The mayor’s office and the Metro Nashville Police Department are making what could be a final push to secure Metro Council’s support for a surveillance footage centralization system sought by police. 

Consideration of a resolution expanding MNPD’s use of Fusus has been delayed in recent weeks as councilmembers probe the necessity and safety of the program, but the legislation faces a vote on Tuesday night. At the council’s most recent meeting, several dozen residents spoke out about the contract during a public hearing, the vast majority of whom were opposed to Fusus. Some residents and councilmembers expressed concerns that the program could be co-opted by state or federal agencies to enforce laws related to immigration, abortion or gender-affirming care.  

If the legislation is approved, MNPD could use Fusus, a system operational in dozens of cities around the country, to access private surveillance footage from camera owners who volunteer for the program. Police could review the footage in prescribed scenarios, including in response to higher-level calls for service. 

The mayor’s office and MNPD have been seeking to assuage concerns in recent weeks, and a new amendment could help sway wavering councilmembers in what promises to be a narrow vote margin. 

According to Dave Rosenberg, Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s director of legislative affairs, the amendment does three things: It allows for the immediate termination of the contract if an entity (state or federal law enforcement, for example) seeks to use the system in a way that violates Metro policy; it prohibits the use of facial recognition or artificial intelligence; and it prohibits Fusus from unilaterally changing its terms of use. 

Raising questions

A coalition of more than two dozen community organizations including the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, Open Table Nashville and the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition has also come out against Fusus on the grounds that the MNPD cannot be trusted with the technology. A letter sent to councilmembers last month pointed to the disproportionate effect of other policing strategies on marginalized communities. The initial rollout of license plate readers in Nashville, for instance, was found to focus primarily on areas with higher minority and low-income populations — although the MNPD’s proposal for a full LPR rollout would see cameras more equally distributed around the county.    

“Because of the nature of policing, FUSUS technology will be used in the same biased and unwarranted patterns against low-income and otherwise marginalized communities, including individuals seeking pregnancy care, gender-affirming care and the tracking of unhoused and alleged undocumented persons,” the coalition letter read. 

According to Rosenberg, the technology is not the panopticon its critics claim it is. Although anyone in Nashville can register a security camera with the MNPD — informing police that a camera is operating at a particular location — the proposal would only allow cameras on commercial properties to be integrated with the Fusus system. That means security cameras at single family homes would not be included. But cameras at multifamily housing properties — like apartment complexes, which are considered commercial properties — could be. 

The system allows business owners to offer up their surveillance camera footage to police under certain circumstances. For instance, camera owners could give MNPD permission to access live footage from a camera during an active call or restrict the department to viewing a certain amount of footage prior to an alleged incident. The footage is stored on a device at the business and can be accessed by police if an incident is taking place nearby. Businesses are notified when footage is accessed and can pull out of the program when they want. 

Police already seek that footage, but it is a time-consuming process that, given the storage and technical limitations on many business’ security systems, can critically delay investigations, according to MNPD Deputy Chief Greg Blair, who oversees the Crime Control Strategies Bureau that houses the Fusus system. Seeking the footage in person can also increase overtime costs, Blair said.

“It makes the job easier and doesn’t do anything we can’t already do,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg is an interesting person to lead the push. Prior to joining the administration, Rosenberg fought to establish protections against surveillance technology while a member of the Metro Council.

“I stand by that, and I’m thankful that this is an issue that the mayor and I have always aligned on,” Rosenberg said. “Fusus does not add tools for surveillance. It’s giving police access, when specifically authorized by business, to video under very specific circumstances that they could otherwise [get]. … Fusus is not built to be a real-time monitoring of video tool. First of all, MNPD is not equipped to be everyone’s security company for free. But second of all, it’s set up in such a way that when they activate a camera, it has to be in association with a call for service.”

“What we are doing is improving our service, providing a better service, a faster service, and saving our detectives time by having the video ahead of time so they don’t have to go get it,” Blair added.

At a meeting of the council’s Public Health and Safety Committee last month, Councilmember Jordan Huffman asked MNPD Deputy Chief Chris Gilder if the Fusus system would have been helpful to police in responding to a recent fatal shooting at a Hermitage bowling alley. 

“The responding officers … had to go in, had to find somebody who operated the camera system, look at the camera footage,” Gilder said. “If they’re a donor camera, that’s something that could have been done literally as the call came out as officers were still on their way to the call and possibly have intercepted the people who were involved on the way there.” 

The administration is proposing a “kill switch” that would end the contract if outside actors seek to use it. Even without that provision, Rosenberg and Blair contend that Fusus would be an impractical tool to achieve what critics warn it could be used for.

“Fusus would be a terribly ineffective way of doing terrible things,” Rosenberg said. “It can be tempting to attach to Fusus all of the unrelated possibilities out there, but that’s not what this product is. The products that were being described in public hearing were terrifying, and I’m thankful that those are not Fusus.”

Making the case

In recent weeks, MNPD has been inviting councilmembers and the community to its Family Safety Center to see the tech themselves. On a recent tour, Blair showed off the Fusus interface, currently deployed but without the donor camera feature enabled. The version of Fusus now in operation allows police command to see where each patrol car is located in the city as well as the locations of registered private cameras.

More than 1,000 private business and residential cameras are currently registered with police. That does not mean police have live access to footage. Instead, police can see where cameras are located, along with owner contact information, to speed up the process of seeking and collecting footage related to incidents.

Blair brushes off concerns about federal or state intrusion in the system.

“The feds don’t need our help to go do whatever their mission is,” Blair said. “They just don’t. We’ve been here for two years and no federal partners [have] called down here whatsoever.”

Additionally, he said he is skeptical that outside law enforcement could figure out what footage to look for, and how that footage alone could prove any crime related to, for example, travel out of state for abortions.

“I don’t know how the state is even going to prove that case,” Blair said. “People can drive. … They want to go to another state, they want to go to another country, they can go anywhere they want. They’re not breaking any laws.”

Blair said MNPD’s surveillance policy is pulled from Fusus policies in Orlando, Minneapolis and Lexington. It includes a “duty to intervene” if police employees observe colleagues misusing the product.

“If you don’t follow the rules, or you access information [you’re not supposed to], your job’s on the line,” he said.

“We need to be responsible,” Blair said. “I get that. But I think this is a great opportunity for council to give us the opportunity to earn this trust in the space.”

Business groups representing Nashville’s hospitality and corporate sectors are coming out to back the MNPD’s use of Fusus. 

“In this technology-dominant era, we owe it to the public to give first responders the most innovative solutions that best enable them to limit and contain violent incidents,” the groups, including the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., wrote to councilmembers. “We can do this while simultaneously balancing privacy concerns and public safety while maintaining trust in our civic institutions.”

Prospects for passage

The amendment with new protections may be enough to convince some, but Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda was adamant at the previous meeting: “There are no amount of amendments that can be added to this legislation that can make people feel comfortable,” she said.

Sepulveda reiterated her opposition to the proposal in an interview with the Banner last week, highlighting the ways Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House changes the context into which Fusus would be introduced. 

“With the stance that they have taken when it comes to mass deportation, immigration in general … reproductive rights, trans issues and a number of other stances when it comes to marginalized communities,” she said, “I think that technology that centralizes camera footage is dangerous. And I don’t know what the future holds.” 

She also expressed a concern that the Republican supermajority in the state legislature could pass legislation preempting any restraints Metro puts on the Fusus program. She has heard the argument that the system will simply make the MNPD’s current process for obtaining surveillance footage more efficient. 

“If they’re already doing that then why don’t they just continue with that process?” she said. “Do the concerns of the community not give them pause?”

But concerns from the community are also fueling some support for Fusus expansion. Councilmember Erin Evans, who chairs the Public Health and Safety Committee, told the Banner that her constituents in the southeast area of the county saw the program as a helpful tool during the brief period it was online before being paused earlier this year. In particular, she pointed to a number of properties in her district that have seen frequent turnover in ownership — sometimes to out-of-state owners — making it all the more difficult for police to obtain footage they need to investigate alleged crimes.  

She said confirming that apartment complexes and other multifamily housing properties could be part of the Fusus program is key to her support. The participation of those properties, she said, could contribute to a faster and better police response. 

As for why she does not share the concerns expressed by community organizations and other councilmembers, Evans emphasized her trust in the mayor as well as people in his administration, like former councilmembers Rosenberg and Bob Mendes, who were skeptical of surveillance. 

“I know that they’re not going to set us up in a situation where their values are going to be compromised,” she said. “I’m electing to put my faith in our mayor, Metro Legal, that they understand the concerns residents brought forward, the concerns other councilmembers brought forward, and are going to be able to address those.”

The post Mayor’s Office, Nashville Police Make Case for Video Surveillance Program appeared first on Nashville Banner.

The sexual misconduct policy proposed for Nashville’s police department remains in limbo three months after it was released by the Community Review Board. But Metro Human Resources is said to be finalizing a review of the proposal, which likely will determine if and how it is implemented. 

“Metro’s existing Civil Service and employment provisions prohibit sexual harassment and discrimination,” Alex Apple, a spokesperson for Mayor Freddie O’Connell, told the Banner. “However, Metro Human Resources is reviewing the CRB’s proposed sexual misconduct policy to identify any opportunities by which they could be improved and strengthened.” 

The Metro Nashville Police Department initially said its leadership would review and respond to the proposed policy. Later the department said it had shared the policy with Metro HR for review. Now, department spokesperson Don Aaron told the Banner, the MNPD is waiting to hear back from Metro HR. At a meeting last week, CRB Executive Director Jill Fitcheard said she’d been told that review was nearly complete. 

The Metro Council approved a nonbinding resolution in September calling on the MNPD to adopt the policy. 

The proposed policy was released by the CRB in August and modeled after practices endorsed by End Violence Against Women International and the International Chiefs of Police. It came in response to a 2020 report from then-Mayor John Cooper’s Policing Policy Commission, which called for the MNPD to “create a ‘zero tolerance’ policy around sexual assault and sexual harassment.” A former MNPD lieutenant who came forward with a 61-page complaint in May, alleged that the department has failed to implement and enforce such a policy.   

The MNPD has rejected that allegation, pointing to sections in the department manual that explicitly address sexual harassment and discrimination. But community advocates, including former MNPD officers, have repeatedly pointed to a culture and enforcement practices that undermine those policies. The Banner examined a case in September in which a former officer won a sexual harassment lawsuit against the department and found that few of the officers involved faced any internal consequences beyond lost vacation days.

While existing department policies primarily focus on workplace conduct, the CRB policy is also concerned with interactions between officers and the public. 

The CRB has received reports in recent years accusing officers of sexual misconduct involving the civilians they’re sworn to protect. A report accompanying the CRB’s policy proposal in August said the board received an anonymous complaint in 2022 alleging that an MNPD officer had an “ongoing sexual relationship” with a young unhoused woman. In part because the unhoused woman declined to identify the officer, the MNPD’s Office of Professional Accountability later closed its internal investigation without taking any action. In the report released along with its policy proposal, the CRB noted that this case served as an example of the nuances of police sexual misconduct that any policy should take into account. 

“While the unhoused young woman and the MNPD officer are both ostensibly consenting adults, the officer’s position in law enforcement calls into question whether the young woman feels coerced into providing consent,” the CRB report reads. 

Federal investigations in recent years have revealed that sexual misconduct by officers is a problem in other big city police departments. Department of Justice reports on departments in Chicago, Baltimore and Louisville uncovered problems with how officers responded to sexual misconduct cases as well as lacking accountability for officers accused of misconduct. 

Discussion of a sexual misconduct policy at the MNPD also comes as the department is taking part in the nationwide 30X30 Initiative, challenging departments to increase the number of women in their ranks by 30 percent by 2030. Metro Police Chief John Drake was one of the first police chiefs to sign onto the pledge, which requires departments “to develop a culture that is inclusive, respectful, and supportive of its female officers.”

The post Fate of Proposed Sexual Misconduct Policy for Nashville Police Force Remains Unclear appeared first on Nashville Banner.

Tennessee lawmakers are questioning whether CoreCivic is a “good partner” for the state’s Department of Correction amid a federal investigation and big budget ask. 

At a committee meeting Wednesday, some questioned whether the for-profit prison company was benefitting the state, given recent controversy and a growing price tag. 

The Department of Correction appeared before the Judiciary and Government Joint Evaluation Committee to provide a progress update after a 2023 audit report raised concerns about staffing and management of the privately operated facilities. Since that time, the company has paid at least $29.5 million in fines, and one of the state’s four CoreCivic-operated prison facilities has come under a federal Department of Justice investigation over physical violence and sexual abuse.

Still, Correction Commissioner Frank Strada told the joint committee that TDOC has made progress on about 90 percent of the corrective actions outlined in the state audit, focusing on improving staffing levels and preventing incidents of violence. 

Strada said guard vacancies had gone from 47.5 percent to 26.4 percent since 2021, still exceeding but much more closely resembling the 20.2 percent rate from 2019.

Strada also boasted of a 25 percent decrease in contraband like drugs, weapons and cell phones making it into the prisons, which he attributes to $12 million spent on metal detectors and other screening equipment.

However, some committee members were unsatisfied with the progress report amid the federal investigation and recent settlements paid by CoreCIvic. 

“I don’t want to just gloss over why we’re here,” Sen. Charlane Oliver (D-Nashville) said, noting the investigation. 

Oliver also questioned why the state allows CoreCivic to run four facilities despite a law that stipulates only one Tennessee prison can be privately operated.

“There is one private prison and we contract directly with CoreCivic to run that facility, the other three facilities, we contract with the county to run those facilities and the county then, in turn, contracts with the private entity of their choice,” Kim Golden, inspector general for TDOC, told Oliver, arguing that case law allows CoreCivic to own and operate the three other facilities. 

“CoreCivic has also had to pay out many, many fines, especially over the past year,” Oliver said, noting that the company paid $15 million in August, just a few weeks before the department asked for a $6.8 million increase to pay CoreCivic earlier this month. “So when I look at these numbers, we are asking for more taxpayer dollars to give to CoreCivic when they are just actually giving money — more than double — back to the state.”

Oliver then asked why the state continues to contract with CoreCivic when they have been “not very good at holding up their end of the bargain with their contract.” 

Strada quickly refuted the claim, adding that CoreCivic has been “a very good partner for the state.”

“We have a very good relationship with the CoreCivic leadership,” Strada added. “I think we get caught up because they’re a private entity but they do offer, for the state, they help us with population management and when you have 20,000 offenders in our care and custody, that’s a partner that’s needed.” 

Strada also said making judgments on the DOJ investigation before it concludes is “a little premature.”

Rep. John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville) resented the term “good partner,” arguing that the partnership is a cop-out for the state and saying CoreCivic routinely breaches their contract. 

“CoreCivic is only a ‘good partner’ to TDOC to the extent that they make your job easier,” Clemmons replied. “They take inmates off your plate and allow [you] to put them somewhere else in a privatized prison and let them handle your problem.”

Clemmons also criticized the company — which reported $1.9 billion in revenue with a net profit of more than $188 million in 2023 — for asking for additional money from the state while facing performance issues. CoreCivic’s stock value increased this month after the reelection of President-elect Donald Trump.  

“They’re over there popping champagne corks for the last two weeks because they think their stocks are going up because of a new influx of a prison population,” a visibly upset Clemmons said. “Those are not the type of people we want being charged with the rehabilitation of Tennesseans.” 

“This is crazy, that we continue to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into a private corporation that is failing to do the job they promised you they would do,” he added. 

Rep. Janice Bowling (R-Tullahoma) seemed to share at least the fiscal concerns about CoreCivic, questioning the “perceived advantages” when the state chose to privatize prisons in the first place. 

Strada, again, said private partnerships were necessary to help with population control but noted he wasn’t in his position when the decision was made decades ago. 

“The thing is if you want to bring them all back to the state prison, what you’re going to have is overcrowding, you’re going to have people triple-bunked, you’re going to have an environment that’s not going to be safe for staff and inmates,” Strada said. “There’s a trade-off, and I think they offer us a service that we currently need.” 

The committee did not vote on any action related to the prisons since it was just a presentation to follow up on a previous report. The Governor’s Office is working on formulating a 2026 budget but has not indicated whether or by how much the state will increase TDOC’s budget. 

A spokesperson for Gov. Bill Lee did not respond to questions about the hearing and budget request on Wednesday, but Lee has previously defended the state’s relationship with CoreCivic, which was a top donor to his 2022 reelection campaign.

The post Lawmakers Question Tennessee’s Partnership with CoreCivic appeared first on Nashville Banner.

Nashville’s Community Review Board voted unanimously Monday night to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Metro Nashville Police Department, formalizing the procedures both sides will follow as the CRB reviews internal police investigations. The agreement comes more than a year after the review board was established to take the place of a stronger oversight board that was eliminated by a 2023 state law. 

Board members had expressed frustration in recent months about the slow progress they were making toward a deal with the MNPD. The board’s attempts to work without one had led to a backlog of dozens of cases. But during a brief discussion before Monday night’s vote, members spoke glowingly of both the process and the final product. Negotiations were led from the board’s side by member Drew Goddard, CRB Executive Director Jill Fitcheard, and attorney Frank Brazil.  

“I believe we got everything we needed, pretty much everything we wanted and the police department, I believe, came out with the same thing,” Goddard said. 

Fitcheard said meetings with the police department negotiators were animated by a “spirit of cooperation” and board chair Alisha Haddock added that “it feels like we’re on the upside of police transparency and accountability.” 

The board did not discuss the details of the final MOU. But recent board discussions about the ongoing negotiations had focused on making sure the CRB had timely access to body camera footage and received the entire case files associated with MNPD investigations into complaints against their officers.

Brazil told the board’s executive committee last week that Metro Police Chief John Drake has also agreed to meet quarterly with Fitcheard.    

The post Community Review Board Approves Long-Sought Agreement With Nashville Police  appeared first on Nashville Banner.

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.”

The post Nashville Police Mostly Stopped Pulling Cars Over, But Some Councilmembers Want to Reverse the Trend appeared first on Nashville Banner.

“I had a brain bleed. I was in a coma. I had a broken jaw, broken nose, crushed eye socket, crushed sinuses, collapsed lungs. They had to intubate me twice. I mean, his intent was to kill me.”

The Dept of Justice’s investigation of Trousdale Turner is now prompting some former staff to tell their stories, including a female guard so badly beaten by an inmate in 2020 that she’s never been able to work again.

“I was in a coma for eight days,” she told the Banner.

The former guard, whose identity we have protected, is just now talking about what happened to her. She was among the first wave of new guards at the prison when it opened in 2016. She’s undergone at least four surgeries and is worried about millions in medical bills, her declining credit and ultimately losing her home.

Update: After publication, District Attorney Jason Lawson from the 15th District told the Banner that Robert King Vaughn Jr. was quietly prosecuted for attacking the other woman in this case. He was sentenced to 60 years for aggravated rape and 60 years for attempted first-degree murder, to be served consecutively for a total sentence of 120 years.

The post Former CoreCivic Prison Guard Talks for First Time Since Horrific Beating at Trousdale-Turner appeared first on Nashville Banner.

Ever since she joined the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office in 2018, Christina Johnson has struggled with how to handle a certain kind of domestic violence case. It was a sort of case she saw regularly, involving people who didn’t fit neatly into the categories provided by the criminal justice system. In a recent interview with the Banner, Johnson — who has led the office’s domestic violence division since 2021 — offered a hypothetical example. 

Say the police are called to a Nashville home multiple times in a single month by a woman accusing her husband of abuse. But when officers arrive there are no outward signs of it, no visible bruises or injuries. Without any physical evidence, the officers separate the couple to interview them about what’s going on and the woman — possibly scared of her partner — says it was a misunderstanding or a mistake. The officers might have their suspicions but can only write up a report and wait for the next call. Then one night, the police are called to the same house again, only this time by the man. When they arrive, he has a scratch on his face. With state law all but mandating an arrest in such a situation, the woman is taken into custody and charged with a misdemeanor.  

“The police officers come to court and they tell me, ‘Hey, I [didn’t feel] great about making this arrest but he had a scratch on his face and I want you to know there’s something going on in this house,’” Johnson told the Banner.

Faced with a defendant she believed was caught in a cycle of abuse — an alleged domestic abuser she believed was actually the one being abused — Johnson said she tried to “do the right thing” but found she was working against the grain. 

Nashville Picked for Pilot Program

That changed earlier this year, when the DA’s office started a pilot program that diverts the cases of “survivor-defendants” away from the criminal justice system and toward the kind of resources offered to other Nashvillians facing domestic violence. The program is a partnership with the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee and since June 1, Johnson said, around 40 individuals have had their cases diverted through it. 

The program is modeled after one started in Seattle in 2019. Johnson has spoken to officials there about their approach and last year, Nashville was selected by the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys to be one of two pilot sites for similar programs. In partnership with Bowie State University in Maryland, the APA will provide guidance and oversight along with analyzing data to evaluate whether Nashville’s program is effective. 

The idea, Johnson said, is to better recognize these types of cases for what they are. 

“These are not just acts of violence,” she said. “If I walk in on my significant other in a compromising position, I might be so enraged that I slap them across the face. That’s very different from a power and control dynamic where I’m in control of the finances, where I belittle them on a daily basis, where I use my position in society or over the kids as something to keep [them] in this cycle.”

After a survivor-defendant is diverted from the criminal justice system, their case leaves Johnson’s desk and moves over to that of Daffany Baker, the vice president of domestic violence services at the YWCA. Within 48 hours of a case being referred to it, the YWCA contacts the individual to offer a variety of services. Among them: shelter, counseling, job readiness training, financial education and safety planning. 

Before coming to the YWCA, Baker was an associate warden at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, a women’s prison in Nashville. She saw then how many of the incarcerated women she worked with were also survivors of domestic violence. 

“The trauma that the women personally had been through, a large percent of it was due to domestic violence, intimate partner violence,” she said.  

The diversion program is designed for people found to be survivors of domestic violence and Johnson outlined several ways her unit identifies those individuals. A person can be eligible if they have been named as the victim in a domestic violence case within the past year or if they have recently sought an order of protection. Johnson said she has also gotten referrals from defense attorneys and community advocates. 

For now, the program is only offered to people charged with a misdemeanor. 

“Every jurisdiction is going to be different,” Johnson said. “I think we are a bit more, for lack of a better word, conservative than some other jurisdictions who are using this for cases all the way up to homicides. We’re not there, but we have to start somewhere.” 

The post New Program Offers Resources Instead of Prosecution for ‘Survivor-Defendants’ in Nashville appeared first on Nashville Banner.

In the early 1980s, Tennessee’s prison system was in crisis. 

A federal judge had declared the state’s prisons “unfit for human habitation” in 1982, citing overcrowding, poor medical care and regular violence. That echoed a state judge’s opinion four years earlier that the conditions across the system were unconstitutional. 

It was amid that tumult that an idea began to percolate among a group of well-connected businessmen in Nashville. One of them was attorney Tom Beasley, who’d served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party from 1977 to 1981. His pitch, according to an article in the November 1983 issue of the American Bar Association Journal: if prisons already contracted with private companies for food and healthcare, why not create a company that could run the whole thing? 

Along with Nashville real estate executive Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto — who later led the American Correctional Association —Beasley went on to start Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the for-profit prison operator now known as CoreCivic. A 1986 article in The Journal of the Southern Regional Council quoted Beasley’s straightforward goals for the company — “solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time.”

More than 40 years later, CoreCivic has certainly made a lot of money. Through state and federal government contracts, the company operates dozens of prisons and jails across the country. It runs four prisons in Tennessee, for which it now receives $233 million annually. In 2023, CoreCivic brought in $1.9 billion in revenue with a net profit of more than $188 million. 

“The prison problem” remains, however. In August, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an investigation into the conditions at Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility, Tennessee’s largest prison which is owned and operated by CoreCivic. The federal inquiry follows years of damning reports by journalists and government agencies. The Banner reported in September on the killing of an incarcerated man at Trousdale and more recently about a federal lawsuit alleging that the chronically understaffed prison had turned into an “open-air drug market” with correctional officers blatantly running the operation.

But as it has for decades, CoreCivic has been able to fall back on a safety net of practical and political ties. After a state audit released in December 2023 highlighted a number of problems with Tennessee prisons — and noted some issues like understaffing were worse at CoreCivic facilities — Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada was asked by a legislator about the future of the state’s relationship with the company. His answer highlighted the dependent nature of it. 

“We have a need for CoreCivic,” he said. “We have a need for those beds.”

Two days after the DOJ announced its investigation into “whether Tennessee protects those incarcerated at Trousdale Turner from harm, including physical violence and sexual abuse,” Gov. Bill Lee called CoreCivic “a very important partner” in operating the state’s prisons.  

A history of political ties and influence 

After CCA – and the for-profit prison industry – was born out of Tennessee’s prison emergency in 1983, it was midwifed by some of the state’s most powerful people and institutions. As chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, Beasley had been a close ally of then-Gov. Lamar Alexander. The venture capitalist Jack Massey, who briefly owned Kentucky Fried Chicken and co-founded the for-profit hospital behemoth HCA Healthcare, was the young company’s chief financier. One initial shareholder was Vanderbilt University. 

The Washington Post noted the company’s powerful ties in 1985, when CCA made a bid to operate Tennessee’s entire prison system for the next 99 years. 

“CCA’s financial and political clout in Tennessee makes the company unusually well equipped to deal with the controversial legal, constitutional and philosophical questions that surround the company’s proposal to manage the state’s prison system for a profit,” the paper reported.

The Post also noted the bipartisan interest in the fledgling private prison industry. Both Honey Alexander — Tennessee’s first lady — and the Democratic state House Speaker Ned McWherter had owned stock in the company, which they got rid of to avoid a conflict of interest. John C. Neff, a former HCA executive who was then the commissioner of Tennessee’s Department of Commerce and Insurance, was also a shareholder. 

Although Alexander supported the idea of contracting with CCA to operate all of the state’s prisons, the effort failed. But the company did soon establish a foothold in Tennessee. In 1992, South Central Correctional Center in Clifton opened under CCA’s management, making it the first privately operated prison in the state’s history. 

The Tennessee legislature considered privatizing the prison system entirely again in 1998, before backing away from the idea. 

Still the company’s presence grew over the years as it secured contracts to run jails and prisons around the state. Decades later, having relied on connections to money and politics to become a powerful corporation, CoreCivic can use money and connections to wield influence in politics. 

According to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan and nonprofit research outlet that tracks money in American politics, CoreCivic has handed out $4,788,815 in political contributions through its political action committee since 1990. Although recipients of CoreCivic cash have been bipartisan over the years, Republicans have recently received the vast majority of the company’s attention. The company is one of Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s top contributors. In state politics, a database created by Tennessee Lookout showed CoreCivic to be one of Tennessee’s top political spenders. The company was one of top contributors to Governor Lee’s re-election campaign in 2022, and it has spent more than $126,000 on contributions to state legislative candidates or associated PACs this year. 

Beyond just helping political candidates get elected, CoreCivic dedicates a significant amount of money on influencing them once they’re in office. The company has spent $35,340,000 on lobbying lawmakers since 1998, according to OpenSecrets. CoreCivic has long denied that it pushes for policies that would increase incarceration rates. Still, it employs eight registered lobbyists to work the halls of Tennessee’s legislature, according to state records.

CoreCivic’s political connections and influence have clearly served it well. As reported by Tennessee Lookout in July, the company has been allowed to work around a state law limiting it to one prison contract. That arrangement continues despite the long history of documented problems at CoreCivic-run facilities, including issues which have resulted in nearly $30 million in penalties from the state since 2022. 

The most recent state budget included a $7 million increase in payments to CoreCivic, a bump that came less than two months after the state’s own audit cited understaffing and other issues that made conditions unsafe at Tennessee prisons, including CoreCivic’s Trousdale facility. 

Latest problems are nothing new

The issues that prompted the DOJ’s interest in Trousdale are not new, nor are they isolated to prisons managed by CoreCivic. Drug overdoses, for instance, have also plagued state-run facilities like Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. But while the 2023 state audit cited issues with both state and private-run prisons, the problems it identified were worse at CoreCivic’s facilities. Turnover among officers at CoreCivic’s prisons, the audit found, was 146 percent compared to just 37 percent at the state’s. Officer vacancies were slightly higher at CoreCivic prisons, too. 

That audit was similar to a 2017 report, which also found that CoreCivic’s prisons were understaffed and poorly run. 

The widespread, and sometimes deadly, problems at the company’s Tennessee prisons have also been outlined in myriad lawsuits in recent years. An Associated Press review of 80 legal settlements by the company found that CoreCivic “has spent more than $4.4 million to settle dozens of complaints alleging mistreatment — including at least 22 inmate deaths — at its Tennessee prisons and jails since 2016.” 

Those problems have been particularly pronounced at Trousdale. Just four months after the prison opened in 2016, it had to stop receiving new inmates because of staffing shortages. An internal memo obtained by the AP at the time included a state official’s observation that “guards were not in control of the housing units, were not counting inmates correctly and were putting inmates in solitary confinement for no documented reason.” By the following year, family members of people incarcerated at Trousdale were pleading with officials at the prison to do something about the worsening conditions there. 

Six years later, though, the situation appeared to be even worse. In a September 2023 letter to U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis, the criminal justice reform organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums urged the DOJ to open an investigation in light of “the mounting evidence of unsafe conditions, violence, deaths, and understaffing” at the prison. 

Despite fining the company millions of dollars in recent years, the letter read, “the state continues to renew and extend CoreCivic’s contracts. We have confidence that a thorough Justice Department investigation will determine whether Tennessee is living up to its constitutional obligations.”

Less than a year later, Leventis announced that he was opening that investigation. A spokesperson from CoreCivic told the Banner that the company will “cooperate fully.” 

But close examinations of their operations have a history of turning up red flags. In 2016, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General released a report highlighting a number of problems with privately run federal prisons, including the fact that they “had more safety and security-related incidents per capita” than government-run prisons. Citing that report five years later, President Joe Biden announced upon taking office that the federal government would not renew contracts with private prison operators.  

At the state-level, however, the company has weathered bad headlines and critical government reports. Nashville broke up with the company in 2020, after paying it for nearly 30 years to operate a detention center, but its other state prison contracts remained active and lucrative. Given the company’s deep ties and the state’s apparent dependence on services that it has regularly identified as subpar, it’s not clear what impact the federal investigation into Trousdale will have. 

What’s easier to see is that more than four decades after CoreCivic was born out of a crisis in the Tennessee prison system, the company has become one.

Update, Oct. 18 at 6 p.m.: After publication, CoreCivic’s director of Public Affairs, Ryan Gustin, emailed the Banner, objecting to the characterization of their lobbying efforts and elaborating on the company’s policies.

“CoreCivic does not draft, lobby for, promote or in any way take a position on proposals, policies or legislation that impact the basis for – or duration of – an individual’s incarceration. This strict policy applies to our own employees, as well as external government relations professionals working on CoreCivic’s behalf at all levels of government. Explicit language on this policy is included in our lobbying contracts and our lobbying disclosure forms. We take it very seriously, and any violation of the lobbying policy is grounds for termination.”

He added that the company contracts with a lobbying firm whose employees don’t work to do “anything other than lobbying on educating government leaders about the solutions we provide, ensuring funding for the contracts we have, and advocating for reentry policies that help reduce recidivism.”

The post A Look Back at the Troubling History of Tennessee’s For-Profit Prison Industry appeared first on Nashville Banner.

A new federal lawsuit describes Tennessee’s largest prison as a chronically understaffed facility where officers blatantly operated a drug ring and overdoses among the incarcerated population were rampant. The suit comes from the family of a 25-year-old man who died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at CoreCivic’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility last year. It also cites many of the same issues that prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into the prison in August. 

The complaint, filed last week, lists as defendants CoreCivic, Trousdale County, the prison’s warden and dozens of other named and unnamed correctional officers and county officials. All of them, the suit contends, either contributed to the conditions at the prison or failed to act in the face of them. 

Kylan Leeper had been at Trousdale a little more than a week, according to the complaint, when a cellmate stabbed him. Five months later he was found unresponsive in a cell, amid what the lawsuit describes as an “open-air drug market.” 

The complaint states that overdoses at the prison increased during the COVID-19 pandemic even as outside visitors were not allowed. That’s because, the suit alleges, officers ran “an elaborate scheme to smuggle, distribute, and profit from inmate consumption of opioids and other drugs.” This allegedly included arranging for payments between third parties outside of the prison and using a variety of methods to get drugs inside the prison. Among those listed in the complaint are having drones fly over the prison walls and drop drugs into the yard or having substances smuggled inside by officers or kitchen staff. 

The suit alleges that former officer and current Assistant Warden Jermaris Porter led the drug operation and that CoreCivic had previously fired him for bringing contraband into the Trousdale prison. According to the suit, he was reinstated by the prison’s current warden, Vince Vantell. 

Along with the allegations that prison officials knew about and even participated in the free flow of drugs into Trousdale, the suit also says they were well aware of constant overdoses. During the five months Leeper was incarcerated at the prison, according to the suit, Trousdale saw “days with up to twenty (20) non-fatal inmate overdoses in a single day.”

“Inmates, staff and COs at TTCC reported observing inmates falling over, falling out, requiring medical attention, and requiring resuscitation during this period of time,” the complaint reads. “Radio calls of an overdose and inmates being wheeled out on carts due to overdose were a frequent occurrence.”

The suit also alleges that CoreCivic failed to train prison staff on how to identify and respond to overdoses and that officers were not allowed to carry the overdose-reversal agent Narcan. 

Leeper had written to his family about the ubiquitous drugs at the prison, according to the suit, and told them that people in the prison “had to guard their food and beverages to avoid the potential for opioids like fentanyl being deposited to cause an intentional overdose.” The month before his death, Leeper — who had a history of drug abuse — had even asked to be moved to a different cell in an effort to avoid drug activity. 

As problems escalated, according to the suit, prison officials started conducting stricter counts of the incarcerated population in an effort to keep a closer eye on their condition and whereabouts. Understaffing made increased vigilance difficult, though. And it was during one of those counts that Leeper was found dead in the cell he’d previously been moved away from. 

The issues outlined in the Leeper suit are shocking but not surprising. Similar problems have been highlighted by past lawsuits and reports from the families of people incarcerated at Trousdale. In 2022, WPLN reported on a series of lawsuits related to ever-present drugs and regular fatal overdoses. The Banner reported last month on a woman whose brother died at Trousdale shortly after other prisoners demanded payment from her to get him into drug treatment.

The post Suit Describes Major Drug Problem at Tennessee’s Largest Prison appeared first on Nashville Banner.

A police video surveillance program halted amid controversy earlier this year is returning to the Metro Council. The Metro Nashville Police Department is asking the council to approve a contract with the security tech company Fusus that would give police more access to privately owned surveillance cameras.

However, the consideration of the proposal likely will be delayed until next month. Councilmember Delishia Porterfield announced Friday that she will be asking to defer the legislation, and a scheduled public hearing on the matter, until Nov. 7 to allow members to learn more about the program. 

If the new terms are approved, MNPD’s contract with Fusus will extend through September 2027 and cost $774,900. 

Porterfield, who chairs the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, was previously one of the program’s more prominent opponents. But while she told the Banner that she continues to “have a lot of anxiety around increasing government surveillance,” she said that she is “a lot more comfortable” with the Fusus proposal now that certain guardrails have been added. 

As proposed, she said, the agreement would give businesses various options for voluntarily participating in the program. Business owners could provide the MNPD with permission to access their on-site surveillance cameras in real time when there is an active incident or a missing person in the area. They would also have the option to register their cameras with the department and set parameters for how and when the footage could be accessed after the fact. Crucially, Porterfield said, the MNPD is not asking to include residential surveillance cameras in the program even though Fusus does offer that capability. 

In a message to council members on Friday, Porterfield said that while MNPD told her those limits had been put in place, she still asked to have them written into the official policy. She also said she has asked the department to offer council members demonstrations of how the system works. 

Additionally, Porterfield told Banner that there are internal MNPD policies meant to ensure transparency and accountability regarding how officers use the surveillance system. She said officers would not be allowed to access the system without at least one other officer present and that records would show what they used it for. 

The MNPD initially entered into a $175,000 contract with Fusus in 2022, but Metro oversights allowed that to happen without council approval: The Metro Code requires council approval for contracts worth $250,000 or more. The original Fusus contract was below that threshold, but it should have triggered another Metro law requiring council approval and a public hearing on any surveillance-related agreements. In light of that— and public resistance to the expansion of surveillance technology — Mayor Freddie O’Connell called for the MNPD to stop using the Fusus program until the contract ended in September. Officials said that any new agreement between MNPD and Fusus that included the use of private surveillance cameras would come before the council for a public hearing and a vote.  

Citing the same limits highlighted by Porterfield, O’Connell spokesperson Alex Apple said the mayor is supporting the program now. 

“This proposal represents a vast improvement over a previous proposal, thanks largely to a strong FUSUS policy MNPD has developed and posted and legislative language that strikes the right balance between privacy and the use of public safety technology,” he said.

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