Why Does America Continue To Tolerate These Elite Police Units? - And Response

The Memphis police involved in the killing of Tyre Nichols was an elite unit called "Scorpion." These elite units morph into nothing less than death squads, making up their own rules along the way.

It was members of an elite Atlanta police drug task force that bursted into the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in 2006, killing her in a barrage of 39 bullets. Then they planted drugs inside her basement to make it appear she was a 92-year-old drug dealer, and that's the story Atlanta police fed to the media who fed the story to the public.

I personally had to straighten out a few people here, black ones at that, long before the truth came out. To this day there remain people who continue to believe a 92-year-old woman was dealing drugs from her home, because police know that first story that gets out will stick in the minds of much of the public.

The raid on the Atlanta gay club, Eagle, in 2009 that cost the city of Atlanta a million was carried out by an elite unit known as Red Dog. Red Dog was disbanded in 2011. You'd think these cities would just disband these elite units altogether. But no. Now Atlanta police have come up with another elite unit named "Titan."

These units much sooner than later tend to go rogue, and they only decimate and wreak havoc on poor communities, simply because poor communities make soft targets. You'd think these units would have been done away with altogether after the death of Kathryn Johnston, but they weren't.

There were the infamous Jump Out Boys of Los Angeles County. Rampart Los Angeles. These are the ones that come to mind, because mainly they made headlines for their acts of out of control brutality, but there are many more all across America on any given day. A unit in New Orleans years ago turned out to be working for drug dealers, guarding the warehouse where the dealers stashed their drugs.

These type units are designed after military units in war zones to track, hunt down and eliminate the enemy. They have no business being used on American soil against American citizens. They are deadly, dangerous, corrupt and brutal. They destroy communities and lives. They even self destruct, destroying the image of policing or what it was meant to be. When did America become at war with its own people?

There's a scene in the fictional movie "Battlestar Galactica" where the character, Commander Adama, played by actor James Olmos, says to the effect, "There's a reason to keep the military and police separate. One serves and protects the people. The other fights the enemy of the state. When the military becomes both, the enemies of the state tend to become the people." The movie is fictional. The warning is fact.

Heed the warning, people. Military style tactics used against fellow Americans have no place on American soil.

Brenda Washington