[Publius]

Did the Memphis police dept just go and hire thugs and give them a badge and a gun?

Right out of "A Clockwork Orange."

[Angelino97]

Right out of "A Clockwork Orange."

Also right out of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn wrote that after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks emptied many of the tsar's jails and recruited their thugs from among the inmates.

These thugs were typical street criminals. Their new job was to terrorize ordinary people so no one would question or resist the Revolution.