City Cast Nashville: Downtown Surveillance MOU Discussion

Today on City Cast Nashville. We are breaking down a quiet move for Mayor Freddie O'Connell's office that could bring increased police capabilities and new surveillance technology to downtown Nashville. The resolution, a memorandum of understanding between Metro and the Nashville Downtown Partnership tied to a nearly $15 million state grant, is already receiving major backlash. Here, to help make sense of it all is our executive producer, Whitney Pasternak, and the Nashville Banner reporter behind the story. Stephen Hale.

It's Wednesday, December 3rd. I'm your host, Marissa Anderson. And this is what Nashville's talking about. Stephen Hale back in the house. Now, let's start with exactly what's in this memorandum of understanding between the mayor's office and the Nashville Downtown Partnership.

So this memorandum of understanding, which is included in a resolution before the Metro Council later this week, is related to a state grant, a downtown public safety grant, a grant from a fund that governor Bill Lee announced earlier this year, I think in October. This kind of was announced in conjunction with the National Guard going into Memphis. So it's tied into this idea that the governor supports President Donald Trump's notion that these downtown areas are full of violent crime and blight, and these grants are going to go, you know, support that in various cities. And the memorandum of understanding is between Metro and the Nashville Downtown Partnership, kind of two parts. One is it essentially says that Metro is not going to apply on their own for this grant.

But then part of the memorandum of understanding details what the grant would be used for, $15 million grant and the kind of eye popping stuff this could be used for, variety of kind of surveillance technologies or capability. So more cameras downtown, something called a noise camera technology, which seems like a weird turn of phrase, but I guess these are cameras that are specifically designed to capture noise over a certain decibel. So they would say they would use this in, like, enforcing noise ordinances, something called a video wall, basically a way to monitor all these cameras in real time, and then some other software that would allow the law enforcement communication and kind of monitoring all this. And then the other one, of course, that a lot of folks online have understandably taken an interest in is an armored personnel vehicle.

In the memo, it says that this would be used to like transport MPD, Swat teams or something, either during a some kind of disaster event or a shooting or some kind of awful thing going on where Swat would be called for, but also potentially for just large events that happened downtown.

So we have a downtown precinct thanks to Garth Brooks. And we're developing a new fire department substation down there. Thanks to Dolly Parton. Why not just give this grant to law enforcement agencies directly? Why is it going to the Downtown Partnership?

That is a fair question. I share that question. I mean, one potential I don't know if it's an answer to that question, but one thing that's worth adding is that there are other uses listed here. Some of them are much more mundane and stuff that the downtown partnership already does, but presumably this would just boost it. So whether that's keeping clean bathrooms or adding bathrooms or having more of their, I think they call them ambassadors downtown, which are just kind of people who work for the downtown Partnership, which, if people don't know, is a nonprofit organization made up of kind of business owners and property owners downtown and if you go down there, you'll see these folks walking around maybe offering help to tourists or pointing them this way or that way. You know, there's stuff related to picking up trash and things like this. So a lot of the stuff the downtown partnership does already is included in some of the uses in this grant. It's just that this other stuff, the surveillance capability and the law enforcement stuff is stuff we would expect the police to do.

The question I have is in my reading of it, it seems like the police department will be doing this. It's not as if some volunteer for the downtown Partnership is going to be driving this armored personnel vehicle. So it does kind of seem like this is just this grant is being awarded to the Downtown Partnership. Metro wants to enter into this agreement stating how it will be used as it happens. A lot of this memo is written kind of prospectively, but the mayor's office says that the downtown partnership has already received this grant, so the money will be coming in. But the MoU also talks about Metro being involved in discussing how to implement those uses. So yeah, I'm not really sure what the distinction is between giving this money to the downtown partnership and giving it directly to law enforcement. I mean, one question I have is what kind of oversight and accountability there will be for how these funds are used, and maybe that's where that comes in. This is a private nonprofit as opposed to the city police department.

The document has been made available. Thanks once again to metro watchdog Mike Lacy, who posted this on his site last Monday, the Monday before Thanksgiving. It is explicit in there that these grants must go to either local governments, business improvement districts or to those who manage business improvement districts. It does not say that law enforcement can apply for these grants. So while Nashville Downtown Partnership is who manages our central Business improvement district downtown, I think we should mention a little bit that their responsibilities extend beyond just power washing streets and hanging Christmas lights. Steven, you reported on a scandal earlier this year wherein they were using a private security force called Solarin. Can you just briefly remind our listeners about that?

Solarin is one of the largest private security firms, and they got docked by the state for, you know, they've since been fined for some of these, for using security officers who were either not properly licensed. A big part of the controversy that we ended up writing about was the uniforms these security were wearing. So some of them, they have patches or they said police on them or they said law enforcement. The concern from the state regulators was that this gives the impression these are active police officers when they were actually security guards. And there's differences in terms of the power that a security guard has versus a police officer. The other thing worth mentioning that me and my colleague Steven Elliott reported on is the Downtown partnership hired some Off-Duty Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers to work downtown, and they ended up making some arrests of unhoused people downtown under the state Anti-camping law.

And this is particularly relevant because if you look at the memorandum of understanding the mayor's office has already signed with the downtown partnership. So this is supposed to expire in July, but part of it involves the mayor's office helping the downtown partnership access off duty Metro officers to provide security. So what we've seen play out is Metro officers being used kind of for private events at the National Sports Complex sometimes. Or sometimes I think you can call the police and like make sort of a reservation for an officer to work an event or a party. So some people in kind of private security community have expressed concern or confusion over, well, what is the role of off duty officers and how does that relate to the police department and to the taxpayer?

And it's something that should not be surprising that it's an area of concern because Nashville has dealt with this in the past, this relationship between taxpayers funding a 24/7 police department, but then some officers, when they're off duty for private paid security work, they would be paid by private organizations, but they're also wearing their Metro police department uniform. And there have been lawsuits before related to this. Right. So this kind of question of like, okay, so the state is essentially the Nashville Downtown Partnership, but the state money would be going to the Nashville Downtown Partnership to use for law enforcement. What does that mean? When the state money goes into a private nonprofit who has their own private security force and sometimes employ off duty officers, you could see where the tangle and the confusion could come in.

Can you talk a little bit about the money itself and where the funds are coming from? I think you talked a little bit about it being tied to these Tennessee Downtowns Act, which is somewhat related to these, in my mind, political performances where Gov. Bill Lee has like brought the National Guard into Memphis and to other cities recently. But I want to hear what it's actually all about.

So this act, I think it's called the Tennessee Downtowns Act or something. Bill Lee announced this back, I think, back in October. And I think it was the same day that he announced $50 million fund to kind of go towards bolstering law enforcement and National Guard presence in downtowns. And the grants would be paid out to essentially these urban centers across the state. Of course, because Nashville and Memphis are the two big ones. Nashville is in for $15 million, according to the memorandum of understanding that we're looking at today. And so that's from a $50 million pot. So presumably, you know, a major chunk of this is already slated for downtown Nashville. Then this was announced, I think the same day that it was announced that the National Guard was going to be deployed to downtown Memphis. And the context for this and the way the governor's office and the way former President and now President elect Donald Trump talks about this is kind of familiar. I mean, we've heard this. These cities are overrun with violence and chaos and crime and blight. And this is largely an overstatement of the actual situations in downtown areas.

But for the political purposes, it helps justify these sort of what might otherwise feel like militarized policing, or, you know, military being sent into a city. And a lot of people who have written about this kind of reference the Trump in 2020, the threats to deploy the National Guard in American cities over Black Lives Matter protests. So there's kind of this strain running through this. And again, it's not just words. This is money from the state. This is an actual activation of the National Guard into Memphis, and then Nashville is getting a pretty large chunk of money that's related to all of this. The mayor's office responded to me and said that they characterize this grant a little bit differently than the way the state does, which is to say the mayor's office views this as like a downtown beautification improvement thing. You know, if you look at the uses in the memo, things like bathrooms, beautification, adding lighting, you know, these are things that can help a downtown, right. These are things that are part of the reason people want to visit Nashville is because of the vibrancy and the safe feeling of downtown. Right. There's also that, though. And then, again, as I've already described, there's the law enforcement kind of capability and surveillance component.

What kind of community feedback have you seen on the issue? And what are, you know, what are what is the council thinking? What what is what's the pushback? What is the defense? Like what does that conversation sort of look like with the community and with the council members right now?

So online at least, there's been a lot of people expressing concern and alarm, and it's ranging from people who are just generally, I think, rightfully concerned about their civil liberties. One of the things that has struck people as odd is the specifics of this. So it's not just cameras. It's not surveillance cameras. A term we might be familiar with. It's cameras that, again, allegedly are going to enforce noise laws. And so that, I think has interested people because, you know, it's a technology that is being built for a specific thing. So essentially, we're going to have a video wall where someone will be, you know, working at the Nashville Downtown Partnership Office. They'll be sitting there watching all of this footage from all across downtown and just seeing and monitoring all of this. So, you know, it kind of does seem like a pretty significant expansion of an already existing surveillance network that we all know is already downtown. And so I think that strikes people as odd. The way this rolled out is that this is the first look that council members are getting at this sort of, well, I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly the first public look.

And it was rolling through in a way where you have to look quite hard and pretty carefully at a lot of different documents to even parse all of this and understand what is in it, what's going on. And then if it were to be passed this week at the Metro Council meeting on Thursday, it would just be one vote. There's no public hearing, it would just be one vote. So if people don't have concerns about the substance of this, they certainly have concerns about there being seemingly no time for deliberation on what many people view as a pretty significant expansion of, not just surveillance, but, you know, police capability, downtown.

The mayor's office has said, I want to be clear that the mayor's office has said they're not opposed to deferring this, which essentially just means putting off the vote. And a couple of council members who I spoke with say that that's what they expect will happen on Thursday. Or at least one council member told me that that's what they plan to do is to try to get this deferred. It sounds like there's a lot of folks who don't feel like they know enough yet to be voting on this and want more time to engage with the constituents, I guess, but also just understand what the heck is going on with it.

Yeah, I think in reading the document, it was interesting to see that this is being posted as a public safety measure to help keep downtown safe. But when you look at the substance, you could argue that the actual tangible initiatives or tactics being used do not reflect that end goal. The thing that I found sort of the most fascinating was the noise cameras because, you know, it's not monitoring criminal activity at all is monitoring noise, as you said. But Nashville's biggest resource is our music industry. We've got bars downtown. We had a noise ordinance enforcement issue during the first few years of the pandemic, where literally almost all of our music venues got citations. And so there's all these people that got cited for noise that also then couldn't do business at all for the same time period, which resulted in a number of them shutting down.

So I think it's it is notable when you have a camera that people have described to me as looking like a speed trap camera basically. Right? But instead of clocking speed or anything, it's clocking sound and probably listening in on conversations and putting it on this video wall for some private security at the Nashville Downtown Partnership to monitor and enforce. It at the very least, I think should have a lot more discussion before we get comfortable with that. As one proposal that's embedded in this MoU.

One of the sort of specific objections I saw raised online that I think is probably worth bringing up is this isn't just, hey, we're going to have some noise cameras and enforce noise. If it were that simple, that's one thing, right? If you wanted to say, okay, we're going to be enforcing noise laws more rigorously. But I think one of the wrinkles with this is that like other surveillance cameras they're going to be monitoring this in real time. So they're going to have a video wall that, you know, again, there'll be someone watching these noise cameras going off and then like a presumably an officer will be deployed. And so it becomes this sort of where it creates this situation where someone who is like you said, an employee of the Nashville Downtown Partnership, which is a private nonprofit that answers to no one but itself, is going to be making sort of enforcement decisions potentially. And this isn't, by the way, this is not exclusive. This is not like a unique situation. This is something that has always been part of the relationship between private security and public policing and at least like, you know, kind of an American setting is there's this confusion over what their rules are, what's allowed.

I'm not an expert on this, so I don't want to overstep what I know here and overstate kind of the exact sort of bounds of this. But I think, in theory, right. Like who where does the decision happen? At what point is a police officer, an actual Metro police officer dispatched to a noise incident? You know, so it becomes sort of this unclear area where if the downtown partnership gets to make that call, that's a little different than an officer who is employed by the city of Metro Nashville making that determination or at least, you know, someone up the chain.

To the city's credit here. There's a lot of positives and bright sides that I do think we can benefit from. Like, I think everyone's downtown. I'm downtown for a council meeting a few times a month. I've been riding my bike through there a lot and it's gross. There's trash. It's gross. You know, like it's gross. And I would love to have additional bathrooms. I think that would be really great, actually. And the public safety component, if we did more cameras and there was more monitoring, you could also see if someone were to get mugged downtown. Right. That is an added piece of public safety. But when I look at an armored personnel carrier and I see how the FEMA trailers were used during floods and 2020, and the fact that there's going to be a Super Bowl, is there any concern that this is going to target protests, not necessarily criminal activity?

That is another good question. I imagine that's going to be part of the council discussion of this is okay, what kind of all the things that came up before about Fusus? What if ICE comes to the downtown partnership and says, hey, you know, we know you got a bunch of new cameras coming. Look at that. Is it written somewhere or what their policy is on that? Or will it just be that the already existing policy, whatever you know, that Metro already has, will apply because Metro is going to be the one ultimately involved in this, whether it's MPD or others.

In my trying to parse the wire, I found it interesting that this all kind of came about close to an announcement that Roger Goodell from the NFL said, hey, as soon as your football stadium stand, you can have a Super Bowl. And in thinking charitable about our mayoral administration, I would like to think that they might be having to do this because their hands are tied by the state. And I heard a theory that this might have been a you were going to let Nashville Downtown Partnership put surveillance downtown, or else you're not going to get a Super Bowl, which don't threaten me with a good time. But do we think that that's a possibility city, that the state is using something to sort of force mayor O'Connell's hand on this.

Without speculating too much? I think, is obvious to anyone who has been living here and observing the relationship between the city and the state for a couple of days, much less years, can see that that dynamic is probably there, whether it's explicitly said or not. I don't think anyone from the state would have to come to the mayor's office and say, hey, listen, we're going to make things difficult for you if you don't go along with this. I mean, I think that the city has for a long time has been in a situation of having to figure out which hills to fight on when it comes to the state. And so, yeah, I think it's entirely plausible to me that when presented with the likely possibility that $15 million in state money was going to be given to an organization to do more, whether it's surveillance, security, policing, downtown, that metro, part of the calculation is like, what are we going to do? Come out and say, no, we don't want that. And then the state will... I mean, the mayor already has people like Representative Andy Ogles and others basically saying that he's like in league with, I don't know, drug cartels or whatever he's saying, you know, so he doesn't really even have to do anything to get those things thrown at him. So I'm sure that, again, whether it's explicit or conscious or not, that's part of the dynamic here for sure, is that Nashville is always at risk of being seen as kind of resisting the state's efforts at safety and well-being.

All right. So what happens next? This might get deferred on Thursday.

Right. So the council meets on Thursday. And this will be going through committees and then up at full council. And yeah, I what I've been told is that to expect numerous people to probably be seeking deferrals and also that the mayor's office is not fighting that is not trying to get people not to defer it. So it's not a guarantee, but I think it's pretty likely that this gets delayed so that council members can get into these questions.

Do we think that it could then come back with a public hearing? Because that's another thing folks like, I know some of you are probably thinking, I'm going to go to council and speak against this. You can't. This is a resolution. So it gets one vote with no public hearing. Do we think a deferral could lead to a council member calling for a time for the community to speak?

That's a good point. I think when we see this come back to the council, you may see something like that, because I know that's what a lot of the response and sort of backlash has been about is that, hey, there's no discussion on this. No one has time to figure it out. Council members don't know all the ins and outs of it. People certainly don't. Right. But it as you say, it was going to be up for just its one and only vote.

Well, as a reminder, everybody at home that council meeting is tomorrow, December 4th at the historic Metro Courthouse. It starts at 6:30, but I would get there a little bit earlier if I were you. If you want to go down and in the meantime, use your voice, whatever side you are on of this surveillance issue, reach out to your council members, reach out to the At-Large Council members and let them know what you think. Don't just use that councilmembers@nashville.gov address. Go to nashville.gov and find your council members direct email and let them know. So let's just thank our friend Stephen Hale for living with us for the past week. But Stephen...

We love you.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Always. And when I get more answers to those good questions, you all were bringing up, we can come back and talk.

Do always welcome.