This story has been republished with permission from The Institute for Public Service Reporting. Read the original story here.
This story was updated on May 27, 2025, with the correct spelling of Tyré Nichols name.
Emmitt Martin seethed with anger the night he and four other Memphis Police Department officers allegedly beat Tyré Nichols to death.
“I was seeing red,’’ he said last month while testifying about the Jan. 7, 2023, encounter.
Martin’s anger was triggered by the chaos of that night; he and fellow officer Demetrius Hailey had inadvertently sprayed themselves with an eye-stinging chemical agent as they struggled to arrest Nichols. But his rage stemmed from another source as well.
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Sidelined with an injury, Martin had just returned to duty that night with an elite special operations unit called SCORPION, and he was “looking for revenge,” he said.
“[I] wanted to get my stats,” Martin testified. If he didn’t, “I would get sent back to my home precinct,’’ he said. “That’s embarrassing.”
Martin did not elaborate, but his mention of “stats” — police shorthand for statistics — is consistent with statements by other former officers who say MPD places pressure on officers to perform. That pressure comes via statistical data that is meticulously recorded and published internally within MPD, one former officer said.
Though arrest quotas are illegal under Tennessee law, MPD routinely kept statistics on the number and types of arrests officers made, often posting that data in precinct offices, said former officer Colin Berryhill.
“It was around 2013, 2014 — something like that — they would print off weekly [reports]. It would be on the lieutenant’s door. Everybody would see it,” Berryhill said. “And they would print off the weekly stats for the shift.”
Officers with the most arrests or citations any given week would appear at the top of the list, their names shaded in light blue. A darker shade of blue highlighted officers in the middle of the pack. A red label, Berryhill said, meant you were falling behind.
“They weren’t supposed to discipline based off of stats, but they would find loopholes,” Berryhill said.
Those “loophole” punishments could involve several outcomes, including reassignment to a ward an officer wouldn’t want to be in, or issuing a negative observance report that could “put you on the chopping block,” Berryhill said.
Such practices trouble criminal defense attorneys like Claiborne Ferguson who said they put pressure on officers to make questionable or unconstitutional arrests.
“The real question is, are they demanding a certain number of arrests, regardless of probable cause or whatever else?” asked Ferguson, who is not involved in the ongoing federal trial of three former MPD officers charged in connection with Nichols’ death.
A spokesperson for MPD declined The Institute for Public Service Reporting’s request for comment, citing the ongoing criminal case.
Martin’s remarks about his stats and anger came as he was testifying in the weeks-long federal trial of former officers Justin Smith, Demetrius Haley, and Tadarrius Bean.
All three men have pleaded not guilty to using excessive force, failure to intervene, and obstructing justice in their alleged efforts to cover up the severity of Nichols’ injuries. They now are awaiting a jury verdict.
Both Martin and Desmond Mills pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution. Martin described how officers omitted key details of Nichols’ injuries to dispatchers and first responders on the scene and instead painted a picture of Nichols as possibly intoxicated, sweaty, and aggressive.
“I had to exaggerate his actions to justify mine,” Martin said.
The pressure Martin described to arrest offenders parallels the experience of Berryhill, an 11-year veteran who resigned in 2020 amid and excessive force investigation. The accounts of the two former officers pose troubling questions, defense attorneys said.
“Police departments always claim they don’t do it. Even if they don’t call it a quota, even if they’re not fired if they don’t meet the quota, everybody’s got performance standards,” Ferguson said.
Any unofficial quotas or metrics by which SCORPION officers were evaluated are unknown, but it is known MPD kept tally of the SCORPION unit’s activities.
Former Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, whose successful 2019 re-election campaign centered on a pledge to reduce Memphis’ crime rate, boasted of those metrics in a January 2022 State of the City address.
Strickland cited more than 550 arrests — mostly felony arrests — 270 seized vehicles, 253 seized weapons, and more than $103,000 in cash as indicators of an effective job by SCORPION, a specialized unit that had been formed months earlier. The unit policed mainly inner-city neighborhoods in unmarked cars engaging in aggressive “zero tolerance” saturation patrols aimed at getting guns and drugs off the streets.
MPD’s tracking of such metrics is standard practice for law enforcement. And while many states, including Tennessee, have banned the use of quotas as a job requirement for officers, incentives remain to tally police actions like arrests and traffic citations, Ferguson said.
Further, he said, federal grants from the Department of Justice sometimes encourage agencies to keep score as a condition of the funding.
“A lot of the grants, federal grants, they at least want, for due diligence, to make sure it’s not a scam, or you’re not stealing the money. They want some feedback from the agency that that money is being effectively used. So [police] have to show a justification of that,” Ferguson said.
The pressure Martin felt to keep up his arrest totals is mirrored in allegations in a civil lawsuit filed by Nichols’ family against the City of Memphis and the Memphis Police Department.
The $550 million lawsuit accuses MPD and Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis of knowingly encouraging officers within the SCORPION unit to “attempt to find illegal drugs and guns by employing aggressive police tactics to achieve quotas at the cost of the constitutional rights of Memphis citizens.”
A similar accusation is found in another lawsuit involving officers once in a specialized unit under Davis’ command in Atlanta.
During her tenure with the Atlanta Police Department, Davis oversaw the RED DOG unit briefly, through 2006 and 2007. Similar to the SCORPION unit, the specialized unit deployed officers in what were considered high-crime areas in Atlanta.
In November, 2006, undercover police officers falsified evidence in pursuit of a no-knock warrant for the house where 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston lived. Upon hearing potential intruders removing iron bars from the front door of her home, Johnston grabbed a rusty pistol and fired a warning shot in the direction of the front door.
The officers returned fire with dozens of rounds, killing Johnston almost instantly.
In the ensuing lawsuit, attorneys for Johnston’s family described pressure from the Atlanta Police Department as one factor for the lethal raid.
The officers, the suit read, “falsified affidavits for search warrants in order that they be considered productive officers and to meet APD’s performance standards. These illegal performance quotas created a custom policy and practice within the police department wherein officers were pressured to achieve arrest results regardless of the truth or validity of the search and/or arrest.”
Nearly 18 years later, Martin’s testimony does not shock another Memphis-based criminal defense attorney.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Jacob Brown. “That’s the whole point of the SCOPRION unit, isn’t it? To have focused suppression, to get out in the community, make your presence felt, right? Do things that can be shown to the public as taking strong action on crime.”
The problem with target numbers, even as an unwritten policy, is that “it means oppressing people with probable cause,’’ Brown said. “It means not necessarily going after the most heinous crimes, but the ones that are easiest to get points up on the board.”
MPD’s arrest practices currently are a focus of a U.S. Department of Justice pattern-or-practice investigation launched after Nichols’ death.
The investigation isn’t limited to the SCORPION unit, but encompasses the department as a whole.
“Police departments with inadequate training, supervision, and accountability systems struggle to prevent misconduct or address misconduct after it has occurred,” said Kristen Clark, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division when the investigation was announced. Later, the DOJ confirmed it would be looking into the policies of specialized units in the department, at the request of both Davis and Strickland.
The DOJ declined to comment to the Institute about the status of the investigation but confirmed in September it was still ongoing.
Micaela A. Watts covers criminal justice and environmental issues for the Institute for Public Service Reporting.
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