Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the CEO of the Tennessee Firearms Association, John Harris and former West Tennessee Assistant U.S. Attorney, Braden Boucek in studio to discuss the details of the Memphis Scorpion Unit that murdered Tyre Nichols last Thursday evening.
Leahy: In studio, our very good friend John Harris, the founder and CEO of the Tennessee Firearms Association. He is an accomplished attorney on Second Amendment issues, and co-author of The Guide to the Constitution and Bill of Rights for Secondary School Students. John, welcome back again. Thanks for staying with us.
Harris: Thank you.
Leahy: And in studio, our very good friend, our newest all-star panelist, Mr. Braden Boucek. He is the litigation director for the Southeastern Legal Foundation and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Tennessee, which is in Memphis. You’ve got some information relevant to this incident. Welcome, Braden Boucek.
Boucek: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Leahy: The timing of your arrival here on the first weekday after the release of this body cam and other related video of the beating death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols by five now former Memphis police officers who were part of this I don’t know what you’d call it, special Scorpion Unit.
40 members out of 2,000 Memphis police officers that appear to be entirely unsupervised and also without proper police training. It looks like basically people that these Scorpion Unit members were committing crimes under the color of law. That’s what it looks like to me. You were down in Memphis. How long did you live in Memphis and act as an Assistant U.S. Attorney?
Boucek: Five and a half years. And during that time, we worked very closely with the Memphis Police Department, which is, I think it’s the largest police force in the entire state.
Leahy: Yes, I think it is. There are 2,000 members of it. What was your overall impression? What years were you there?
Boucek: I was there from 2005 to 2011.
Leahy: This looks to me like a huge command and control problem with Memphis Police Department. This special unit, the Scorpion Unit. It’s an acronym for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods Unit.
Boucek: It seems like a reach. They just really wanted to call it the Scorpion Unit.
Leahy: They just wanted to call it Scorpion. And they had to come up with an acronym. With this is one of the many annoying things about modern political life, right? You get all these acronyms and they just…
Boucek: They’re forced.
Leahy: Forced acronyms. But this was set up in October of 2021 by the new Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who’s a black woman, and the mayor there, who’s a Democrat, a white guy, Jim Strickland, everything I’ve seen the reports from local reporters, from the guy you probably knew this guy as a reporter. His name is Marc Perrusquia.
Boucek: Total pro, great investigative reporter.
Leahy: And he was with The Commercial Appeal at the time. Now he’s with the University of Memphis Institute for Public Service Reporting. Basically, this guy is saying these guys have a pattern of behavior and it is not unusual for them to when they have a suspect, these are my words, to make up offensives, stop them and drag them out of the car and throw them on the ground. Multiple times this has happened. This unit has been in operation for a little over a year. To me, from the outside, it looks like this is a total problem of the Memphis Police Department being out of control. Your thoughts?
Boucek: Certainly the Scorpion Unit was ripe for disaster. If you’re going to have young, poorly trained officers that are operating as a strike unit with a minimum of supervision, you are just asking for trouble. In particular, in a situation like this, what you really need are police who are adequately trained and properly trained in the proportional use of force in responding to the particular scenario. So I agree.
At least with the Scorpion Unit, a total absence of leadership and control over something that needed more control, not less, if it was going to be this kind of specialized unit that was going to go to interdict in high crime areas. Whether or not that reflects broader trends in the Memphis police force, I can’t say.
I will say, from my experience, when we saw officers get indicted, they tended to be in clicks. And the police officers that you knew or that I worked with that were all fantastic officers, they’d always look at you and would be like, we weren’t surprised. They weren’t surprised.
Leahy: Yes, exactly. And these five officers, from what I’ve read have been arrested on charges of second-degree murder at the moment, it’s second-degree murder.
Boucek: At the moment.
Leahy: At the moment. They’ve only been in operation for like two, three, four years. Just as an operating principle.
Boucek: So that’s astounding to me that you could have only had two to three years of experience and then be put in this super-elite unit that’s supposed to go into incredibly tense scenarios. I’d love to hear some official accounting for why you would put people with that minimal experience on this.
Leahy: You’ve nailed the key issue that we’ve got an entire investigative team now looking at this. We’re bringing in our reporters from all around the country that we have at The Star News Network, and we’re doing FOIA requests and trying to find out the very first thing in terms of the Memphis Police Department we have in our story on this, which was published.
I spent all Saturday working on it, and it was published late Saturday. Headline: Five Memphis Police Officers Charged in Beating Death Belonged to 40-Member SCORPION Unit with History of Violence, Poor Training, and Lack of Supervision. That’s the headline. And we get into the meat of the matter. But one of the things we look at is, well, who was their boss?
We’ve asked the Memphis Police Department to tell us who their boss is. They’re not responding to it, but it appears that you go down a couple of levels organizationally, and you have basically an assistant police chief, and under that assistant is a deputy chief of special operations.
Under that, you have a colonel, Colonel Prentiss Jolly, in charge of the organized crime unit, who has about 10 departments reporting to them, including, apparently, the Scorpion Unit. Are you familiar with the structure of the organization?
Boucek: I did cases with the organized crime unit.
Leahy: You did? Was Prentiss Jolly there in charge at that time? He was appointed, I think, to head up the organized crime unit in 2015, so he probably wasn’t there.
Boucek: No, I don’t think so.
Leahy: Just as an aside, when he was a major in the Memphis Police Department, for what it’s worth, Prentiss Jolly had been pulled over on a DUI charge about seven or eight years ago. Nonetheless, he got the job. What can you tell us about the organized crime unit of the Memphis Police Department during the period of time you worked with them? 2005, 2011?
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Braden Boucek” by The Federalist Society. Background Photo “Memphis Police” by Thomas R Machnitzki. CC BY 3.0.
