A morbid fraternity gathered Sunday on the north side of the state Capitol in Nashville:
- The granddaughter of a man killed in a hit-and-run a year ago on Dr. DB Todd Jr. Boulevard.
- The father of a 13-year-old killed on Halloween 2020 while skateboarding in Rutherford County.
- The family of a 23-year-old woman killed while cycling on Highway 100 last year.
The group, along with cycling and pedestrian safety advocates and public officials, including Mayor Freddie O’Connell and state Sen. Heidi Campbell, met for the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, with bright yellow flags planted in the hill beneath the Capitol marking the lives of the approximately 1,000 people killed annually on Tennessee roads.
Pedestrian death totals vary year to year, but the annual figure in Nashville has more than doubled since 2016. Advocates at the event called on Metro Nashville to redouble its commitment to its Vision Zero program and urged the state of Tennessee, which controls many of Nashville’s most dangerous roads, to adopt a similar initiative.
Chuck Isbell, whose son Nate was killed in Rutherford County four years ago, was among those urging the state to get more involved.
“He actually embodies everything me and his mother taught him,” Isbell told the Banner of his son, Nate. “He stuck up for the little guy. He was a friend to everybody.
“We really need to get the governor involved,” he continued. “We need a governor to come into a [Vision Zero] program for the state and start making implementations towards that goal.”
Isbell said he believes a more significant police presence on local streets, including the implementation of license plate readers, could help reduce car-related deaths and injuries.
In Nashville, though, police traffic enforcement has plummeted in the past decade, and some local officials are working to reverse that trend, at least to a degree.
The case
The numbers are stark.
In 2012, MNPD traffic stops peaked at 445,143. By 2016, the year the Driving While Black report came out, that number had dropped to 298,583. In 2018, stops had decreased to 204,400, and the Policing Project report was released near the end of that year. The following year, stops plunged to 55,667, and by 2022 the number had dropped to 25,679, nearly a 95-percent decrease from the 2012 peak.
Police officials now say traffic stops are increasing, and in 2023, the numbers jumped to 30,670. Between 2018 and 2023, traffic fatalities increased by 75 percent as enforcement fell.
“The [Policing Project] study concluded that large numbers of stops in high-crime neighborhoods were not impacting crime, and that directing officer resources to more productive strategies could potentially lead to greater crime reduction,” MNPD spokesperson Don Aaron said in a statement. “With that said, traffic enforcement is a necessity given Nashville’s growth and driving behaviors.”
Some Metro councilmembers are publicly urging MNPD to continue reversing the trend and increase traffic stops. In addition to constituent complaints, a couple cite anecdotal reasons for backing an increase. District 11 Metro Councilmember Jeff Eslick said there are some problem spots in his district where he remembers police regularly setting up speed checks, but that he couldn’t remember spotting one in recent years. District 12 Metro Councilmember Erin Evans, who chairs the public safety committee, said the last time she got a speeding ticket was in 2017, and that a particular area in her district used to be known for speed enforcement.
“People are not afraid of being pulled over by the police anymore,” Evans said. “They’re not afraid of punitive outcomes from bad driving behaviors like speeding, running stop signs, running red lights. … I do believe we have swung too far in the opposite direction. I don’t know what the right answer is, but the current path is not ideal.”
“I have observed a slight increase, anecdotally, in very reckless driving with extraordinarily high rates of speed on local roads,” Mayor Freddie O’Connell told the Banner. “And I’m comfortable if somebody in that scenario gets pulled over for a significant traffic violation.”
Eslick and District 19 Metro Councilmember Jacob Kupin have been among the loudest calling for MNPD to ramp up traffic enforcement. Both have met with department leadership about the issue. They are two of the sponsors of a new resolution asking the police department to do so, though Eslick said he is not pushing for it to be considered at Tuesday’s Metro Council meeting as he continues to tweak the language.
“I think police took a big step back,” Kupin said of the climate after the two reports were released. “Nobody’s really said, ‘OK, take a step forward again.’”
Support for increased traffic enforcement was also evident at the October meeting of Nashville’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, where members discussed the October deaths of three pedestrians, including tourists in the entertainment district and a 10-year-old riding a scooter on Nolensville Road. In addition to enforcement, the group expressed support for infrastructure that can limit the damage done by cars, or prevent it altogether.
“They were doing what they were supposed to be doing,” BPAC chair Katherine McDonnell said of the slain pedestrians. “Our infrastructure is failing. We are not upholding our promise of keeping people safe.”
The concerns
Two of the key figures behind the Driving While Black report are cautioning against ramping up traffic enforcement to address safety concerns.
“The fewer interactions that we can have between police and residents, the better,” said Andrew Krinks, the report’s editor and project coordinator. “I think it would be very regressive to move towards trying to increase that.”
“I am aware that there are councilmembers who are looking at public safety when it comes to pedestrians and motorcyclists, and I think that they should, because it is an issue here in Nashville,” added Rasheedat Fetuga, founder of Gideon’s Army, the group that put out the report. “I don’t ever want it to be that I am not in support of pedestrians [and] cyclists, but I don’t know that traffic stops are the solution.”
Both mentioned a couple of alternatives to ramping up traffic stops, including focusing on infrastructure that can prevent injuries and deaths, and outsourcing traffic enforcement to a non-police entity like the Nashville Department of Transportation. Krinks also highlighted research that questions the connection between traffic enforcement and road safety. Gideon’s Army has compiled a list of other street safety recommendations, including prioritizing especially dangerous roads, new pedestrian infrastructure and non-police traffic enforcement.
Councilmembers and others advocating for increased enforcement acknowledged the findings of the two prior reports and said they did not think profiling would be a concern moving forward.
“We didn’t have body cams; we didn’t have a Community Review Board; we didn’t have the accountability in place that we have now,” Eslick said. “Plus, the captain [of the traffic division] and the police chief are both African American, so I don’t think they would be encouraging discrimination when it comes to stops or targeting when it comes to stops. We’re past that. … We’ve not been pushed to pay attention to our speed recently, and I think we can all use a reminder to make sure that we’re doing what the law says.”
The leader of the CRB, Jill Fitcheard, told the Banner she is open to more traffic enforcement, including by engaging the Tennessee Highway Patrol, a state agency existing beyond local oversight.
“When it comes to traffic enforcement, we have to do something,” she said. “You can’t have people running red lights and stop signs, driving fast down city streets, up on the curb.
Those are things that I think we could enforce. The balance here is making certain that if we do increase enforcement, that we are making certain that we are really diligent about the constitutional rights of drivers as well.”
Raymond Jones, captain of MNPD’s traffic division, said his office is “very conscious” of public concerns about profiling.
“Speeding is a problem everywhere,” he told the Banner. “To be fair to everyone, everyone gets the same amount of attention. “Say there’s a complaint in a predominantly Black part of town, they’ll get the same attention and enforcement as a predominantly white part, because speeding affects everybody.”
Jones also said that his division focuses enforcement on the high-injury network of streets flagged by Metro’s Vision Zero team.
“We let data help drive where we go,” he said.
Automated traffic enforcement is a challenge in Tennessee, with state law curtailing the use of automated speed cameras. Fitcheard said she is open to the use of automated enforcement, while Krinks said any automated enforcement tool should be housed outside of the police department.
“We’re so far from getting to the point where we’re getting really granular with overpolicing, because we’re underpolicing,” Kupin said. “That causes safety issues for everybody, minority or not. I think it contributes to a feeling of lawlessness and freedom to do whatever.”
What’s next
MNPD has already kicked up traffic enforcement.
“It is very evident that the police are patrolling Old Hickory Boulevard and making stops, and I’m quite happy with it,” Eslick said, adding that he wants to see that work expand to other streets in his district.
Aaron, the MNPD spokesperson, said the department is planning to launch a pilot program in December “with extra-duty officers being paid overtime to further address traffic issues.”
State Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville) attended the memorial event on Sunday. She told the Banner that she plans to look into filing legislation for the upcoming legislative session creating a state-level Vision Zero plan.
NDOT representatives told the BPAC in October of its short-term response to incidents like the death on Nolensville, including installing plastic posts along the bike lane and a push to lower the speed limit on certain streets.
“I think it is very important to be able to have real world, actual moving violation traffic enforcement to ensure that roads are safe, but still to avoid the idea that we’re stopping people just for basically a knock-and-talk,” O’Connell said.
O’Connell said he will watch the Metro Council discussion about the new resolution calling for greater enforcement. Eslick and Kupin said they will continue pushing MNPD to increase enforcement, but Kupin has some reservations about providing more resources to the police department to accomplish the goal.
“If we didn’t do Tasers and we didn’t do [license plate readers], you would have more money and you’re choosing to spend resources on that,” he said. “I struggle with this duality of we don’t have enough money or resources to do this, but we do have enough money and resources to go buy a bunch of Tasers so that every single officer has one even if they’re sitting on their nightstand at home.”
Eslick, to a degree, echoed the concern: “It’s a priority problem not a resource problem.”