- One of the officers charged with beating Tyre Nichols to death reportedly snapped a photo of him.
- An ex-LAPD lieutenant told Insider illicit scene photos are a cultural issue in law enforcement.
- Police misconduct is typical in specialized units with low training thresholds, the ex-officer said.
A former Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant said that Memphis Police Department officers exhibited a range of cultural issues emblematic of police departments on the night that they beat Tyre Nichols.
Nichols, who was hospitalized after the five officers brutally beat him, died from his injuries on January 10. Since then, five officers who stopped and brutalized Nichols have been fired and charged with second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression. They pleaded not guilty Friday.
One of the more striking details to come out since Nichols' death was a Tennessee police de-certification report, which revealed that one of the officers also took and shared a photo of Nichols, said Adam Bercovici, an ex-LAPD veteran of 30 years and longtime lieutenant, who testified at Vanessa Bryant's August trial against Los Angeles County first responders who took and shared crash site photos of Kobe Bryant.
Bercovici said the fact that the same cultural issues of illicit photo-taking in law enforcement agencies came up again in Memphis — under wholly different circumstances — shows the kind of impunity that police agencies allow patrol officers operate with.
"The behaviors don't change until there's consequences, and until there's policy," Bercovici told Insider. He said that without proper supervision, officers start working "with a sense of blind entitlement," after a few years on the job.
Memphis PD did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
All eyes are on the SCORPION unit
Police are being recorded more frequently by civilians and with their own cameras, which has put a sharper eye on police brutality, Bercovici told Insider.
During his time, Bercovici told Insider that Polaroids were often used for capturing and collecting macabre crime scene photos, or "death books," but now the way officers use their own cell phones is also being looked at with more scrutiny in a digital world.
An Insider investigation into specialized units across the US similar to the one used in Memphis had a rampant track record of police brutality, including the killings of Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and Amadou Diallo. Months after the unit's creation in 2021, Memphis mayor Jim Strickland boasted about the unit's rate of 566 arrests with 360 felony arrests.
Bercovici said that creating those kinds of specialized units with inexperienced patrol-level officers placed in "high-crime" areas is a recipe for disaster.
"Where did somebody in this organization think that it was a smart idea to get a bunch of three-year police officers in a 30-man unit, call them SCORPION, and then give them a bunch of plain cars and let them go nuts?" Bercovici told Insider.
The specialized and embattled SCORPION unit that Haley and the other officers were a part of was quickly disbanded after Nichols' beating death.
'18,000 different ways of doing things'
In Memphis, the misconduct was carried out by patrol-level officers, and with the Bryant case, in Los Angeles, patrol-level and higher-level LA County sheriff and fire department staff shared the illicit death photos of Kobe Bryant and others.
According to evidence and testimony from the Los Angeles trial — including waffled recollections from those implicated — the crash site photos circulated to at least a dozen people inside both agencies as well as people outside of them before the staff members claimed to have deleted them in coordination. None of the deputies who took or shared the photos were fired, and the discipline doled out was light at most.
But the Bryant verdict allowed for an acknowledgment that sheriff's officials had a common practice and lack of policy that allowed for illicit photo-taking to fester at crime and accident scenes among deputies.
In California, on the policy level, the "Kobe Bryant Act" was passed in 2020 making it a misdemeanor for first responders to take and share photos of deceased people or victims at crime scenes if it's not done in the scope of an official investigation, according to CBS News. In the trial that followed the illicit photo-taking, jurors awarded Bryant and Chris Chester, who also lost family members in the crash, about $15 million apiece.
Bercovici told Insider that clear, actionable policies around use of personal cell phones and use of force are needed around the country to prevent the behavior from continuing to happen.
"You have 18,000 police departments in this country and you have 18,000 different ways of doing things," Bercovici said.