- Elena Wilson is a summer intern on The Tennessean's opinion and engagement journalism team. She is a rising senior and journalism major at University of Missouri.
Tensions between Black Nashvillians and city officials are rising as Metro Nashville Police Department faces public outrage for its internal affairs and relationship with the community.
After weeks of pressure and preparation from organizations like Nashville NAACP, Mayor O’Connell took to the historically Black First Baptist Church on July 30 to discuss police accountability and oversight with MNPD Chief John Drake, director of the Community Review Board Jill Fitcheard, director of the Department of Law Wallace Dietz and members of the community in a “Conscious Conversation.”
In May, a 61-page document from whistleblower Garret Davidson, a retired MNPD lieutenant, alleged misconduct, sexual harassment, abuse of power and internal involvement in the law that struck down police oversight boards across the state.
Candid discussion on the state of policing in Nashville is incredibly needed. With many questioning the ongoing investigation into the whistleblower document and debate on the constitutionality of the state repeal of police oversight boards, these conversations are necessary to allow space for grievances and to provide rightful clarity on issues of public safety.
The result of this meeting, however, revealed a severe lack of trust between city officials and some members of the community.
There is a severe disconnect between the community and city leaders
As one audience member said well, the community placed their trust in the Community Oversight Board, which was approved in a 2018 referendum by 134,135 Nashvillians, or 59% of voters. Now, city officials must fully support the Community Review Board if they wish to rebuild the trust broken by the overturn and the MNPD whistleblower complaint.
Conscious Conversations, hosted by Isaac Addae, manager of entrepreneurship and economic development for Metro Government, are “community engagement platforms” in which Addae moderates conversations between the community and relevant stakeholders on pertinent issues.
Based on the most recent Conscious Conversation, not enough is being done to actively foster that trust. When Chief Drake and Fitcheard, who are both Black, were asked if they meet regularly, they answered that they do not meet at all aside from an instance where Fitcheard has been in the chief’s office.
The two laughed as they told the audience they both wished to do better. That’s not funny. A reasonable person would assume that the police chief and the director of police review board would make a greater effort to meet especially given the amount of times Chief Drake referenced his support of the then COB and now CRB throughout the conversation.
Members of Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH) who were in attendance questioned Chief Drake’s awareness, or lack thereof, of the two police officials who worked with state lawmakers on the police oversight legislation.
“Did he know that those officers were working with the state legislature to write this law?” vice president of NOAH and co-chair of NOAH’s Criminal Justice Task Force Rev. Linda Brown-Saffore said in a later interview. “Was it not until this whistleblower letter came out that (Chief Drake) learned that they had worked with them? You’re going to tell me that (Chief Drake) didn’t know that they were doing this when it was someone that could have been a deputy to him that was working on it.”
Chief Drake did not address the progress or results of his internal investigation during the Conscious Conversation.
Others in the community would like to see greater consideration and involvement of community organizations in violence intervention and prevention efforts. This prompted an emotional response from Rasheedat Fetuga, founder and CEO of Gideon’s Army, a grassroots restorative justice organization, in which she told Chief Drake she feels like he lies about his support for community oversight and commitment to restorative justice. Chief Drake denied the comment saying: “First and foremost, I am not a liar. People that know me know that is not me.”
I later spoke with Fetuga who told me that the COB, which she was a prominent advocate for, and the CRB have difficulty obtaining records from MNPD. Flitcheard echoed this during the meeting, stating that it can take over 100 days to obtain records after an incident report.
“That’s not what justice looks like,” Flitcheard said at the Conscious Conversation, which was met with applause from the audience.
Policing in Black communities breeds continuous trauma
Over six years since the police killings of Jacques Clemmons and Daniel Hambrick, and four years since the murder of George Floyd sparked the defund the police movement, the Black community of Nashville, like other communities across the country, is still grappling with the same issues of police misconduct and a disconnect between the community and the police force.
According to Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit that collects data on police violence nationwide, 2023 was the deadliest year for police killings in over a decade. Police killed 1,247 people in 2023, with 27% being Black. A 2023 Gallup poll found that Black Americans were least optimistic about community-police relations and fair, respectful treatment from police in comparison to their non-Black counterparts.
Some police reform efforts have been made nationwide. In Nashville, that is in part due to Gideon’s Army’s 2016 “Driving While Black” report. The report found that between 2011-2015, MNPD performed traffic stops at a rate 7.7 times above the national average, the majority of them Black drivers. The number of traffic stops has declined significantly since the report, Fetuga said. However, that does not negate the deeply rooted trauma associated with policing in Black and brown communities.
We saw this just one month ago in the case of Sonya Massey in Illinois, where some of the first words Massey said to officers that arrived at her door were “Please don’t hurt me,” and some of the last before being fatally shot in the face by Deputy Sean Grayson was “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
In North Nashville, it is no different, where in 2018, the 37208 ZIP code had the highest incarceration rate in the country according to a study from the Brookings Institution. The study links poverty to the “deadly cycle” that leads the predominately Black neighborhood to increased levels of police contact and incarceration, according to previous Tennessean reporting.
As Fetuga would like to see, this pain can only begin to be reconciled if Metro “invest[s] in the communities that depend most heavily on policing.”
“Invest in the infrastructure, the economic, academic, public safety, transportation, workforce infrastructures of these communities so that it reduces the need to rely on police response,” Fetuga said.
Conscious Conversation is a small step in the right direction
For some, this Conscious Conversation was a necessary start. Several in the audience said they hope it will not be the last. For Reverend Brown-Saffore of NOAH and Fetuga, much more needs to be done. “It’s going to take more than a three-hour meeting to solve all these problems,” Brown-Saffore said, “but it was a good start and I learned so much.
Fetuga said she feels that these conversations lack real commitment. “When you open it up and it's a public meeting, you can't really get to the foundation of what needs to be discussed and you can't make agreements,” Fetuga said.
There is truth in both sentiments. While the Conscious Conversation was a place for concerned members of the community to feel heard, and for city officials to physically see the people their actions and policies will impact, verbal declarations can only go so far. Legislation and direct action are volumes louder. Nashvillians deserve that.
Elena Wilsonis a summer intern on The Tennessean's opinion and engagement journalism team. She is a rising senior and journalism major at University of Missouri.
