Scorpions in the Grass

Journalist for The Trace Josiah Bates tells the inside story of the brutal murder of one man by a secretive, plain clothes Memphis police unit that riled the nation, revealing how elite police forces spread in cities across the U.S., gaining unchecked power and devastating Black and Brown neighborhoods

On January 7, 2023, 29-year-old Tyre Nicols was fatally injured by police during a traffic stop, dying three days later from blunt force trauma. In gripping, rigorously reported scenes, Josiah Bates traces Nichols’s story for the first time, from the life he lived, to how his murder sparked nation-wide calls for police reform, and finally taking us into the courthouse as his killers—five officers in Memphis’s now disbanded Scorpion unit—are questioned and tried, while Nichols’s family looks on.

Folded seamlessly into this central narrative is the history of these units, starting in ’70s Detroit in the wake of the race riots, then in New York City and Atlanta, Los Angeles and Portland, where murders of unarmed Black teenagers went ignored and elite units was awarded more and more plaudits and power as the war on drugs raged through the ’80s and ’90s. Usually dressed in plain clothes and waiting in unmarked cars, these officers would bait, profile, raid, and kill with little to no oversight and no retribution. And they still do.

Bates confronts the far-reaching implications of how these forces have shaped our cities, almost invisibly, systemitizing unwarranted, extra-judicial attacks and paving the way for ICE agents and other bodies to do the same. This vivid, intimate story of one slain man and his family reveals the gravity and import of a crisis on a national scale.