Before it was disbanded in 2011, the Red Dog unit had more than made a name for itself around town.
The Atlanta Police Department’s anti-drug strike force, attired in distinctive all-black uniforms, frequently made the local news as it racked up busts throughout the city. It also found itself under the media spotlight with reports of Red Dog squad members manhandling suspects.
Once again, the Red Dog unit’s name is back in the news, this time with regard to a police beating death case in Memphis.
Tyre Nichols, 29, was beaten and later died Jan. 10 after a traffic stop by five Memphis police officers in the department’s since disbanded Scorpion crime suppression unit. (Fulton County also once had a Scorpion unit; it was renamed after Nichols’ death and is now called the Fugitive Apprehension Support Team, or FAST).
Nichols’ family seeks $550 million in a civil lawsuit against the city and its police department. Memphis police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis and Assistant Chief Shawn Jones, defendants in the suit, were once involved with Atlanta’s Red Dog unit, a court filing states.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
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According to a CNN report, a recent filing in the US District Court in the Western District of Tennessee on behalf of the city and officials states that “all allegations related to the Red Dog Unit” be stricken from the lawsuit. Nichols’ family alleges Davis’ and Jones’ “involvement with the Red Dog unit should have given the City pause before hiring them,” the report continues.
Throughout its near 23-year existence, the Red Dog squad was Atlanta’s high profile, in-your-face answer to drug crime.
In the late ‘80s, Chief George Napper started the Red Dog unit, 30 officers strong. Its sole mission: getting drugs off city streets.
“Red Dog — which is said to stand for Run Every Drug Dealer Out Of Georgia — came into being during the crack-cocaine epidemic … when Atlanta, like other cities, had open-air drug markets and almost weekly drive-by shootings,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2011 when the unit’s demise was announced.
Former Atlanta Police Chief Eldrin Bell, who headed the Red Dog unit in its early days, defended his former squad’s tactics.
“As a result of how we policed Atlanta,” Bell said, “what I’m hearing from people, even now, is that we struck fear in the hearts of criminals.”
“Those all-out tactics filled the jails and courts with accused drug dealers. In Fulton County, for instance, indictments for drug offenses more than tripled between 1985 and 1989,” the AJC previously reported.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
When Bell fired three Red Dog officers in May 1991 for allegedly beating a suspect, the unit came under public scrutiny. In November of that year, the officers were ordered to be reinstated.
But nearly 20 years later, the Atlanta Eagle raid would give the Red Dogs a black eye that wouldn’t go away.
“On Sept. 10, 2009, 24 Atlanta police officers from the vice unit and the now-disbanded Red Dog team stormed into the (Midtown gay bar), ordering everyone to the floor and using anti-gay slurs,” the AJC reported in July 2011. “The city released a report … that was based on a three-month investigation that found many officers lied, knowingly violated the constitutional rights of those at the bar, destroyed evidence, and tried to cover up what they had done.”
The Eagle raid cost the city over $1 million in lawsuit settlements from bar patrons claiming Red Dog officers violated their civil rights.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Atlanta defense attorney Bruce Harvey wasn’t sorry to see the team go.
“They were traditionally a unit that did what it wanted to do and found a way to justify it afterward,” he told the AJC.
Announcing the end of the Red Dog unit, Mayor Kasim Reed reminded other officers that tactics were changing.
“There’s going to be a blanket rule in the city,” he said. “You will not put your hands on people in this town. You will not do violence in this city and it stand.”
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