Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) Chief John Drake announced last week that full body-worn and in-car camera deployment across the entire MNPD is now complete.
“After project completion at all eight precincts in mid-July, training and camera distribution continued to officers in all other remaining police department components,” according to a press release that the MNPD published.
“As of today, cameras have been deployed to 1,367 authorized employees (lieutenants, sergeants, and officers) to include Metro Parks Police. In-car camera systems with multiple angles have been installed in a total of 790 police vehicles.”
Two experts warned Metro Nashville officials in 2019 to watch themselves to make sure they don’t go overboard paying for body cam technology. This, according to a report that two consultants prepared for Davidson County District Attorney General Glenn Funk.
Those two consultants, Kay Chopard Cohen of the Washington, D.C.-based Chopard Consulting, and Paul Wormeli, of the Virginia-based Wormeli Consulting, released a report about body cams to the Metro Nashville government.
“Very little research has been done illustrating the positive or negative impacts of BWC evidence. That said, it is hard to suggest a rationale where video evidence showing real-time actions would be detrimental to the justice system’s fact-finding process,” Cohen and Wormeli said in their report.
“But a jurisdiction should engage in a realistic cost/benefit analysis to assess the impact of the creation of this type of program to the entire budget of a city, county, or state.”
Nashville Mayor John Cooper in 2019 unveiled a plan for MNPD officers to start wearing body cams.
“It’s important that we get this done, and it’s important that we get it right,” Cooper said at the time.
“This plan puts cameras in the field as soon as the infrastructure is there to support them and allows us to learn what works in the process.”
Several issues delayed the camera rollout including Metro agencies not finalizing policies on how police video footage would be shared, and the Metro Nashville Police Department not having the infrastructure to support wireless uploads.
Furthermore, the cost of these cameras factored into the delayed plan.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Police Body Camera” by North Charleston. CC BY-SA 2.0.
I feel so much safer. (sarcasm)
Dude – Good questions:
“The question unanswered and unasked in the Times’ and Post’s stories is: Who is doing this? Who is killing all these Black people?”
The answer is really simple. The vast majority of blacks are being shot by other blacks. But that is virtually never discussed because it is not the narrative being promoted by politicians and the media.
The New York Times and Washington Post both made the FBI figures front-page news. And the Times gave some insight as to who the victims of homicide in this country were and are.
Here is the relevant passage in the Times story:
“The (FBI) report … breaks down last year’s homicide victims by race, ethnicity and sex, although not all law enforcement agencies provided such data. Of the people killed in 2020, at least 9,913 were Black, 7,029 were white, 497 were from other races and 315 were of unknown race. There were at least 14,146 men killed and 3,573 women.”
The startling number here: There were nearly 3,000 more Black victims who wound up dead in America from criminal violence than there were white victims, though Blacks, at 12-13% of the U.S. population, are only one-fifth the size of the white population.
Translation: Black Americans are being shot, stabbed and beaten to death at a rate six to seven times that of whites. And by the end of this year, well over 10,000 Blacks will have been made the victims of homicide in America.
That figure breaks down to roughly 200 Black folks dead every single week in this country from gunshot wounds and other criminal violence — a weekly death toll that rivals U.S. losses in Vietnam at the height of the war.
The question unanswered and unasked in the Times’ and Post’s stories is: Who is doing this? Who is killing all these Black people?
If, as the slogan proclaims, “Black lives matter,” why is there not greater public alarm at BLM in who is killing so many Black people?
PS: It’s not the police. Those are all counted elsewhere.