Making the crooked road straight in Nashville with race and police accountability

Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake addresses members of the media on Monday, March 27, after a school shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville. (Photo: John Partipilo)

Retired Metropolitan Nashville Police Department Lt. Garet Davidson’s whistleblower complaint released in late May alleged widespread abuses and misconduct by high-ranking police officers in Nashville. If the allegations are true then the department needs an overhaul starting with the senior command. Local officials, specifically Mayor Freddie O’Connell and members of Metro Council, must call for an investigation of Metro Police by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

Davidson’s 61-page complaint provides a peek into the power dynamics of  the police department’s executive leadership. Several assistant and deputy chiefs, the Office of Professional Accountability — also known as internal affairs — and the director of public affairs are at the center of the complaint. 

Davidson outlines an exhaustive list of abuses, which he says can be verified by legally-taped recordings. He contends that senior officers regularly exonerated bad-acting police officers whose personal connections to MNPD power brokers shielded them from reprimand. 

The complaint goes beyond noting habitual patterns of nepotism. In reading it, one may conclude that police officials interfered with and fabricated internal affairs’ reports and tampered with evidence critical to investigations. Davidson accuses the senior command, including Police Chief John Drake, of slow-walking reform measures initiated by the Community Oversight Board and mayor in a flagrant disregard of the mayor’s designated authority in the Nashville charter and despite public promises of support for the COB. 

There are additional allegations of racism and sexual harassment, including allegations of supervisor mistreatment of Black employees in the Metro Police Crime Laboratory. The department  also “failed to implement an actual zero tolerance policy on sexual harassment and discrimination,” Davidson states. This allegation comes after Silent No Longer TN, an organization comprised of female police officers and personnel, recounted dozens of instances of sexual assault and harassment in MNPD.

The most disturbing allegation is that Assistant Chief Mike Hager and Deputy Chief Chris Gilder worked with state lawmakers to overturn the COB that Nashville voters overwhelmingly adopted by referendum in 2018. Davidson contends that Gilder received a trophy for his role in the COB’s dissolution. This allegation, if true, is both racially odious and indicative of democratic backsliding.

The effort to create the oversight board entailed a multi-year grassroots campaign in response to the police killings of Black men in North and East Nashville, the Driving While Black report by Gideon’s Army, and calls for police reform by the Metro Human Relations Commission and the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service office. The COB coalition was anchored by Black women such as Sheila Clemmons Lee, the mother of Jocques Clemmons who was shot and killed by a police officer in February 2017. 

The COB’s passage 18 months after Clemmons’ death was a testament of hope. Black and white Nashvillians, immigrant groups, Muslim and Jewish Nashvillians, labor groups and conservative libertarians and military veterans serving as far back as the Vietnam and Korean Wars came together to support the referendum. As someone who worked closely on the campaign, I can personally attest that former and current Metro Police personnel also played a behind-the-scenes role in supporting the creation of the oversight board.

The bill to overturn community oversight boards was debated and signed into law in May 2023 at the height of a legislative trial that became known as the “Tennessee Three” that resulted in the removal of two Black lawmakers by the Tennessee House of Representatives. The new law decapitated the COB and included wholesale layoffs and the reorganization into a community review board with weakened investigative powers. 

The coalition that undergirded the oversight board is a major reason why advocacy groups and Community Review Board members gathered at Jefferson Street Baptist Church in North Nashville on June 12 to express their outrage about the whistleblower complaint. The movement that created the Community Oversight Board is tethered to the modern-day landscape of Black resistance and multi-racial movements in Nashville. Erasing that story — a story that can inspire other grassroots movements — has been an obsession of state lawmakers and some establishment figures in Nashville.

Much of the public reporting about the 2023 preemption law has incorrectly analyzed the main reason why the state Legislature targeted the Nashville oversight board in particular. The oversight board was preempted because it was highly effective — an outcome that unsettled Metro Police power brokers. 

In addition to investigating dozens of police misconduct complaints, the oversight board produced groundbreaking policy reports that pressured Metro Police to revise policies and practices that adversely impacted heavily-policed communities. These policies addressed issues including use of force procedures, sexual harassment and assault inside of the police department, racial profiling of immigrants, police interactions with hearing-impaired residents, racial profiling and license plate readers, use of police dogs mainly against Black residents, public reporting of excessive force against youth, and securing police body camera footage after police doctored a recording obtained during an oversight board investigation. 

Furthermore, the Community Oversight Board has been Nashville’s most diverse board with members of different races, genders and sexual orientations. Activists representing grassroots organizations, former police officers, experts on domestic violence, restorative and juvenile justice advocates and attorneys have served on the board. 

O’Connell and Metropolitan Law Director Wally Dietz have hired former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton III to investigate Davidson’s allegations. The parameters of the investigation, however, are unknown. There has been no reporting on Stanton’s power to issue subpoenas, whether officers are mandated to cooperate with the investigation, the police union’s role in protecting officers named in the complaint and anti-retaliation safeguards for officers who corroborate the allegations. These questions are important considering that a second whistleblower has come forward with new allegations of misconduct.

The involvement of the Metro Law Department in choosing Stanton raises additional concerns. Civil rights advocates view the department as biased, at failing to be an honest broker and prone to tip the scales in favor of MNPD. Within a month after the 2017 police killing of Clemmons, two department lawyers issued a memo perceived as an intent to derail the creation of an oversight board with investigative powers. (Editor’s note: Dietz was not Metro Legal Director at the time of the Clemmons shooting.)

As Professor Joanna Schwartz wrote in her pioneering book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, immunizing police officers from vigorous investigations and accountability is an article of faith of municipal law departments. Nashville is no exception. 

I am disappointed, but not surprised, by the lackluster response from Nashville’s institutional leaders to the whistleblower complaint. O’Connell, I believe, understands the police department needs to change. Yet, understanding and doing are two different realities. 

Nashville’s elected officials and civic influencers are too reticent and overly cautious or simply lack the political will to address the alleged malfeasance by police and the law department’s outsized role in shielding police officers accused of misconduct. This go-along, get-along approach means that those police officers who speak up could be targeted for retaliation without any assistance from public officials. Already, the Metro Police Department has made a concerted attempt to discredit Davidson’s complaint by tying him to the leak of documents in the Covenant School shooting investigation. 

This is Nashville, a place where, despite all the performative demonstrations, addressing racial justice and accountability is the road less traveled. Black folks and adjacent communities are treated like fans invited to a football game that they can only attend if they pay markup prices and sit in the bleacher seats.

Equally embarrassing is that Black elected officials, women’s rights groups and white liberals who pride themselves as vanguards of racial justice have a self-imposed gag order about the complaint. It is yet another display of institutional racism and Black erasure in Nashville – a city that envisions racial progress mostly in the form of street- and building-naming ceremonies of iconic civil rights leaders. 

Many of these officials were righteously outraged at state preemption when it was engineered by right-wing lawmakers targeting the Metropolitan Council, Airport Authority, and Sports Authority. During last year’s “Tennessee Three” debacle, local officials went on national television decrying authoritarianism, preemption and white supremacy. Yet, responding to the Metro Police Department’s possible involvement in preempting the Community Oversight Board has invoked a different response — or no response at all. Their silence de-credentials them from challenging preemption in future battles when the Legislature is motivated by hyper-partisanship and revenge.

But this is Nashville. It is a place where, despite all the performative demonstrations, addressing racial justice and accountability is the road less traveled. Black folks and adjacent communities are treated like fans invited to a football game that they can only attend if they pay markup prices and sit in the bleacher seats. When allowed on the field of play, it is only to perform as the halftime entertainment if they pledge not to take a knee or raise a fist. 

The power of racism in Nashville is not just that it manufactures the performative, which understandably allows many of us (me included) to survive and advance. Racism has the power of illusion. It makes some of us feel that we are real players in a game that has been rigged from the start. The performative is not power; it is another form of erasure. 

Even still, there is hope that people of good will can bring pressure to bear on the mayor’s office, Metro Police and Metro Legal. Nashville has its moments of prophetic resistance, sometimes originating from unlikely places and people. Opportunities to tap into reservoirs of struggle are fleeting, but they do exist. Maybe, this is such an opportunity to change the direction of policing in the city. Perhaps, this is an opportunity to make this crooked road straight.

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