concerned about safety.

The reason is because safety involves the coming and going of our family members and our children. For any of us who have ever been parents, we have always had a little trepidation when that little one leaves home for the first time to go to pre-K or kindergarten that they would be safe.

We are appalled at the unsafe conditions that we face in our schools today: Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Santa Fe, and beyond. We know that violence permeated those safe spaces.

At the same time I think, as I thank the Congressional Black Caucus for its recognition, that as it speaks here on the floor today it is embracing an American issue: public safety.

I will be looking for Republicans who are going to admit that even as we want those who protect and serve to go home to their families, we cannot deny American mothers and fathers the right to expect their young people to come home.

We can walk, if I might say, and chew gum at the same time. We can uplift the urgency of the importance of law enforcement at all levels: first responders, EMTs, and firefighters, as I do, as a member of the Fire Services Caucus, former chair of the Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee and now ranking member. We have worked in the House Judiciary Committee and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus on major legislation that deals with answering all of these concerns.

Mr. Speaker, I would be remiss to think that there are not Republicans who will not join us in this whole idea of crafting a 21st century approach to police-community relations.

There is no one that could in any way accept the murder of a man on the streets in video, as was my constituent's brother. Philonise Floyd is here, and he will join me at the State of the Union. His brother, George Floyd, big George, who grew up in Cuney Homes, was everybody's friend. Their mother and their family was everybody's family. They opened their doors to children who may not have a good hot meal, and they gave it to them.

However, like every American who leaves their hometown and looks for a greener space, as what he looked for in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he found a deadly end. No one could accept that. The reason, Mr. Speaker, that I know that is because the people who took to the streets nonviolently and walked shoulder to shoulder with us were from all walks of life.

Out of that was crafted a combination of Republican-supported ideas, things that were embraced in the Trump executive order, now embraced in the Biden executive order dealing with a reconstruct of police- community relationships, which would include the idea of making sure that random stops that caught Tyre Nichols in the throngs of violence, that lasted for an hour on videotape; or the tragedy of Breonna Taylor; or the tragedy of Eric Garner; or the tragedy in the early stages under color of law, Trayvon Martin, by someone who was supposed to be a civil patrol, and a young boy lost his life; or the young boy in Cleveland, Ohio, who lost his life at age 12 or 13 years old; or the cafeteria worker who lost his life; or Pam Turner, who lost her life; or Sandra Bland, who lost her life.

We can construct under the Constitution a reasonable response to traffic stops included in the early premise of legislation. We can deal with the right way to, in essence, address a human being, and chokeholds when you are not in danger basically are without place. No knocks that come to, in essence, a wrong person's home or someone entering the wrong home. All of that is reasonable to deal with in a new construct of which we hope the President of the United States will join us in a bipartisan, bicameral effort.

That would include training and accountability as well. It would include dealing with mental health concerns or violence intervention as well as the necessity of wearing body cams, which were the element of truth and have been.

I was very proud in the small cities that I represent, Mr. Speaker, to be able to provide grant money for our cities to get body cams, small cities that don't have it. Just think if we passed legislation that allows all departments to seek body cams for truth for all that are involved.

I rise today to capture the essence of the importance of this Congressional Black Caucus Special Order because it is laying the footprints for the day tomorrow, as the President speaks to the Nation on many issues.

There is no doubt, as someone who went to the funeral of Tyre Nichols as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, to be able to say that we can do this together.

Public safety is an American issue. It is an American families' issue. It is the issue of those who are entrusted to protect and serve. It is the issue of local government, State government. It is the issue of moms and dads. It is the issue of teenagers and young families and senior citizens. It does not leave one person untouched.

I believe that the work that was done in the last years with legislation that carried the name of George Floyd has the ability to embrace a wide perspective of diversity and new changes and inspiration and, of course, working as one would with all persons concerned and even respecting the other body.

The Congressional Black Caucus has taken up the light, and I am grateful for that leadership. I look forward that we continue to work because we are not a nation of laws and values if we do not adhere as a nation to the belief that every person deserves the dignity of their humanity and does not deserve, under the Constitution, to be denied their equal protection of the law, their due process in the workings between law and community.

I thank my very important coleaders of this Special Order. I wish them well. I know that they will be a dynamic team. I had the privilege of doing this in the last session. I can tell you, you will have a moment of joy every time you rise on this floor and are joined by the esteemed members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Each and every one of them have their own special story. We do make a difference. We can change lives, and we can change laws.

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman for her powerful and extemporaneous comments. I think it is a representation of the powerful leadership she has provided over the years and will continue to provide in the future.

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for that powerful statement.

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for those powerful comments.

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Mr. IVEY. Adams).

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, on behalf of Representative Kamlager-Dove and the Congressional Black Caucus, we thank the Speaker for this opportunity.

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