NEW: As she rose through the ranks of the Atlanta police department, now-Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis spent nearly 18 months overseeing a hyper-aggressive street crime unit that was ultimately disbanded following a series of lawsuits.
Sampson, 38, said he knew the Red Dog unit growing up by the kind of car they drove — a blue cruiser marked as police but with no lights — the tactical clothing they wore, and how they traveled four-in-a-car.His lawyers were, however, able to link officers in the 2010 strip-search to the Red Dog unit.
Mayes, who was a member of the unit from 2009 to 2011, also described supervisors’ imposing arrest quotas, first for drugs and guns, and later for just about anything that would boost arrest statistics.Stalone Davis, the former Red Dog member who joined the unit around 2007, said in an affidavit in the Sampson case that veteran officers were replaced with younger, more aggressive ones in 2009. C.J. Davis had by then left her post overseeing the unit.
Even though a record number of people were shot in 2020, her last year with the department, the city’s then-mayor, Steve Schewel, described her as an “excellent chief” who managed to keep the peace in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Instead of having her officers confront the protesters, Schewel said, Davis instructed them to allow them to march through the streets.
“I believe that if an officer is found to be wrong, or criminally in the wrong, then they should not be protected by the department,” said Davis, who was appearing in her role as president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, or NOBLE, which advocates for equality in the justice system.
Sgt. Mark LeSure, who retired from the Memphis police department in January 2021, five months before Davis began, said some on the force initially found her hiring “a slap in the face” because there were strong options within the department’s ranks.LeSure said Davis was met at first with “resistance,” but with time many of his former colleagues began to “embrace” her.Denver’s regional transit chief, Joel Fitzgerald Sr., who is Black, was one of the other eight finalists.
But implementing such a team is a fraught and complicated undertaking even for the most robust police departments — a lesson Atlanta police learned with the Red Dog unit.
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