Using the flight path data the FAA requires to be published, I found that the footprint of the drone pilot included 24 places I’ve defined as “sensitive locations”, i.e. churches, schools and playgrounds that should have an above average expectation of privacy from unwarranted drone surveillance.

But the drone flights also flew over 10,240 addresses of businesses and private homes, all of which, under TN state law, should be shielded from unwarranted drone surveillance.

MNPD will certainly say that the footage they obtained falls under certain carve outs and that it was all done above board.

What I am saying, repeatedly, as I did with FUSUS, as I have with Flock, is that there is no way to control sensitive law enforcement data when the first place it goes is on the servers of corporations that have every incentive and every right under TN law to share it with virtually form of law enforcement.

And with precisely zero agreement on file for what would happen with the data, the only people to ask “what did you do with video of our residents?” are the sales executives and Sam Reed (the Skydio/Oracle/Boring Company lobbyist/Co-Owner of 8th & Roast Coffee) who are being paid to sell Nashville on AI-powered corporate mass surveillance.

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After the surprise announcement of the trial, whose two-mile radius from the Madison precinct intentionally left out the majority white District 7, Council has sought to clamp down on MNPD’s ability to unilaterally implement “temporary” surveillance programs.

MNPD told Council Members in a closed door meeting that the drone trial was undertaken with absolutely no paperwork signed, meaning that Skydio could not have been restricted in their use of surveillance data. And the Tennessee Information Protection Act enshrines their right, as a data controller, to share that data with any level of law enforcement if they believe that a “rule” was broken. The law does not define the word “rule”.

MNPD told Council Members that their footage only began when the drones where in the proximity of the situation it was called for. The drones, which navigate via 6 on-board cameras, have the ability to record footage and heat signature data to Skydio’s cloud servers. According to Council Members present at the closed door meeting, MNPD denied having any written agreement with Skydio regarding what access Skydio had to surveillance data obtained during the free trial.

MNPD has also pushed repeatedly for access to license plate readers, like those from Flock Safety, and I reported recently that MNPD has accessed hundreds of thousands of Flock cameras via other departments without any authorization.

MNPD has been actively lobbying against Metro Council providing oversight that would limit its future use of drone technology.

Skydio's assurance that agencies "own and manage" their footage is, in the end, just that: an assurance, not an obligation. MNPD has confirmed no contract, no MOU, and no written agreement of any kind governed the drone trial, meaning there is nothing on paper legally binding Skydio, a war drone manufacturer, to honor that promise once the footage of Nashville residents arrives on their servers.

I have compiled a list of the churches, schools, playgrounds, businesses and homes that were under surveillance by MNPD and Skydio and the precise dates and times the drones were overhead.

I have used pre-existing historic satellite photos to reproduce the view of the drone surveillance, though the drone video is suspected to be about 12x sharper than satellite imagery.

You can see what day and time a Skydio drone flew over these churches, playgrounds, schools, businesses and homes.

Since 2022,¹ MNPD appears to have been involved in over 1,000 vehicle searches using technology like Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras¹, despite being barred by Metro Council from using surveillance technology it has not been authorized to use since 2017², except under explicit, limited circumstances³.

View the data here

The searches were conducted on behalf of MNPD by other law enforcement agencies. The queries leveraged systems that draw data from enormous networks of ALPRs operated by private companies like Flock Safety, which use, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of devices across the United States to collect location data from American drivers without consent.

It is not possible with the data available to tell if any of these searches used warrants, though national patterns indicate that vanishingly few ALPR searches do follow due process norms like this: police agencies do not require a warrant or even suspicion to perform a search⁴, and an EFF review of millions of ALPR searches nationwide found law enforcement operating in the absence of a warrant requirement to search these databases⁵, using them well beyond the scope of specific investigations.

That MNPD reaches into these systems is not itself new.

What the data reveals is the staggering scale at which it happens, and that it happens almost entirely outside the reach of any safeguard, audit, or public records law. MNPD has kept drawing on that access without the council authorization required by Metro law, and without ever disclosing to the public how often it was doing so.

No one can get everything right. See any errors with this article? You can submit anonymous edits to it on peoplesjournalism.org. The author can choose to merge any submitted edits to the main version, but all edits are visible to the public, allowing us to uncover the truth collectively.

This is unfolding inside a national crisis that Flock, one of many purveyors of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance, is racing to manage, not a contained local dispute. Nearly 100 municipalities have walked away from Flock contracts since 2021⁶, many citing, in the LAPD’s words, serious concerns about civil liberties and civil rights, particularly regarding privacy and the data being collected⁷.

The same failure this piece documents in Nashville has already surfaced elsewhere, from the other direction. Mountain View discovered that Flock had allowed outside agencies to access its cameras without the city’s knowledge, with its police chief calling that access “frankly unacceptable.”⁸ Dayton, Ohio found its own cameras had been searched more than 7,100 times for immigration enforcement, explicitly banned under the city’s own policy.⁹

Nashville’s numbers are not an isolated finding. They are one more data point inside a crisis that is still accelerating.

It was previously thought that MNPD’s pattern of deploying surveillance technology without council authorization went back to September 2022, when it quietly entered into an unauthorized contract with the camera-network company Fusus, and continued through May 2026, when it launched a Drone as First Responder program without the public hearing or council vote Metro law requires beforehand.

The Flock searches reviewed for this story push that timeline back even further, to early 2022, when other departments’ logs already show ALPR searches run on MNPD’s behalf, likely in violation of Nashville’s 2017 surveillance ordinance, which explicitly named ALPRs among the technologies requiring council approval.

Nashville People’s Journal (NPJ) will extract data as part of a prolonged analysis of MNPD’s protracted history of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance outside the bounds of all “safeguards” imposed on them. NPJ strongly supports other local media looking into these extremely concerning revelations.

What We Know

MNPD Does Not Have Blanket Authorization to Access Surveillance Data

Metro code permits surveillance technology without Council approval only in narrow circumstances. The exception applies when the technology is used on a temporary basis for a criminal investigation supported by reasonable suspicion, pursuant to a lawfully issued search warrant, or under exigent circumstances as defined in case law³. MNPD has no direct access to Flock’s LPR network.¹⁰ Any formal access to it, even “borrowing access” from another department, outside those aforementioned limited uses, is likely in blatant violation of the so-called “surveillance ordinance.”

Beginning July 1, 2017, approval by the metropolitan council, by a resolution adopted after a public hearing, shall be required prior to any of the following actions by the Metropolitan Government of Nashville or Davidson County, the departments, boards or commissions thereof, or any individual or entity acting upon its behalf: ... (2) Entering into an agreement with a private entity to acquire, share or otherwise use surveillance technology or the information it provides if such agreement includes exchange of any monetary or any other form of consideration from any source... (4) Acquiring new surveillance technology, including but not limited to procuring such technology without the exchange of monies or consideration...

Metro Code § 13.08.080, Deployment of surveillance or electronic data gathering devices onto public rights-of-way requires metropolitan council approval.

The Frequency of MNPD Accessing ALPRs Has Not Been Previously Disclosed

That MNPD benefits from license plate readers it does not own has been public for years, and the department has said so itself. MNPD spokesperson Kris Mumford told the Nashville Banner the department has rarely asked airport police to search the LPR network on its behalf, citing a homicide case a few years ago¹⁰.

Chief John Drake has gone further, publicly citing the practice as a reason to expand the technology: he has pointed to neighboring agencies that have adopted the technology¹¹, including Mt. Juliet Police, which has credited its cameras with catching people connected to crimes originating in Nashville. Those neighboring departments publicize this kind of assistance constantly.

Mt. Juliet Police alone reported that during the first six months of 2026, its officers arrested 342 wanted individuals¹², 88 percent of them non-residents, routinely announcing arrests of Nashville drivers flagged by its readers. A high volume of ALPR searches for MNPD appears to have been conducted by the MJPD.

No one can get everything right. See any errors with this article? You can submit anonymous edits to it on peoplesjournalism.org. The author can choose to merge any submitted edits to the main version, but all edits are visible to the public, allowing us to uncover the truth collectively.

The Scale Is Staggering

What the department has never disclosed is how much of this is happening. The audit logs aggregated by Have I Been Flocked, which track searches made within the Flock system¹³ and are released through public records requests nationwide, tell a different story than “rarely.” A search of the platform’s database for “mnpd” returns 962 distinct entries¹, and a search for “metro nashville” returns 201 more¹.

Both searches can be reproduced directly at haveibeenflocked.com/search?q=mnpd and haveibeenflocked.com/search?q=metro+nashville. Each of those entries is not a query of a single neighboring town’s cameras but of Flock’s national network: individual MNPD-linked searches in the logs reach tens of thousands of devices across thousands of separate camera networks at once.¹ Below are examples of ALPR access logs available on HaveIBeenFlocked.com.¹

Almost None Of It Is Regulated

The searches sit outside nearly every layer of oversight that would otherwise apply.

The safeguards Metro Council attached to MNPD’s own LPR program, a 10-day data retention limit¹⁴, mandatory audits, and access restricted to a handful of specially trained employees, govern only Nashville’s own cameras, not a search run on another agency’s network.

The records themselves are shielded from the public: ALPR data in Tennessee is not subject to public records or FOIA requests¹⁴. And the audit trail that is supposed to be the backstop was recently weakened for exactly these cross-agency searches: as of earlier this summer, logs of searches conducted by connected agencies on a department’s cameras no longer display the searching officer’s name, the license plate queried, or the reason for the search¹⁵. The ACLU has warned that even where logs exist, there is no mechanism to ensure the logs are accurate and meaningful¹⁶.

“Guardrails” Have Become A Roadmap, Not A Protection

Few working earnestly to rein in law enforcement’s use of these technologies believe “guardrails” are the right fight, and even the company at the center of this story markets itself as a champion of them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued that Nashville’s council-built guardrails are insufficient to address the danger posed by mass surveillance systems¹⁷, and that only blocking access to the technology altogether protects residents; Lucy Parsons Labs made the same case directly to Metro Council, opposing the guardrails as a fix. Flock’s own messaging leans on the identical word: the company promotes “guardrails that help everyone use Flock in alignment with legal requirements and community expectations”¹⁸ as one of its core selling points, the same reassurance vocabulary its critics say lets deployment continue while creating only the appearance of accountability.

Nashville Community Safety Network fought exactly this kind of bill once before. When Metro Council considered BL2025-690, the guardrails ordinance now preempted by state law, the group opposed it from the start, writing that it provides a false sense of safety and does not actually provide any meaningful protections¹⁹ from federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The bill passed anyway in March 2025. The same group later organized against a $15 million downtown surveillance MOU in December 2025, writing that “Nashville has rejected surveillance overreach before.”²⁰

A National Reckoning Over The Same Technology

The revelations come amid a national reckoning over ALPRs. At least 50 police officers nationwide have been charged with or accused in recent months of misusing license plate reader systems, with Flock’s system specifically implicated in 46 of the cases²¹. In 26 of those cases, officers used the technology to spy on wives, girlfriends, former partners²², their exes’ new partners, or women they wanted to meet.

No one can get everything right. See any errors with this article? You can submit anonymous edits to it on peoplesjournalism.org. The author can choose to merge any submitted edits to the main version, but all edits are visible to the public, allowing us to uncover the truth collectively.

That pattern is what led Flock to announce new controls this week: cutting the default data retention period from 30 days to seven²³ and making its “Audit Assistance” abuse-detection tool²⁴ mandatory. The ACLU says the changes do not go nearly far enough, calling them a “thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns... rather than an earnest effort to address them.”²⁵ Even that critique sits inside the guardrails framework the previous section describes: the ACLU is arguing Flock’s reforms are not strong enough guardrails, not that guardrails are the wrong tool. Increasingly, it appears that the only way to protect surveillance data from getting into the wrong hands is not to have data at all.

What We Don’t Know

The information available on HaveIBeenFlocked.com raises more questions than it answers.

Did MNPD, or the agencies searching on its behalf, have warrants authorizing use of these databases, or were they sidestepping local council restrictions entirely?

These searches span both a state agency and multiple municipal departments. Which type of requesting agency accounts for the larger share of the total, and whether that share is concentrated in a handful of standing relationships or spread across many independent requests, is not yet established.

Were any of these searches conducted for personal reasons, as has been documented nationally in the cases above? That remains unconfirmed for any specific search in this dataset.

The pattern documented here shows MNPD reaching Flock’s network through other agencies’ systems, without the council approval Metro law requires and without disclosing the practice to the public.

This is a developing story.

Further Reading

• “Guardrails” Won’t Protect Nashville Residents From AI-Enabled Camera Networks, Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Flock CEO Goes Ballistic on Critics as More Americans Question Mass Driver Surveillance, ACLU

• Defund the Police, and Defund Big Data Policing, Too, JURIST

• Who Is Flock Safety? (And Why Public Oversight Matters), Maryville Residents for Privacy

• “Privacy for Profits”: ACLU Warns Flock Building a Nationwide Surveillance Network, Democracy Now!

• Activists and Journalists Raise Concerns Over Systemic Human Rights Risks Linked to Flock Safety’s Products, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

• Flock Camera Cancellations: City Tracker, Finding Flock

MNPD Held A Closed Door Demonstration for Council, Flouting Sunshine Laws With Drone Legislation In Active Deliberation

The Thin Blurred Line Between Public Safety Officers and Sales People Pushing AI-Powered Corporate Mass Surveillance

By Mike Lacy
Edited by Kelly Chieng & Elizabeth MK Sullivan

On Friday Aug 7, 2026, MNPD hosted Metro Nashville Council Members in a closed door “demonstration” to present information about their drone as first responder pilot, conducted via a 45-flight-day free trial by the war drone manufacturer Skydio¹. The hastily scheduled presentation came on the heels of Council Member Sandra Sepulveda filing legislation to limit MNPD’s use of drones without the public hearing or Metro Council resolution that Metro Code § 13.08.080 requires for new surveillance technology². A Council Member in attendance described the closed door meeting as “essentially a sales pitch.”

The drone trial, which concluded on Friday, had been running without the public hearing or Council resolution that Metro Code § 13.08.080 requires for new surveillance technology, as per WSMV³. Friday’s secretive “demonstration” was very likely in blatant violation of the Tennessee Open Meetings Act (TOMA), which declares that meetings of public bodies with decision-making power over public business must be open to the public⁴.

Against the wishes of several of the Council Members in attendance, no outside community members were allowed to attend. However, MNPD did allow a single junior reporter from the Tennessean (who graduated from journalism school this month) and a lobbyist, Sam Reed, to attend.

The primary MNPD official present in the meeting appears to have been Deputy Chief Chris Gilder.

Deeper Context On Deputy Chief Gilder

Deputy Chief Gilder, an attorney as well as a police officer, has previously been connected to efforts to roll out AI-powered corporate mass surveillance in Nashville, including making the department’s case for the FUSUS camera-integration system before Council⁵. A 2024 whistleblower complaint from a retired MNPD lieutenant alleged Gilder and another top official worked to help draft the 2023 state law that eliminated community-led police oversight boards⁶, including Nashville’s board, which Nashville voters had created by a 20-point margin in a 2018 referendum⁷. An independent investigation later disputed the allegation: outside counsel retained by the Mayor’s Office reported finding no evidence MNPD had lobbied for the law, and Gilder categorically denied any involvement or participation in the legislative process⁸.

Multiple public records requests have been submitted to MNPD and the County Clerk’s office for the Deputy Chief’s financial disclosure forms. The purpose of these requests was to confirm that Mr. Gilder has not received compensation for pushing for mass surveillance in Nashville.

Thus far, MNPD and the Clerks office have only released Mr. Gilder’s financial disclosure forms for 2023, and despite multiple rounds of public records requests, Metro has refused to (or been unable to) release information about whether Mr. Gilder received outside compensation for the years 2024 and 2025 from any firm that might have contracts with Metro Nashville.

Since his last (and only available) financial disclosure form submitted in 2023, Mr. Gilder has been involved in adding a line item for the surveillance firm LeoSight to a $15 million MOU between Metro Nashville and the Nashville Downtown Partnership — by his own account, at MNPD’s request rather than through a competitive bid⁹.

LeoSight is led by Mark Wood, a surveillance industry executive whose name appears alongside Chief Drake’s on MNPD’s original Fusus contract, entered without Council approval. Separately, The Intercept reported that Marshall Freeman, an Atlanta police official who also sat on Fusus’s board, pitched the platform to at least 14 cities as a fellow officer’s independent recommendation without disclosing that board seat (Fusus was later bought by Axon)¹⁰.

The Intercept: “Duped”: How One Atlanta Cop Secretly Shilled for Police TechNYC, Seattle, and more paid millions for Axon Fusus software after speaking to an Atlanta officer — who sat on Fusus’s board.

Without its officials submitting their legally required financial disclosure forms, it is very difficult for Nashvillians to determine if MNPD’s efforts to roll out AI-powered mass surveillance is being done because law enforcement legitimately believe the technology is useful, or if their officers are being compensated to make the case for this technology (which, as a report published this year by their own philanthropic backer, the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance, itself concedes license plate readers lack any real evidence of their efficacy¹¹).

MNPD and the Mayor’s Office did not respond to my request for comment, submitted Sunday Aug 9.

Notice of the meeting, which Council Member (CM) Sandra Sepulveda believes only surfaced after she filed her drone-restriction legislation, had been posted to Instagram by Sepulveda, the chief sponsor of an ordinance to restrict the use of drone surveillance technology.

Reached for comment, CM Sepulveda said that she believes the drone “demonstration” was directly in response to her legislation, which had also prompted Chief Drake to write a letter urging Council Members to not further limit his department’s access to drone surveillance tools, a form of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance that MNPD has already shown they are willing to implement on a “trial” basis without proper authorization.

When members of the media, Metro staffers, and community members arrived at MNPD HQ to attend the presentation on Friday, they were turned away by security and told that it was an “invite-only” meeting. Also turned away were several members of the Metro Community Review Board, who by WSMV’s account had been caught off guard to learn the trial launched without Council approval.

Council Members in attendance of the closed door meeting included:

• Mayoral Candidate Joy Styles

• Public Health and Safety Committee Chair Jordan Huffman

• Minority Caucus Chair Terry Vo

• Sandra Sepulveda

• Emily Benedict

• Erin Evans

• Jeff Preptit

• Bob Nash, and

• Jacob Kupin

All nine Council Members listed above were contacted for comment for this story.

A single reporter, Elijah Carll from the Tennessean, was the only journalist allowed to attend the meeting — the invitation appears to have gone to the paper broadly rather than to him specifically. A representative from the Nashville Scene and I were turned away.Mr. Carll, a Tennessean reporter since July 2026, is listed on LinkedIn as graduating from the ¹²University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism this month¹². I have previously documented how the Tennessean has uncritically published articles in support of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance, seemingly in tandem with MNPD’s budget hearing, promoting a later debunked report by my former boss at the Mayor’s Office John Buntin.

Below is a graphic from a Substack post I made on May 22, 2026 detailing the seeming coordination between MNPD, The Police + Public Safety Alliance, and the Tennessean to influence public sentiment on AI-powered corporate mass surveillance.¹³

It is not clear why a newly minted reporter was the only civilian besides the lobbyist Sam Reed who was allowed to attend the meeting, which is concerning given the stakes of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance.

Council Members also reported talking to a lawyer from the Council’s legal office after learning the public would not be allowed in, as they were concerned about the TOMA implications and if attending such a meeting could result in ethics complaints or litigation. According to a Council Member present, after ten minutes of research conducted right before the meeting took place, the representative of the Council’s legal office reportedly concluded that Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act (TOMA) did not apply since this was a “training” and therefore it did not need to be open to the public.

Upon entering the building, CM Nash, a former MNPD commander, denied to me this private meeting violated TOMA, claiming that they were not going to be talking about any legislation.

“Is this meeting about police drones?” I asked him.

“Yes.” He replied.

“Is there open legislation regarding the restriction of police drones currently on the Council floor?”

“Yes,” he said.

But this meeting about police drones, had nothing to do with any legislation about those very same police drones, he insisted. It was not clear why, if there was no lobbying about legislation going on, there was a lobbyist invited to this closed door meeting.

The police officer manning the door confirmed to me that the lobbyist Sam Reed was “on the list.”

When I contacted Mr. Reed by phone about what was going on and indicated I knew he was present and asked for his assistance attending the demonstration, he promptly exited the building and left the premises before the demonstration began.

Sam Reed is a registered Metro Nashville lobbyist for Elon Musk's Boring Company, Vanderbilt University, The Nashville Downtown Partnership, Oracle, and Nate Bargatze’s eponymous theme park “Nateland” the comedian is attempting to build.¹⁴

Mr. Reed, as per the latest disclosure filings for Metro lobbyists, is not a registered lobbyist for the war drone manufacturer Skydio or MNPD, though he is a registered lobbyist for the Nashville Downtown Partnership, the private nonprofit through which the Mayor’s Office routed a $15 million MOU that originally included contracts with LeoSight and FiveCast before Council stripped them in December 2025¹⁵.

In a letter to the Vice Mayor and Council opposing bill BL2026-1498, Chief Drake has made it explicit that he does not want any further restrictions on his department’s use of drones, warning it could limit their use for missing-person searches, crash-scene mapping, hazardous materials incidents and large public events. “The public safety value of this tool cannot be understated,” Drake wrote¹⁶. Drake’s letter states the bill would also affect the Office of Emergency Management’s and Nashville Fire Department’s ability to deploy drones in their own operations¹⁷.

Amongst surveillance watchers, there are concerns the Metro Council is not equipped with the legal support needed to combat the expansion of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance, which has the benefit of lawyers inside MNPD (including Deputy Chief Gilder, Esq.), and lawyers for the multi-billion dollar corporations who leverage their legal teams to help write legislation and RFPs to their clients’ benefit.

Most Council Members are not lawyers and do not have the resources to utilize them outside of the official Metro Council law office, which has provided concerning opinions of late.

Stephen Watts, a community organizer with The Nashville Community Safety Network, provided this comment on the topic:¹⁸

Since the goal of the surveillance industry is to remain unregulated, empowered by technology that evolves faster than legislation, it should be Metro’s goal to make sure that the effects of legislation — as experienced by the public — are not evolving beyond specific use cases…I’m reminded often of internal legal advice to Council to not hold public hearings for surveillance equipment passed in February, even though public hearings were legally required.

Friday’s analysis that advised Council Members it was proper to attend a closed door demonstration about the benefits of drones with other Council Members while drone legislation is actively on the Council floor, is particularly concerning to some. Other recent examples have demonstrated concerning patterns from the Counsel’s legal office.

It was Council’s legal office, someone familiar with the situation told this outlet, that gave the legal opinion that the Nashville Downtown Partnership only needed to change their budget by one dollar to resubmit its rejected budget to Council — a decision that has also raised eyebrows about the Council’s legal office. The Council legal office has had new leadership since longtime Counsel Margaret Darby departed the role in December 2025 at the end of her four-year contract, moving to private practice¹⁹, and there is concern it is not giving legal advice with the public’s best interest and the spirit of the law in mind.

Researchers like Ed Vogel from the Lucy Parsons Lab, featured in the Nashville Banner’s Aug. 6 piece on the airport’s under-the-radar license plate readers, has said these fights ultimately come down to democracy²⁰, are documenting how procurement laws and sunshine acts are being shredded to adopt the move-fast-and-break-things approach through which AI-powered corporate mass surveillance is brought in through every side door available.

At stake, Vogel puts it, is democracy. Friday’s secret meeting, led by MNPD’s Deputy Chief Gilder, is only the latest in a long string of bypassing all norms and accountability to provide a panopticon to police, and more to the point, the corporate surveillance firms acquiring the footage and cashing the checks. As the meeting detailed to Council members, MNPD has been flying drones for the better part of two months without a single contract in place saying what a war drone manufacturer may do with the footage it has obtained of thousands of Nashvillians.

Friday’s chaotic secret meeting is now becoming a standard sight around the country, with AI-powered corporate mass surveillance being pushed by product marketers and, increasingly, the thin blue line between sales people and public safety officers is being blurred.

The University of Texas at Austin
Jul 2026 - Present

At Wednesday's budget hearing, Council Member Jason Spain asked Chief Drake about a study endorsing surveillance technology that had received two pieces of coverage in the Tennessean over the prior two days — a news article and an op-ed from the nonprofit that paid for it.

Spain hadn't read the report. He probably couldn't have. As the reporter confirmed to me, it wasn't publicly available when the articles came out. A study promoting AI-powered corporate mass surveillance was discussed on the Council floor before a single council member had access to it. How did this happen?

Greater Nashville Hospitality Association Hobson Pike Land, LLC Legacy South MarketStreet Management, LLC Murphy Pipeline Contractors, LLC Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation Nashville Downtown Partnership Nashville Zoo NRN Parcel A Owner, LLC, NRN Parcel D Owner, LLC, and NRN Parcel E Oracle America Inc. Predators Holdings LLC  Ryman Hospitality Properties Service Properties/The RMR Group TEB, LLC Tennessee Football, Inc.  The Boring Company Vanderbilt University

Stephen Watts, a community organizer with The Nashville Community Safety Network, provided this comment on the topic:

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Metro Nashville Council to vote on restricting police drone use following unapproved pilot program

On September 15th, 2022, the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) entered a contract with FUSUS, a law enforcement surveillance technology company. Despite falling under the purview of surveillance technology, MNPD entered a $175,000 sole source contract1 with FUSUS, a price point below the $250,000 benchmark2 that would require Metro Council approval. MNPD acquired 58 FUSUS devices with the original contract, eight for public use and 50 for private use to disperse to businesses and residents. Currently, there are over 900 FUSUS-linked cameras in Nashville.

With national outlets like HBO and CNN and the Washington Post finally sounding the alarm that even right-wing propaganda outlets like Breitbart can’t ignore, it is good to see local journalism in Nashville covering AI-powered corporate mass surveillance meaningfully.

Shout out to Ed Vogel, the co-author of my piece in Truthout.org from last year covering Mayor O’Connell attempts to route surveillance technology through the Nashville Downtown Partnership, who is featured in this piece by The Nashville Banner.

Another good piece of local journalism, this one covering MNPD and the O’Connell administration’s attempts to expand MNPD’s AI-powered corporate mass surveillance efforts via a drone program launched through an alleged “loophole”, was released today by the Nashville Scene.

Learn more about the efforts to curb AI-powered corporate mass surveillance at nashvillecommunitysafety.net and on Instagram.

Amid Debate About Automatic License Plate Readers in Nashville, the Airport’s Use Has Flown Under the Radar

Public records show data collected by airport LPRs is part of a sprawling web of surveillance accessed by law enforcement across the country

The Nashville Banner

August 6, 2026
Steven Hale

While a groundswell of community opposition blocked plans to deploy automatic license plate readers across Nashville, the city’s airport is an outpost in the growing surveillance network those devices have created.

There have been at least 10 of the AI-powered cameras in use at Nashville International Airport since 2024, according to a contract between the Metro Nashville Airport Authority and the surveillance technology company Flock Safety obtained by the Banner through public records requests. The MNAA has its own police department, which operates independently of the Metro Nashville Police Department. The LPRs capture the license plates and other details of thousands of cars that pass through every day. That data is accessible to officers at the airport’s Department of Public Safety as well as thousands of law enforcement agencies around the country who are part of Flock’s network. But despite the roiling debate over LPRs in Nashville in recent years, the airport’s use has flown under the radar.

“The deep layer of it that I think a lot of people across the country are discovering is that really these are fights about democracy,” Ed Vogel, a researcher and advocate who is part of the nationwide DeFlock movement, told the Banner. “What is happening in a lot of communities, the patterns that we’re seeing are technologies like ALPRs are being procured, contracts are being signed with very little public disclosure.”

Vogel describes his work as “trying to make the problem legible.” He is one of many people around the country who have devoted themselves to meticulously reviewing public records to map LPR deployment and track how they are used.

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In post-9/11 America, most people who go to an airport likely take for granted that they will encounter some degree of invasive surveillance or security. What they may not be aware of is how widely available Flock’s LPR network makes their license plates and vehicle details and how much that data can reveal about them.

Audit logs for the Nashville airport’s LPR’s obtained by the Banner through a public records request show that data captured has been combed over as part of hundreds of thousands of searches by law enforcement agencies across the country so far this year. Among them are more than 75,000 searches by police departments and sheriff’s offices in Tennessee and nearly 2,500 searches by airport police.

Flock’s policy states that LPR data is stored in the cloud for 30 days before deletion. But the airport’s policy instructs officers to transfer all data captured during each shift to the internal servers, where it is stored for a minimum of three years.

The logs record the reason given by the user for each search, often listing the alleged crime being investigated. In many cases, those reasons are what one might expect: a “fugitive” with an arrest warrant, a homicide investigation, a kidnapping case or a stolen vehicle. But others raise questions about whether a mass surveillance network is being used to track people accused of minor crimes or none at all. Several searches performed by Nashville airport police in June were only labeled “other.” One logged on June 11 was labeled “alcohol offenses / non-DUI”; one in February was simply explained as a “welfare check.”

Searches by other law enforcement agencies in the state also included some with notably vague explanations. In June, officers in Hendersonville, White County and Memphis logged queries for cases of “disturbing public peace/riot” and “disorderly conduct.” The University of Tennessee Police Department logged a search June 13 for “alcohol offenses.”

In Nashville, part of the resistance to LPRs and other police surveillance technology was based on fear that it could be used by or for federal immigration authorities to pursue the Trump administration’s policy of hunting down allegedly undocumented immigrants across the country. The audit logs reviewed by the Banner indeed show a number of searches logged as immigration cases, including one in Sevierville in June.

Although Flock says it does not directly share data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 404 Media has reported on local law enforcement agencies acting as a sidedoor to the network.

The MNPD does not have direct access to Flock’s LPR network since it does not have a contract with the company. But the department has announced on a number of occasions that LPRs from private owners or neighboring counties have been used to assist its investigations. MNPD spokesperson Kris Mumford told the Banner the department has rarely asked airport police to search the LPR network on its behalf, citing a homicide case a few years ago. But the audit logs do appear to show examples of other departments accessing the network for MNPD. A May 20 search by the Murfreesboro Police Department, for example, was logged as a case of a wanted person with an arrest warrant and included the name of a Nashville police sergeant.

The searches recorded in the audit logs also provide a picture of the immense surveillance capability at the fingertips of anyone conducting them. They are mostly not targeted surveys of footage obtained by local cameras, but rather a scouring of Flock’s immense network of LPRs. The most common type of query in the logs reviewed by the Banner was what’s called a “lookup,” which allows the user to see a license plate’s recent location history based on readings from the nationwide network of cameras. Flock also offers what it calls a FreeForm search which, according to the company, allows “searches based on everyday language, such as ‘white sports car with a racing stripe’ or ‘red pickup truck with a dog in the bed.’”

The airport authority’s contract with Flock also highlights an “Unlimited Custom Hot Lists” feature, which allows the user to “add a suspect’s license plate to a custom list and get alerted when it passes by a Flock camera.”

“These tools really give a pattern of life and they can really make it obvious for their users what someone’s daily habits are, what their patterns are, what they’re doing,” Vogel told the Banner.

It takes little imagination to come up with ways such a tool can be abused — in fact, it takes no imagination at all. The Washington Post earlier this week reported that at least 46 police officers have been charged or accused of using their access to Flock’s LPR network to do things like stalk an ex-wife or girlfriend or spy on women they wanted to meet.

The airport authority document outlining the policy for its LPRs states that they are to be used “for the furtherance of criminal investigations” and that “no officer may use, or authorize the use of, the equipment or database records for any other reason.” The policy also prohibits officers from using the LPR system until they have been “properly trained.”

“For authorized Department of Public Safety (DPS) members, this training covers login procedures, two-factor authentication setup, and an introduction to the Flock Safety user interface,” Charlotte Weatherington, the airport authority’s director of corporate communication, wrote in response to emailed questions from the Banner. “Upon logging in, new users are introduced to system capabilities, search parameters, and the importance of query specificity. DPS members gain access to the Flock ALPR system through supervisor approval. After approval, a system administrator creates the user login.”

Asked what measures are in place to ensure that airport officers don’t abuse their access to the network, Weatherington referenced the airport’s written policy and added that users are required to enter an offense type and case number before conducting a search of the network.

“These strict data rules block the improper searches,” she wrote.

But the airport’s internal policies can’t control how others might use the data its LPRs provide. Vogel said he is not optimistic that a network designed to collect and share surveillance data on such a massive scale can be made safe.

“It’s difficult, I would argue impossible,” he said, “to actually implement meaningful guardrails to prevent the use of these tools in ways that are harmful.”

Banner reporter Stephen Elliott contributed to this reporting.

HBO’s Last Week Tonight is the latest major media platform to unpack the non-consensual efforts to unleash AI-powered corporate mass surveillance in America. This is the same pattern we see in cities run by alleged “progressives” who claim to support the rights of vulnerable populations.

There is little that Americans agree on today, but denouncing AI-powered corporate mass surveillance is one of the bright spots that vividly reminds me that the American soul is unconquerable and that the belief in freedom from tyranny is as bipartisan an issue as it gets.

Even Breitbart, the far right wing propaganda platform founded by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, is able to see clearly how dangerous these tools are and understand how fundamentally un-American AI-powered corporate mass surveillance is.

There are tremendous profits to be made unleashing AI-powered corporate mass surveillance, and police officers have been documented profiting from convincing other municipalities to non-consensually surveil their neighbors.

But looking at the universal outrage against this technology, I am convinced that Americans are not fools, and they are not children.

Americans understand that protecting liberties means that police investigations will require acquiring warrants and doing actual police work: talking to witnesses, asking questions, piecing together clues.

This will require having a community that has faith that the police are on their side and are not wholly unaccountable. In Nashville, MNPD, like many police forces, has a long road to rebuild that trust given that they willfully participated in gutting their own voter-imposed oversight and their leaders continue to lie about the efficacy of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance.

Will protecting our civil liberties sometimes lead to slow results or some cases that cannot be closed? Yes. It is childish to claim otherwise.

But we are Tennesseans, and before that, we are Americans. We are not weak-willed and unable to make hard choices. Look at the sacrifices we are willing to make to protect the widest possible interpretation of the Second Amendment.

If we do not extend even a modicum of the same allegiance to the Fourth Amendment’s protection of unreasonable search and seizure, it makes me ask these hard questions:

• Are we a country that makes hard choices to defend liberty? Or,

• Are we a country that fetishizes violence and domination and leverages the Constitution only when it is convenient to these ends?

Which is it?

Do we hold the Constitution sacred? Or do we only appeal to the scripture of the Founders when it enables brutality at scale?

Here is the hard truth that the children in power cannot accept: violating our constitutional rights is a crime and it is violence. If you violate the privacy rights of 100 people to close one case, you have committed 100 crimes to close one case.

• If your values are based in religion, this is immoral.

• If your values are based in neoliberal market economics, this is inefficient.

• If your values are based in freedom from tyranny, this is un-American.

Our constitutional rights are sacred, and protecting them has sacrifices. Being unwilling to make hard choices, being unwilling to choose the greater good over short-term wins, is precisely the lily-livered neoliberal cowardice that dismantled our public institutions and allowed right-wing totalitarianism to take root in America.

• Americans clearly will not tolerate their First Amendment Rights being taken from them.

• Americans clearly will not tolerate their Second Amendment Rights being taken from them.

• And we are showing that, no matter how much corporations lobby our politicians and police officers, corrupting our institutions from the inside out, we will not tolerate our Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure being taken from us.

It is not just about Flock. It is not just about Fusus. It is not just about drones as first responders or the thousand other ways they violate city, state, and constitutional law to inflict AI-powered corporate mass surveillance.

It is not about Right vs Left. It is about Up vs Down.

It is about how the rule of the few over the many will never stand in this country.

AI-powered corporate mass surveillance is not liberal or conservative: it is tyrannical.

It is a tool designed to be used by tyrants, and frankly it does not matter if those tyrants think trans athletes should compete in sports or if all immigrants are rapists or if they think “guardrails” will keep bad actors in check. Tyrants, and the tools of tyranny, have no place in America.

Who am I to say this? I am someone who is only less American than Native Americans.

My people came to this country in the 1640s, and we left behind the rule of kings. The same kings who instituted “general warrants” that let them mass-surveil the colonists with “writs of assistance”, monitoring people without specific suspicion, tracking who they associated with, where they went. This is how tyrants behave everywhere.

This is why the Fourth Amendment’s right against unreasonable search and seizure was written: to stop the mass surveillance of tyrants, regardless of whether they are Liberals or Conservatives.

People talk about the dangers of AI-powered corporate mass surveillance because of how it affects immigrants, women, and children. Read the news stories at the bottom of this article to see how very real these harms are, far, far more real than the statistics about the usefulness of these tools for law enforcement. But the biggest danger is to American democracy.

America, if nothing else, believes in the fundamental right of its people to do one particular thing…

Even if these tools were effective. Even if they closed every case the police had open. Even if they could solve “90% of missing person cases,” Americans still have the right to look the people peddling this technology in the face and say the most American thing possible: “Fuck you. Make me.”

These tools don’t deliver what they promise. They do deliver constitutional violations, stalking, and surveillance of women and children at scale. But even if they did all the things they promised and didn’t have these harms, we still have the right to reject them because we don’t feel like spending our tax dollars to have corporations profit off of spying on us.

America is saying, loud and clear, to the AI-powered corporate mass surveillance purveyors and all the liberal and conservative politicians and police in their pockets the same thing that my ancestors said to the king of England in 1776:

Fuck you. Make me.

I know I wasn’t the only one with concerns and who expressed them to WPLN, and I believe they’ve heard the feedback and are internalizing it. I think this places us firmly in that phase of accountability described by the Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan picked up: “Trust, but verify.”

I will be candid about why I chose to take such a firm line for an episode that seemed rather ordinary to many listeners: I think there are many things we can afford to “f%*k around and find out” about in civic life.

But based on the now 90 cities that have overturned their Flock Safety contracts for AI-powered corporate mass surveillance (up from 88 when the episode of This is Nashville aired), I very much want our valued civic institutions to feel uncomfortable carrying water for this dangerous technology that has no empirical evidence of benefits at scale.

Or at the very least, to be far less deferential to authority and to do the real work the public is expecting them to do before devoting an hour to a topic like AI-powered corporate mass surveillance. The push back they received would not have come as a surprise had they done that research and understood the positions they were centering.

City leaders, police forces and media institutions around the country that are recapitulating the talking points of product marketers for the multi-billion dollar surveillance firms are shocked when the public is displeased at this arrangement, but they shouldn't be. They are f#&king around, and finding out.

If my clap back at WPLN and Mr. Farmer and his producer seemed out of proportion to what they allowed on air and said/didn’t say, please understand this: being directly in touch with those who are dealing with the fallout of these systems nationally, responses like mine are not out of proportion with the danger these systems represent and the actual harm they are causing.

When a child steps into someone’s vegetable garden, you admonish them lightly. When a child steps into the roaring city street, you admonish them firmly. The child did the same action, but the danger is very different, and so is the admonition.

But I do understand the chaos it sows when a media figure and institution is taken to task, and I don’t take it lightly. And when I chastise a liberal institution in our Blue dot in a Red sea, it feels internecine and “harms solidarity”. But what is “solidarity” if our liberal institutions, knowing or not, are helping to feed lambs to lions, seemingly just to stay in good graces with authority figures? Accountability, back stoped by grace, is the only thing that makes institutions worthy to be defended.

I heard from some of you that you didn’t like the way I called out WPLN and its host and producer of This is Nashville. I appreciate the feedback and welcome any further conversations you would like to have about it.

WPLN is a community treasure, whose trustworthiness must be preserved. But trust is earned through mutual accountability. If trust is demanded, it becomes loyalty. And institutions grounded in loyalty are incapable of holding other institutions accountable.

Evolution shows no evidence that organisms adapt without outside pressure. Public institutions are no different. But WPLN is showing the most important vital sign of life: the ability to learn.

And as an institution that appears deeply invested in learning how better to serve its community, I want to say clearly that I believe in public radio, deeply, and I think you should listen to and support WPLN if you believe they are living up to your standards, now more than ever.

WPLN has shown positive signs that they heard those of us who were concerned about their coverage last week and will do better in the future.

Trust, but verify.

Last Thursday, WPLN’s This Is Nashville held a roundtable on AI-powered corporate mass surveillance. I found it an extremely frustrating and revealing example of why trust in the media and our institutions is at an all-time low.

What the Host Blake Farmer and Producer Emily West of This Is Nashville provided the audience, through their own commentary and framing of information, was not a grounded, fact-based unpacking of the invasive, unconstitutional dragnet unfolding across this country.

Instead, they enacted classic liberal performative objectivity, a ritual of neutrality that, in practice, handed the microphone to the billion-dollar sellers of the thing under scrutiny.

To say I am disappointed in how Blake Farmer and Emily West behaved during this hour-long broadcast is, as you will see, quite an understatement.

Conspicuously absent from the show: the Police + Public Safety Alliance, whose pro–license-plate-reader report (which has been debunked by the Metro Human Relations Commission) seems to have prompted the whole episode. Apparently, the Alliance would rather not defend their report in public after a rather disastrous showing bringing it before Metro Council.

In lieu of the Alliance being there to argue for AI-powered corporate mass surveillance, Farmer and producer-reporter Emily West spent the hour last Thursday recapitulating the talking points of multi-billion-dollar surveillance corporations, Flock, Palantir, and Axon/Fusus, often the exact points their own guests and callers were flagging in real time were misleading or inaccurate.

This behavior included playing a full-length ad from Flock Safety’s YouTube. A listener tuning into WPLN without context would have assumed that NPR was now being sponsored by corporations pushing AI-powered corporate mass surveillance. Mr. Farmer presented this literal commercial as if it were some sort of empirical research worthy of entering public discourse, commenting immediately afterward:

“And that’s from Mt. Juliet, which is doing way more than Metro [Nashville].”
[Starts at 00:27 in the video above.]

Firstly, credit to WPLN where it is due: real opposition to AI-powered corporate mass surveillance did get seats in the convo (Council Member Emily Benedict and the EFF’s Matthew Guariglia both pushed back hard). However, no one from Nashville’s local anti-surveillance/privacy-sovereignty movement was booked, and the sharpest constitutional objections were left to callers (including me, “Stephen from Goodlettsville” and “Kelly in Madison”) to force onto the air.

And what’s more, the host of the show and its producer at no point acknowledged the extreme, documented harm being done by this technology and the deeply reported corruption of law enforcement officers secretly working as lobbyists for the companies.

WPLN did not cut the mic on people who brought up these issues, but deference and centrality was given to one side of the argument: MNPD’s unquenchable desire to record everyone’s activity everywhere (without a single follow-up question as to how that would actually benefit anyone but the corporations who are quite literally paying police officers to sell cities on this).

The centerpiece of Thursday’s This Is Nashville episode was a pre-recorded interview in which MNPD Deputy Chief Blair lamented that he can’t yet watch every square inch of Davidson County on a screen, and Farmer met him with something that can only be described as sympathy.

Farmer asked skeptical questions like: “Does a city need cameras everywhere while crime is falling?” but always in a register that let Blair reframe them to be more palatable, and Farmer never fact-checked a single answer Blair gave, including one extraordinary lie.

MNPD Deputy Chief Blair lied and stated that license plate readers: “could solve 90 percent of all missing person cases.” Not even the debunked Alliance study dared to claim that AI-powered corporate mass surveillance has that level of effectiveness, and Farmer and WPLN did nothing, in the interview or in the lead-up to its airing, to challenge it.

What Deputy Chief Blair claimed is an absurd, outrageous lie whose sole purpose is to manipulate listeners into thinking they are harming the public by defending their constitutional right to privacy. And WPLN has endorsed this lie.

“Missing persons alone, if they had LPRs, they could solve 90% of all missing person cases.”
MNPD Deputy Chief Greg Blair
(00:04:44–00:04:49)

Let us assess this claim by the document that has been debunked for essentially being commissioned to argue for license plate readers. Even this deeply flawed “study” made a claim nowhere near as bullshit as what Mr. Farmer and WPLN allowed Deputy Chief Blair to claim, unchallenged, in a pre-recorded interview.

"Thus far, however, there is little evidence that LPRs reduce crime and even less is known about their impact on solve/clearance rates."

Nashville and Its Peers: Policing and Public Safety
By John Butin
Commissioned by the Police + Public Safety Alliance

Set the rhetoric aside and look at what these systems have been demonstrated to be effective at. In one city, Flock accessed the cameras inside a children’s gymnastics facility as a sales-pitch demo, and police keep getting arrested for stalking women using them.

I’m not saying that everyone pushing for AI-powered corporate mass surveillance is a pervert. But I am saying that perverts do seem to be really into AI-powered corporate mass surveillance.

When I grew up, there was a word for people who filmed others without their consent: “perverts.” I think it is time we brought that word back because that is precisely who is using this technology.

Nationally, 88 cities have already ripped Flock out after learning what it does to the people living under it. That is the product Farmer spent an hour normalizing.

Farmer even joked several times that the people in his office were being recorded by the studio cameras. He did not seem to appreciate the core difference between his studio cameras and Flock Safety, Fusus, and all the other systems he is working to normalize: consent.

It is very unclear to me why a public radio host finds it funny to normalize technology that is being used by perverts to spy on women and children.

Nashville’s public-safety institutions have a consent problem, in more than one sense of the word.

Here are only a few examples of surveillance being non-consensually inflicted onto Nashvillians.

• MNPD stood up its Fusus camera integration system without the required approval.

• The Mayor’s Office had to be dragged into holding a public hearing on surveillance when they wanted the Nashville Downtown Partnership to buy them nation-state surveillance software.

• Last month, MNPD launched a drone program with essentially no warning to the district it flies over, in obvious contravention of Metro and likely state law. These drones fly over schools and playgrounds. Here is the location data to prove it.

That there is a relationship between non-consensually filming one's neighbors and rape culture is not a new observation for me.

The through-line is a civic apparatus that keeps pressing an intimate, invasive access on a public that is unambiguously refusing it, and asks permission only after the fact, if at all, and usually only once someone might face consequences.

It is hard not to hear the logic of a broader rape culture in it: come on, Nashville, all the other cities are doing it — you’re not a prude, are you?

Consent, in this framework, is a formality to be managed, not a line to be respected. And yet Blake Farmer and WPLN treat the whole perverted pattern as unremarkable.

The hand waving at actual documented harms, the made-up figures about finding missing persons, all of this has a name, and it is not “lying” necessarily. There is, and this is not a joke, a technical term in philosophy for this.

It is what the philosopher Henry Frankfurt called “Bullshit.” Worse than a liar, the bullshitter says whatever is pleasing to power, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, always unmoored from any sense of grounded empirical truth.

Ed Vogel wrote in Truthout last week that the fight against surveillance cameras “is a struggle for democracy” — and it is, at bottom, a struggle against bullshit backed by billions of dollars of marketing.

I know the efficiency argument is bullshit too, because I tested it. I brought Blair a proven method — used in other cities — to cut MNPD’s active dispatch load potentially by a third. He wasn’t interested.

After Thursday’s interview, I think I can guess why: actually reducing MNPD’s active dispatches without giving Blair and his colleagues access to spy on Nashvillians just isn’t interesting to him.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The same officials smoothing the path for cameras here have been building the data pipelines that feed federal enforcement.

So this is where Farmer has planted himself: alongside the hallucinating AI vendors, the surveillance-disinformation complex, the Alliance and my old boss John Buntin who writes their propaganda, and men like Blair who insist (without a shred of proof) that violating the Fourth Amendment at industrial scale will “solve 90 percent of missing persons.” He picked the bullshitters. Bullshit. Utter, complete bullshit.

Unless Farmer and WPLN make clear that the purpose of their journalism is not to carey water for people peddling debunked studies (studies that call Nashville “behind” for insisting on the Fourth Amendment and basic procurement law) I’ll say my piece at the next NPR pledge drive: don’t give WPLN a dime.

If WPLN is going to literally air ads for corporate mass surveillance, it should make those companies pay for the airtime and stop asking listeners to donate while we choke on their Bullshit.

Keep tabs on the surveillance industrial complex on Instagram by following the community group doing the work to keep our community safe from bullshitters.

I have been posting a bit less on Substack of late because I have been rehearsing a short excerpt of a play that I wrote. It’s going to be at the Dark Horse Theatre on Saturday, July 25, at 8 PM and Sunday, July 26 at 1 PM. Also I’m looking for a new job, are you hiring?

My fellow performer, Zack Waterfire, is on the keys, playing a certain famous jazz musician, and I am playing a certain famous philosopher (it’s Nietzsche, ok? I’m playing Nietzsche).

Thanks to the invaluable producing assistance of Caitlin Hohn, rehearsals are going quite well, and I think it’s going to be very cool and very weird.

It was really great to get to write something that’s not about Nashville local politics. But at the same time, of course, it kind of is.

If you’re not familiar with the Kindling Arts Festival, it is a terminally dope performance festival put on by Daniel Jones & Jessika Malone. Do your soul some good and go see as many shows as you can this year.

Kindling was kind enough to include me in their “New Play Platter,” where excerpts of various plays are going to be presented, each around 10 minutes. Also included will be works by Josh Inocalla, Maya Antoinette Riley, Saúl Rodriguez, and Shea Stripling & Kyle Sahadeo.

What’s my play about?
If you’ve ever wondered what TV show Frederich Nietzsche would be binge-watching in the afterlife and want to hear him defend himself against accusations that he’s responsible for inspiring the fascism that is destroying the world (again), all told within a Kubrickian fever dream with excessive iambic pentameter, this is the show for you!

Tickets Available Here

On June 30, 2026, Nashville’s Metro Human Relations Commission (MHRC) released its response to a document recently presented to the Metro Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee that advocated for expanding what I’ve called “AI-Powered Corporate Mass Surveillance”.

The document the MHRC was responding to is a “report” commissioned by the Police + Public Safety Alliance, a non-profit whose sole beneficiary is MNPD. The MHRC’s verdict about this report is scathing: “We believe the report’s analysis is fundamentally flawed in its framing, methodology and scope.”

The response can be read in full on the new publication I have launched with Robin L. Owen of , Nashville Peoples’ Journal.

MHRC’s response is deeply researched and is about as critical a review as one can get in the anodyne world of public safety policy analysis. It is a profound repudiation of one-sided public safety conversations that claim to be objective research but are, what I would call, “paid-for copaganda,” far more rooted in “vibes” that appeal to the people commissioning said reports than anything that could approach the term “research”.

The fact that violent crime is dropping without massive investments in spying on our neighbors is treated, in the report, not as an indication that spying is not a path towards safer communities, but as a curious anomaly to be brushed aside in favor of endorsing AI-Powered Corporate Mass Surveillance tech like license plate readers, tools that even the Public Safety Alliance’s report must confess have no track record whatsoever of preventing or reducing crimes.

MHRC is not alone in its critiques of this report. A similar vein of critical feedback was given when the report was presented to the Metro Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee. In that hearing, Council Member At-Large Zulfat Suara pointed to the report’s own metrics and noted that it is quite strange that Nashville is being criticized for not having an intensive surveillance dragnet, whilst the cities with the most of this technology also have the highest crime rates.

The report was written by my former boss from the Cooper-era community safety office, John Buntin. Mr. Buntin is a former O’Connell consultant paid through a Department of Law contract, and he wrote the report for the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance.

Since serving as Nashville’s Director of Community Safety in the Cooper Administration, Mr. Buntin seems to have left behind any pretense of advocating for non-surveillance-based approaches to preventing crime (the types of things I served under him to help implement). As the MHRC response to Buntin’s report notes:

“Missing from the report is any meaningful comparison between surveillance technologies and other evidence-based public safety interventions such as violence interruption programs, youth employment initiatives, affordable housing, behavioral health services, substance use treatment, food security programs and trauma-informed victim support.”

As someone whose job was literally to implement these programs in Nashville from the Mayor’s Office, I can tell you they have strong evidence supporting their ability to prevent and reduce crime. And given that Nashville has, in fact, seen violence dramatically decline these past few years, I’d suggest that organizations claiming to care about public safety might better invest their time and resources by researching which of these programs may actually be driving down our crime rates and could use more funding and institutional support. These are the programs I helped stand up (ironically under Mr. Buntin’s oversight).

I’ve written about my frustrations with the report before, so I’ll let MHRC’s response speak for itself. It is presented in full on NPJ. Use NPJ’s tools to comment on any passage you have thoughts about.

Why do we need a People’s Journal?

We need a place to work towards a greater collective understanding of the one great eternal question: what the f*%k is going on?

I’ve discussed this with my friends who work in traditional media, and for the most part they agree with this analysis. Professional journalism in America is, by and large, unable to deeply cover the topics that I know concern many of you.

The reasons they do not cover these things in deep detail form a spectrum.

• On one side, there is limited bandwidth, the perpetual requirement to do more with less, on tighter and tighter budgets.

• Further along the spectrum, there is an adherence to “professional journalistic objectivity”, stopping short of saying what anything really means, always just hinting at its shape. I fear that this may no longer make sense in our post-modern collective social paradigm.

• And on the far side is the very concerning complicity we see with media organizations, aligning for economically existential reasons with the ever-narrowing oligopoly that has its chokehold around our democracy.

Don’t get me wrong. I have seen much attention paid to matters that are very important for the public good at the local level in the past few years.

But often the lived experience of the community that is facing the brunt of the power’s indifference goes into the journalist's notebook as harrowing case studies in systemic oppression told on a human scale, but comes out at press time as contextless anecdata from which we are meant to draw our own conclusions.

There is a perverse false equivalency that undergirds much of how we talk about what happens in our communities.

It tends to go something like this:

“Janet says she was systematically traumatized by the systemic indifference of a bureaucracy that is allegedly designed for her benefit and has shedocumentary evidence to prove the harm done to her. The leaders of that bureaucracy responded to our request for comment by citing statistics that are not internally consistent with one another and did not address anything of substance. Who’s to say who is right? Hit that like and subscribe, fam.”

I believe that a People’s media should be written and edited by those most incentivized to get the information right. That is why the first article we are publishing is about benches you’re seeing around Nashville (which the city is removing) and is edited by someone deeply involved with their placement.

Some people who grew up in a world of traditional media would say, “Well, that’s not objective.” To those people, I say: “Please log on to the site and submit an edit request if you think there is a mistake. But if you find you’re not willing to do that, do you actually have a problem with this new way of doing journalism, or are you just worried that it is shifting power and reputational centering away from “traditional media”?

I do not believe the answer is “better” authorities.

Truth, as I see it, is something whose underlying nature appears different from where you’re looking from inside the nested spiral of perception.

• From one perspective: Truth is the revealed word of a metaphysical superior to you, prophetic guidance from a being who bestows meaning only to those who follow it.

• From another perspective: Truth is the argument that best accomplishes the goals of power to maintain their status and the world’s order as they believe it must be.

• From another perspective: Truth is the experience of the oppressed, singular in their access to the reality of conditions on the ground of being.

• From another perspective: Truth is relative and therefore meaningless, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I see all of these, in their own right, as correct. But, more importantly, incorrect to the degree that they think the others are wrong and they alone are right.

Truth, I believe, is the integral of all perspectives. But the pursuit of truth, even from this perspective, is an uphill battle.

There are reasons we can never grasp the whole truth. Here are a few:

1. The experiences of others are ultimately inaccessible, changing as soon as they come into our awareness just by being observed by us.

2. The complexity of the universe evades comprehension, with infinite, unfathomable complexity unfolding in every micro and macro slice we take.

3. The arrow of time points us ever further from what happened and gives us nothing but our petty predictions of what comes next.

And so, in a very real, important way, we cannot know The Truth. But that is not the same as saying there is no truth to know.

And it points to the direction we must take: to be radically transparent about what we know, and to:

1. Always be open to being wrong, and

2. Changing what we thought we knew when we have new information.
   
   NPJ is architecturally grounded in these two principles.

Radical Transparency

We do not just hand you a hyperlink because the hyperlink is just an underlined way of saying “trust me.” People do not click them. FYI, I can see if you click my hyperlinks on Substack. And guess what, folks, you do not.

On Nashville People’s Journal, we will not ask you to trust us. We will ask you to seek the truth and give you the means to do it. Every assertion will be sourced. If it is a thing we are asserting ourselves, we will tell you that. If it comes from a document, we will point not just to the document, but to where in the document we got it. If we did math on a spreadsheet, we would show you the math.

And most importantly, we will show the voids. The empty spaces. What should be there but isn’t. This, more than anything else, is where power abstracts and hides, calcifies, and democracy dies.

The beginning of wisdom is the acknowledgment of ignorance, and an approach to truth that cannot acknowledge what is unknown is incapable of truly knowing anything.

Always Revisable, or: Comment Sections Are Where Discourse Goes to Die

There is no comment section on Nashville People's Journal, and there never will be — a comment section is where a story gets argued about instead of made better. Instead, you get the thing underneath GitHub: the pull request, minus the developer jargon.

You highlight the exact words you'd change, type the words you'd put in their place, and tell us why. Your suggestion lands as its own timestamped line in the article's permanent, append-only log — public, plain-text, archived, and unable to touch a single published word until an editor reads it beside the live text and merges it.

A merge writes a real, attributed edit carrying your rationale as the note; a decline is logged too, with a name on it. Nothing changes in a back room, nothing dies in silence, and the version badge on any article diffs the whole history word by word. This is what "don't trust us; check us" looks like in software: the story is the repo, and you're not the audience — you're a committer.

At the beginning, it's going to be Robin and me publishing things. But we will need other contributors, editors, columnists, and more.

With NPJ, if there’s ever money being made, we’ll post how much is being made and who is getting it.

All edits will be logged as if this were open source software. If we make a mistake, we can correct the surface, but the record is immutable. All source documents will be on archive.org (redacted where appropriate), so when others try to change the record, the permanent records retain the truth.

If you are a fan of the ideology behind Wikipedia, GitHub, or G0v, this is for you.

If you think the truth comes from people who have every reason to get it wrong, people who'll catch more heat for questioning the powerful than for going easy on their own bosses, then go ahead and unsubscribe.

If this sounds like something you’re into, stay tuned.

Tonight the Council takes up the CBID budget again, the ~$9M plan, run through the Nashville Downtown Partnership, that failed by one vote on June 2 with ten members absent. CM Kupin is bringing back the same proposal, and with a full chamber the hope is that it will have the 21 votes it needs.

NDP has not made any coherent arguments about why they will operate better than they have previously. Less than a year ago it was discovered that Metro Council actually have full oversight over the budgets of all business improvement districts.

Since then, questions remain unanswered. Here are three that are top of mind for me.

1. Why is Metro’s insurer suing NDP — and not Metro? The $10M negligence and breach-of-contract claim over the library garage fire was brought by Travelers, Metro’s insurer, recovering what it paid out. The complaint alleges NDP breached its 2017 contract by failing to indemnify the city, yet Metro Legal hasn’t independently pursued that indemnification, NDOT only quietly suspended the garage contract effective July 2025, and the Council is being asked to approve NDP’s budget while the city’s own insurer argues NDP’s gross negligence cost taxpayers eight figures. Why is the contracting party that NDP allegedly wronged the one entity not in court?

2. Why is the budget moving while Block by Block’s own sister company gets the security contract? Civicity, NDP’s chosen replacement for Solaren, is “powered by” Block by Block — a named co-defendant in the garage suit. If tonight’s budget passes, downtown assessment dollars flow to NDP and, through Civicity, back toward the same operation Metro’s insurer blames for the fire. Who vetted that arrangement, and did anyone disclose the overlap to Council before the vote?

3. What changed in 2003 that exempted NDP’s budget from Council review for 22 years — and who has kept it that way? The statute clearly requires annual Council approval. For more than two decades it went to Metro Finance and was waved through implicitly. That’s not an accident of paperwork; it’s a standing arrangement that successive administrations and councils chose not to disturb. Who benefited, and which officials signed off on the workaround each year?

   {Rich Text} is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

People have asked me: why does NDP have such autonomy, why are they given so many chances, by the Metro Council and the Mayor’s Office, with such a catastrophic track record of late? I think there are a lot of reasons.

One piece of this that I think we need to explore is campaign donations.

So I’ve built a dashboard tracking contributions to sitting council members (and to a former District 19 councilmember now in the mayor’s office) from the people and firms on NDP’s board.

It’s a who’s who: the banks, the big developers, the white-shoe law firms, HCA, the Titans, the Chamber. Note the two seats that matter most, the District 19 chair Kupin holds ex officio, and the one O’Connell held on his way to the mayor’s office

We Cannot Jump To Conclusions

We can’t judge campaign donations in a vacuum, so I put the difference between the NDP associated donations that each politician received next to median donation they received. Brenda Sanderson, an NDP board member for example, donated 1.9x Jacob Kupin’s median donation value.

It is naive to assume that just because someone donates to a campaign that they are receiving something specific in return.

But it is also naive to believe that people operating an entity as powerful as the Nashville Downtown Partnership give their money to politicians because they’re feeling charitable. They are, I suspect, too good at business to do that.

So, keep an eye on how the votes go tonight. And remember that in Metro Council’s confounding co-signing of NDP’s continual chaos, there may be a method to the madness.

How this works, briefly

• Who we tracked. Every NDP director and every CBID director currently on those boards — 59 NDP, 14 CBID — plus the firms, corporate PACs, and parent organizations they represent.

• How donations get flagged. Each contribution in the Davidson County campaign-finance corpus is matched against that dictionary. Firm and PAC matches (Gresham Smith PAC, Holland & Knight TN PAC) are scored at 80–95% confidence because the link is unambiguous. Personal-name matches are scored at 80%.

• How the score is built. Each candidate’s exposure number is the sum of amount × confidence across every flagged gift to their committee. The dashboard ranks the mayor and all sitting council members by that number.

• The number is a floor, not a ceiling. The dictionary only catches direct matches to actual board members and their firms. Money routed through spouses, employees who aren’t on the board, industry PACs, or 501(c)(4) intermediaries doesn’t get caught. The real flow from this network is almost certainly larger than what’s shown.

• Personal-name matches carry some risk. A “Robert Campbell” donation matches the NDP director but could in principle be a different Robert Campbell. The Davidson County itemized-donor pool is narrow enough that same-name false positives are uncommon in practice — the one surname where genuine ambiguity exists is Freeman (two civically-active people share it), and those are flagged with explicit warnings. Before publishing any contribution by name, verify employer and address on the original filing, which the dashboard links to.

• Board rosters as of 2026. Directors rotate on and off NDP and CBID. The dictionary reflects who serves today. A contribution from someone who served in 2022 but has since rotated off won’t get flagged; treat the score as a measure of current network exposure, not a complete historical accounting.

Two days after it was rejected, one day after Metro’s own insurer sued the Partnership and its contractor over the downtown library garage that burned nearly to the ground, the District Management Corporation’s board met to reconsider the rejected budget before resubmission. They chose to change nothing.

Last night, after a heated debate enflamed by NDP’s own advocate, the Budget and Finance Committee advanced it for full discussion. There were two noes and one abstention. The full council votes tonight.

But let’s go back to last night’s meeting, because in it, someone said the kind of thing that is supposed to stay unsaid.

In public comment, Block by Block, the vendor who is being sued by Metro’s insurer alongside NDP, put forward Adam Ries, the Operations Manager, to lobby for their money. Mr. Ries noted that he had statistics he was prepared to read, but that, on hearing comments made before him, he had chosen to speak off the cuff.

He should have stuck to the numbers.

“If you guys have any questions on what we do, go out for fourth Avenue, take a left on Murfreesboro Road or Lafayette. Go down a half a block. Look at the boundary lines of what we are, where we work. Is it clean? Is it safe?…
Is it somewhere that you would want to walk? Look at your tours that come in town that are walking across Murfreesboro Road down to Second Avenue. Really? Look at that... that’s not that really that safe of a place… Go to anywhere that we are inside the Interstate loop. I finally moved down here because I feel safe. I walk my dog every night.”

Adam Ries
Operations Manager, Block by Block
09:26 – 10:22

In addition to disparaging historically Black and underresourced parts of the city, he said something that has long been suspected and never confirmed by someone on the record, actually paid by NDP: during big events like CMA Fest, the Metro Nashville, he claims, pushes unhoused people off Broadway and into other parts of town, in his words, “because it doesn’t look good.”

He did not say it as an accusation.

He said it as a setup: the city clears people away, and his team is the one out there afterward, more than a thousand interactions during CMA week alone. The displacement was simply the backdrop against which his own team’s work could look heroic.

They did over, I think it was over 1000 interactions just during CMA week. With the time that the city pushes people out of Broadway, pushes people to other areas, whether or not you know, because it doesn’t look good. Our team was out there making sure they had resources, getting people into rehab, getting people into housing. I would truly challenge some of these people that are making these accusations against the company that I work for to ask them, what have you done to help your unhoused neighbors and friends?

Adam Ries
Operations Manager, Block by Block
10:22 – 10:54

More on who he was accusing of not helping their “unhoused neighbors and friends” later…

The denial, and the machine behind it

The Mayor’s Office immediately denied knowledge of Mr. Ries claims. On the Council floor, Councilmember at-large Delishia Porterfield asked the administration directly whether Metro pushes the unhoused out of downtown for events like the CMAs. Dave Rosenberg, from the mayor’s office, said he was “not aware of anything like that happening.”

It is worth remembering that Mr. Rosenberg has been capable of being unaware of a great many things while serving at the pleasure of Mayor O’Connell.

When the $15 million Downtown Public Safety Grant MOU came out of the very office he represents, Mr. Rosenberg could not say who had drafted it. A denial is only as good as the person offering it.

When Rosenberg says he has no knowledge of Metro doing it, perhaps he means the doing is held at arm’s length: by THP troopers, paid through money that Metro collects and hands to the District Management Corporation, which is led by Tom Turner, which hands it to the Nashville Downtown Partnership, which is also led by Tom Turner, which hands it to Civicity, which hires the off-duty Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers, who have developed a habit of charging unhoused people with felony camping.

This is the same pool of officers who, last May, ran a six-night operation alongside ICE: more than 600 traffic stops concentrated in Nashville’s Latino neighborhoods, and a pattern of profiling so well documented that the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition sued to pry loose fifty hours of body-camera footage. The budget the council takes up tonight funds four of them.

Felony camping is a charge MNPD has a standing policy not to enforce, as per Chief Drake in MNPD’s recent budget hearing. THP has enforced it downtown, at scale.

The man he did not name

You do not have to approve money going to off-duty Tennessee Highway Patrol officers... that engaged in widely reported racial profiling last year and continue to work with ICE... “Clean and safe,” that’s what Tom Turner says his mandate is. How’s that going?... They blew up the downtown library garage... Why are we giving these people money? ... Be responsible with our space. Be responsible with our garage.

Manaen Hall
Metro Nashville Transportation Licensing Commissioner

Adam Ries from the NDP had choice words for “the people making these accusations” about his employer. It appeared, to all those present, that he meant Manaen Hall, a Metro Transportation Licensing Commissioner who had just spoken against the budget that had already once been rejected by Council.

Mr. Ries’ comments derailed much of the discussion of his employer’s budget.

CM at-large Delishia Porterfield felt that Mr.Ries’ comments were so inappropriate that she took her floor time to note that she has watched Hall do the very work Ries implied he had not done: crowdsourcing for his neighbors, checking on people in the cold, carrying out blankets and sleeping bags, and providing food. She called the spectacle of a vendor attacking a constituent “highly inappropriate.”

That a paid representative of the Partnership did not recognize one of the city’s most visible advocates for the unhoused and disenfranchised tells you something about the vacuum he operates in.

It may have to do with the fact that the parts of town he called unsafe, the corridors out of Murfreesboro Road and Lafayette, are precisely the historically Black and under-resourced neighborhoods, the parts he is afraid of going to, is where one might see people like Mr. Hall (or at Metro Council meetings, where NDP and Block by Block should be expecting to spend more time in forthcoming years).

The bill arrives in Inglewood, and everywhere else

Councilmember Emily Benedict laid out what CM Kupin (who recently lost his place in the power rankings of NDP’s thirstiest advocate) seems eager to make us all ignore.

Travelers’ lawsuit against NDP and Block by Block over the library garage fire is for damages in excess of $10M. The total damages are most likely to be paid, at least as per Benedict (as per Metro Legal Director Wally Dietz) by taxpayers.

NDOT, which owns it, is planning a partial demolition and rebuild of the upper floors, and no one has put a public number on the final cost. Whatever it is, the repairs and the demolition and the eventual replacement sit on top of the ten million, and here is the catch Benedict pressed: Block by Block’s liability limits will not cover the damage.

She put that question to Metro’s legal director more than a year ago, before there was any lawsuit, and the answer was the same then as it is now. Everything above those limits falls on Nashville taxpayers. Not the CBID’s assessment payers. Not the property owners inside the “clean and safe” district. Taxpayers in Hermitage, in Bellevue, in Inglewood, in Belle Meade, people who will never park in that garage and were never asked to insure it.

And when Benedict asked Ben Simpson, the Partnership’s chief operating officer, that very night whether the limits had finally been raised to Metro’s standard, they had not. By her account, an organization that knew its coverage was inadequate had no intention of fixing it.

These are not serious people

In the words of Logan Roy, these people at NDP, turning in the same budget after it was rejected and after they had a $10M+ lawsuit filed against them for damages to public property: these are not serious people.

But they have landed in very serious positions, doing extraordinary damage to public property and to the public's well-being, and they carry on, as they have for twenty-two years, as if they are accountable to no one except the corporations that profit off a steady stream of drunk tourists.

Tonight, the full Council decides whether to keep paying for it.

It is not easy to accept that you are part of the problem you believe you are solving. Adam Ries may believe he is one of the good ones, and on the nights he is out there, he almost certainly is. But belief in one’s own goodness is not a contract, and good intentions are not an insurance policy.

We still have never seen the private policing contract that the millions of dollars are meant to go to in NDP’s budget, now through Civicty, a new company “powered by Block by Block” (whatever that means).

Let’s see that contract for private policing. I want to see the bang for our buck.

Here's what makes the ask remarkable: in the eleven days since the rejection, we learned that Metro's own insurer is suing NDP and Block by Block for $10 million over the fire that destroyed the downtown library garage.

That lawsuit was filed on 06/04/26 at 05:25 PM.

Ndp Lawsuit

232KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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The next day, June 5 (per the resolution itself), the District Management Corporation's board (a distinct body from the NDP board, though NDP appoints most of it) met to revise the budget that funds NDP.

This was the board whose operations and its subcontractors' conduct had gotten its budget struck down three days earlier and had drawn a $10M-plus lawsuit the day before it resubmitted its budget. Facing all of that, they decided something had to change.

That something was: nothing.

The leadership of the CBID (essentially d/b/a “NDP”) has presented a budget that has not changed in any substantive way I can see. But perhaps NDP’s strategy did change: pack the gallery, and hope a fuller room is all it takes for 21 members to cosign so all their problems can just go away.

NDP may get its budget approved unchanged. It will not, however, make their problems go away.

What’s Broke

What didn’t change in the budget is the part Council balked at: nearly $2.8M for “Safety Services.” Strip the branding, and that line funds armed Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers who work off-duty for a nonprofit and are accountable not to the public, but to NDP’s president, Tom Turner (who draws $511,164 from that nonprofit and is also its registered Metro Council lobbyist) and the NDP board of directors.

NDP would like you to picture something gentler. Go to civicity.com — the vendor now slated to run the operation — and you’ll find green-shirted “ambassadors,” a crossed-out handgun, and promises of an “unarmed approach that prioritizes engagement and de-escalation.”

But Turner told the Nashville Banner months ago what Civicity is actually for: to do basically the same work with THP officers. Civicity manages the troopers. The unarmed ambassadors are on the brochure; the armed state troopers are the real product.

THP Officers will not, it seems, be wearing these cute green shirts and hats.

NDP’s off-duty THP detail logged 337 arrests in 2023–2024, 209 of them targeting people who listed a homeless or shelter address, and THP is now a federal defendant in the ACLU’s Demster v. Blanche over the May 2025 ICE operation.

This is the operation NDP wants Council to fund, run by a freshly minted division of Block by Block, the contractor named alongside NDP in the $10M Travelers suit over the library garage fire. The prior vendor, Solaren, was dropped only after the state fined it $118,000 and stripped its security license for 30 days over personnel allegedly posing as sworn officers.

And tucked into the same resolution: a request that Council retroactively “accept“ the CBID budgets from FY2009 through FY2026, budgets the law required Council to approve by resolution, and that it never did.

I’ve flagged this on this feed since July 2025 and named it in April for what it is: credible standing for a claim of procedural ultra vires, spending undertaken beyond lawful authority, exposure I put north of $60 million. This resolution appears to be an attempt to paper over it.

But look where the record starts. We have the CBID’s own approval resolutions. 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, after which they simply stop. Those documents do double work: they prove the resolution route is the legally correct one, which sinks the “honest misunderstanding” defense, and they pin the lapse to roughly 2004. Yet the cleanup begins at FY2009, skipping the first years of the very gap it claims to close.

A real cure has to reach back to at least 2005. And ultimately, only a lawsuit against NDP and Metro for procedural ultra vires would answer whether a backward-facing non-binding approval means anything to the courts.

So the question for the sponsor, Council Member Jacob Kupin: if you’re accepting the record, why does it begin where it does rather than where the files show the practice broke down? It likely cures nothing; regardless, the resolution’s own analysis concedes the acceptance is “non-binding“ and “would not affect previous budgets.”

But that’s the whole pattern.

NDP didn’t bring a budget to Council for the first time in two decades because it found transparency. It got caught.

It didn’t drop Solaren on principle. The state first fined the firm $118,000 and revoked its security license.

The garage negligence didn’t surface through NDP’s transparency. Photos had to be leaked to the media, and Metro’s insurer sued for $10 million the day before the board resubmitted this budget.

These parties appear to abide by ethical standards only when an outside force leaves them no other choice, and then only to the bare minimum the law demands (if that).

Tomorrow, Council decides which it’s going to be: the outside force, or the cover-up.

Molly Secours

June 11, 2026

Last week Tennessee Lookout Editor Holly McCall published a piece titled: The Silence of Tennessee’s ‘statesmen’ drawing our attention to previous governors and leaders (across political parties) who have remained silent before and after the last-minute redistricting aimed specifically at obliterating Black votes in Memphis.

It’s right to honor the many Tennessee Black leaders who have stood up for civil rights, often putting their bodies in harm’s way and livelihoods at risk, but white leaders today should be speaking out, too, to take a stand against injustice, and there is some historic precedent here in the state.

The eerie silence of former Tennessee leaders has been disturbing for many of us. In her editorial, McCall ponders how Howard Baker, a long-time Republican U.S. Senator who was known for brokering bipartisan deals and encouraging civil discourse might respond to what is occurring in Tennessee.

These days, ‘civil discourse’ feels like something that might be encased behind glass at a museum memorializing the before times when the water filtration system at our state Capital hadn’t yet started pumping MAGA infused water into the fountains.

For those of us with three decades or more of Nashville residency under our exhausted belts, it has been disturbing to witness former leaders stand idly by while hard-fought for civil rights have been dealt a lethal blow.

And McCall’s piece got me thinking how not long ago we lived among ‘city fathers’ who used their privilege and influence to challenge bigotry and racism and tweak the consciences of the powerful. It wasn’t always so uncommon for white leaders to speak out on controversial issues of race.

Who were these ‘city fathers’ who served as mentors to hundreds (maybe thousands) fortunate enough to inhabit their sphere? Probably many of us experienced these men up close as they found time to have coffee or lunch and share stories that prepared the next generation to carry on work they (unfortunately) knew would be necessary.

Probably most well-known is John Seigenthaler who in 1961, as a young U.S. Justice Department aide was brutally attacked with a pipe by Ku Klux Klansmen as he rushed to protect Freedom Riders arriving in Montgomery, Alabama. The Klansmen left Seigenthaler in the street to die but he survived the assault and then spent four decades with the Tennessean as a journalist, eventually becoming editor, publisher and CEO. During his reign, Seigenthaler guided the steadfast coverage of the civil rights movement and exposed the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessean archives are full of civil rights history in large part because of Seigenthaler.

Another John was the colorful and controversial attorney, entrepreneur and former gubernatorial candidate John Jay Hooker, affectionately nicknamed The Duke of Belle Meade and Little Lord Fauntleroy who dedicated the last years of his life to getting money out of politics and promoting civil rights advocacy. Anyone who ever lunched with Hooker heard about the time his private plane was chartered to pick up Muhammad Ali, with whom he shared a deep, decades-long friendship that began in the 1970s and lasted until their deaths. It was this friendship that greatly influenced him and strengthened his commitment to equality. He died in January 2016, before the November election of President Donald Trump.

Probably, the quietest of the Johns in demeanor but unparalleled in fierceness is writer and historian John Egerton who packed a wallop with his pen. Egerton spent much of his career writing and agitating against the ways racism and white supremacy mapped the South’s trajectory. It would be impossible to tally the number of Nashville writers inspired by his words or total those who had the good fortune of having his red pen scribbled all over a rough draft. In November 2013 John Egerton quietly slipped out of life as if late for his next appointment.

And then there was inimitable Southern Baptist preacher and author, Rev. Will D. Campbell, who in 1957 walked nine Black school children through hostile crowds to integrate public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The only white person present at the founding of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, Campbell was committed to the sacredness of all life.

Always controversial, Campbell began meeting and ministering to the enemies of integration, the Klu Klux Klan, believing that like those on death row, everyone deserved mercy. Having spent the last years of his life in a log cabin in Mt. Juliet, the man affectionately known as ‘the bootleg preacher’ sadly died in 2013.

While these four white men knew and respected one another, they inhabited separate worlds but shared something in common: a commitment to justice. They all courageously used whatever privilege and influence they possessed by standing side-by-side and in proximity to Black and brown brothers and sisters, and anyone disenfranchised. They spoke truth to power and didn’t shrink from confrontation.

And while former Govs. Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam purport to tackle political “differences” on a podcast named “You Might Be Right,” they’ve virtually remained silent as state legislators hacked up voting districts like a pig at a barbecue — in broad daylight. And that is hard to digest. The podcast title and the content functions less as a bipartisan meeting of the minds, and more as a siren call for complacency, tempting Tennesseans towards agreeing with, or at least being apathetic to, what the right is doing to our state and country.

Let me be clear. The two former governors are not the only powerful men of political privilege standing quietly in the shadows. And it’s not just ‘men of power’. There are a handful of extremely powerful Southern men and women who seem to have misplaced their tongues in the face of overt fascism. That these individuals have chosen silence these past several years as the Trump-obsessed legislature fomented fear and loathing while passing bills that target immigrants, trans people, women and anyone dark skinned is deeply troubling — some might even say, appalling.

As far as the triumvirate of Johns and a Will for justice, having known and been mentored by each of them, it is highly doubtful that any of them is giving a heavenly thumbs up for a light-hearted podcast called ‘You might be Right’ in the face of so much wrong.

Molly Secours

Molly Secours is a filmmaker/writer/narrator and ai they’re of “White Privilege Pop Quiz: Reflecting on Whiteness” and co-host of a new podcast series called “Forever Human Voices” featuring really smart people who know ‘stuff’ and why our human voices matter now more than ever. Love mail can be sent to: mollysecours@gmail.com

This is a personal opinion piece. {Rich Text} is having some exciting updates coming, including a specific forum for grounded community journalism. More info soon.

Dear downtown property owners paying special assessments to the Nashville Downtown Partnership (NDP),

I write to you on an ignominious occasion: the one-year anniversary of the destruction of the downtown library parking garage. But what I want to tell you about dates back far longer than last year.

Since 1998, you have been compelled by law to give money to Metro Nashville via special assessments to an entity called the “District Management Corporation.” That entity then passes 100% of those funds to the Nashville Downtown Partnership, totaling at least $60 million since 2004.

Last week, Metro’s insurance company sued NDP and its subcontractor, Block by Block, for more than $10 million, alleging gross negligence that caused the Downtown Library Parking Garage to become a fireball one year ago today, leading to its likely foreclosure.

Travelers' complaint pleads negligence and gross negligence against both NDP and Block by Block, alleging that they converted the garage into an unpermitted storage yard for combustible materials, allowed employees to smoke on the premises, and failed to comply with applicable fire codes and regulations.

The complaint characterizes the conduct as "wanton" and "willful" and seeks damages exceeding $10 million across its counts.

This is the organization the Metro Council is planning on handing millions of dollars of your money to for securing downtown.

The plan is that this will be implemented by a firm called Civicity. Civicity is the newly created “sister company” of the company that Metro’s own insurer claims, alongside NDP, is responsible for the catastrophic damage to the library parking garage through gross negligence.

And if NDP’s budget had passed last Tuesday as was planned, none of this would have come to light before your special assessment funds were obligated to NDP and the co-defendant in the lawsuit against Metro, Block by Block.

But since today is the likely deadline for filing the suit and NDP has not yet received the required budget approval, the public now knows what Metro’s insurer has long known: NDP and Block-By-Block’s negligence appears to have led to the catastrophic destruction of the downtown library parking garage.

And because we now know this, you have the opportunity to use this information to demand that Metro Council act differently, and not let NDP and Block By Block’s gross negligence go unaccounted for.

Your businesses deserve to be safe. But private policing by way of NDP, and its cadre of reprobate subcontractors, is not how you make a city safe, workers happy, and tourism boom.

What the Lawsuit Says

The Travelers lawsuit alleges that NDP allowed its contractor, Block by Block, to convert the garage into an unauthorized storage yard for combustible materials and allowed employees to smoke in its vicinity. Neither Metro Codes nor the Fire Marshal had ever issued permits for fuel storage there.

Ndp Lawsuit

232KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Preliminary reporting on it described it as a series of explosions.

WSMV's headline on June 10, 2025: "Explosions heard as large fire erupts inside downtown Nashville parking garage."

The media was slow to report details about this incident after it occurred, which the initial fire investigator’s report described as happening for unknown reasons at a location that was not visible.

Subsequently, it was called a “fire”, the explosions went undiscussed, and the incident received little follow-up media coverage for the next few weeks. The library was closed and would be for another 9 months.

But when photos surfaced weeks later showing dozens of propane tanks in the fourth-floor storage area where the fire originated, the NDP confirmed through spokeswoman Alexis Bell that its “clean and safe” subcontractor, Block by Block, had been storing fuel there for its maintenance vehicles.

The Nashville Scene reported that NDP was pointing to Block by Block as being responsible for the fire.

But by April 2026, the NDP appears to have been in a bind. The State of TN was planning to strip Solaren of its private policing license for illegally allowing its officers to wear “police” badges.

Seemingly not wanting to leave downtown without a private police force accountable only to NDP, a pivot was made. A new company had been registered by Block by Block’s leadership called “Civicity”, and Civicity would now manage the THP officers that had been working for Solaren.

By this point, NDP’s CEO, Tom Turner, had changed his tune about Block By Block’s responsibility for the catastrophic fire.

“Talking about the garage fire, it’s an undetermined cause from an undetermined source,” Turner told the Nashville Banner.

“So I think to imply that somebody had a role in it is maybe not the best conclusion to draw. … Because Block by Block was in the garage doesn’t mean that they have anything to do with what’s going on with a fire of unknown origin.”

Tom Turner, NDP President

That is where things lay, and if NDP had had its budget approved last week, Civicity would have had funding authorized by the Metro Council, regardless of its “sister company”’s role in the garage explosion.

But NDP’s budget wasn't approved, and the likely deadline for filing a suit against NDP loomed, and the lawsuit went in with no funding on file. And now we know who Metro's own insurer thinks is responsible: NDP and Block By Block.

But, Downtown Property Owners, [NDP is] so convinced of Block By Block’s competence, [they] have already moved forward with Civicity.1

They have already moved beyond Solaren and are using Civicity, despite NDP not having the legal approval from the Metro Council to access your special assessment funds.

All of this would be extraordinary on its own. But in context, it is unfathomable. NDP has not had a budget approved by Metro Council in 22 years, which the Metro Code requires them to do (and they did for the first 5-6 years).

This is something I discovered last year, and it is why their latest budget now contains budgets dating back to 2009.

Let’s talk business.

Unlike others who have raised concerns about NDP, my background is not primarily in the non-profit world. I cut my teeth in the corporate world, managing a multi-million dollar professional services product line at a SaaS company, directly serving Fortune 100 clients. My salary did not go up when my team ended the year in a deficit.

The people managing your special assessment fees operate differently. NDP’s revenue grew from $9.3M to $19.1M over the past decade. Its CEO’s compensation grew from $265,200 to $511,164. Its net income oscillated between surplus and deficit, five years in the red, five in the black.

In 2024, the year before the garage fire, NDP ran a $307,602 deficit while paying its CEO $511,164.

Again, my professional background is mostly in for-profit business. Maybe it is normal for non-profits to pay their CEO half a million dollars a year while they operate with a $300k+ deficit. I guess I should have entered the non-profit sector if I wanted to make the big bucks.

The structure you’re paying for

Downtown Nashville Business Owners, your security is not run by a single contractor with an approved budget and an auditable contract.

It is run through an entity created in 2022 called NDMC PSO LLC, a shell company of the District Management Corporation, created by the same person who runs the DMC and who then hires his own firm, NDP, to manage downtown security through it, under a contract that, if similar to the previous one, is “proprietary and confidential.”

If that is confusing, I suspect it is supposed to be. The arrangement was established by the person who presents himself to you as your chief advocate, as downtown property owners, NDP’s president, Tom Turner.

NDP’s contract for security services has not received the required Metro Council approval, yet they are already employing Civicity in anticipation of its approval.

NDP told WSMV that their contract with Solaren could not be made public because it is “proprietary and confidential”. This means that you, the business owners paying for it, and the council members about to vote on it, and the public and tourists impacted by it, will not be permitted to see its terms.

A contract for security services, funded 100% by public funds collected by a government to supplement public services, that is “proprietary and confidential,” is patently absurd, almost certainly unlawful, and deeply unethical.

It has led many to ask “what on earth is in this contract for patrolling downtown Nashville that needs to be ‘confidential’, and by what possible right could a “disregarded” entity of a statutorily created 501(c)(3) have to conceal its terms.

Council Member Zulfat Suara asked to see this contract and the Civicity contract at NDP’s budget hearing several weeks ago. Neither has seen the light of day, even though Civicity is already overseeing supplemental law enforcement in downtown.

Who Has been watching the watchmen?

NDP’s Director of Safety Services is David Corman, a former MNPD precinct commander who earned $116,943 in 2024 directing the private policing operation.

Until recently, Corman’s son served as Director of Administration at Solaren Risk Management, overseeing HR, payroll, accounting, vendor management, compliance, and risk mitigation.

Solaren is the firm that staffed the off-duty Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers who, until very recently, were the firm overseeing policing downtown. The younger Corman graduated from college in 2022 with a degree in geology; his prior employment was as a team lead at a Regal Cinemas movie theater.

That is the type of compliance and risk-mitigation infrastructure of the operation NDP wants Council to keep funding, no questions asked.

Why off-duty THP, and not MNPD?

MNPD has ceded primary downtown security to NDP since 2022. At his budget hearing several weeks ago, Chief Drake said MNPD is not the primary agency downtown because he doesn’t have the manpower. Chief Drake presents THP officers as uniquely able to work overtime shifts to patrol downtown.

This is hard to square with the fact that, according to my preliminary research, MNPD officers appear to have logged the most overtime of any Metro department over the past decade.

The likelier explanation for why MNPD is not exclusively patrolling downtown is policy. MNPD does not charge people for “felony camping,” a law that criminalizes being unhoused.

THP does.

NDP, if you ask me, appears to have shopped for the one agency willing to enforce a state law others won’t.

And not for nothing, the THP officers are from the same pool of officers who committed the ICE raids on Nashville families and who continue to collaborate with ICE across TN.

And, Downtown Property Owners, your special assessment fees are supplementing the income of this pool of officers.

“Proprietary and confidential” is not an answer in a crisis

THP is already harder to hold accountable than other police forces, something that could be disastrous for a wide swath of reasons if THP/NDP/Civicity officers were involved in a mass casualty event in Downtown Nashville.

THP fought public records requests from the May 2025 “Operation Flood the Zone” (the joint THP-ICE sweep through South Nashville) for months, releasing footage only after litigation and with heavier redactions than MNPD provided for the same incidents.

The Tennessee General Assembly then passed the Officer Identity Protection Act, allowing the names of state troopers to be entirely redacted from public records. TIRRC’s lawsuit for fuller access is still pending in Davidson County Chancery Court.

That is THP on duty. Off duty, working under a contract, NDP under a contract marked “proprietary and confidential,” accountability is harder still.

The next time something goes badly wrong downtown, a shooting, a crowd-crush, a use-of-force incident with casualties, THP, NDP, and Civicity would be the entities the public would have to get answers from. We already have a preview of how they handle a crisis.

Three weeks after the fire, drivers whose cars sat trapped on the upper floors were paying for rental cars out of their own pockets and getting nothing back from NDP.

Christina Kane, a visitor from Indianapolis who parked in the garage for a work conference, told WSMV, “It’s like nobody cares.”

By late July, Mark Blumberg, whose car appeared undamaged but who could get no answer on retrieval, told WSMV: “We have not heard any communication whatsoever. The Nashville Downtown Partnership is hoping that all of this will go away.”

The Nashville Banner reported in September that one customer “went home without his car in June, and paid auto loan and insurance premiums through September while waiting to hear from NDOT and Parking Management Company.”

NDP’s public response was to refer questions to its subcontractors and recommend other garages. Six months in, six cars were still trapped on the upper floors. The city had no plan to retrieve them; they would be demolished along with the structure.

That was a static problem on a fixed site, with no time pressure and no casualties. NDP was not equal to it.

A downtown whose visible enforcement apparatus cannot be examined after a disaster is a downtown where future visitors weigh the risk and book elsewhere. The reputational damage from a poorly handled incident is bad enough; the reputational damage from a poorly handled incident, the public is not allowed insight into, is what closes hotels and empties convention calendars.

The deeper point

Setting aside which department patrols which block, the harder truth is that policing by any agency does not determine whether downtown thrives. Downtowns become unpleasant for the same reasons all cities do: housing failures, mental health support failures, transit failures, wage failures. Enforcement and AI-powered corporate mass surveillance are a downstream response to upstream collapse.

And it is a dumb, counter-productive, response. And someone who used to be the Council Member for Downtown knew this.

In October 2021, before he was elected mayor, Freddie O’Connell wrote on Twitter:

Strong communities are better for safety than a surveillance state. Let’s not let fear drive Nashville to follow New Orleans’s path. We can build safer communities through smart, strategic investments that don’t involve spying on one another.

The administration he now leads is helping the NDP do the opposite: let fear drive downtown into a private-policing arrangement, routed through a shell company whose terms the public is not allowed to see, fueled by all the AI-powered corporate mass surveillance they can sneak into MOUs on a holiday weekend.

The question before the Metro Council is not whether downtown needs to be safe. It is about who we trust to keep us safe, and whether we believe people when they show us who they are.

Your Metro Council needs to hear from you before the budget vote, which is likely to take place on June 16, 2026.

NDP’s Board of Directors has spoken on your behalf for 22 years. The lawsuit on the public record is what their judgment has produced. You are paying for it either way; the only question is whether you have a say in what you are buying.

One last thing.

Former Tennessee governor and US Senator Lamar Alexander, asked on CityCast Nashville recently what advice he’d give Nashville as it grows, put it plainly:

I think the number one goal of the Chamber of Commerce should not be recruiting more jobs to Nashville, but keeping it a nice place to live. And that by itself will recruit jobs.

The same logic applies downtown. A district that, to feel safe, depends on a private THP arrangement, run through a shell company, is a district whose underlying problem your assessment fees are not solving.

The way to keep downtown a place where people want to live, work, and spend money is not to expand the type of arrangements that just got NDP sued for $10 million.

It is to insist that any public safety apparatus your money pays for be brought back under public accountability.

No private policing.

Real funding to serve those that THP has been leveraged to arrest and make someone else’s problem.

Downtown Nashville Property owners: you will be told things about people like me who have been raising the alarm about NDP.

You will be told that I want to “tear it all down,” that I want to harm the city’s economy, its tourism, its way of life. The people who tell you that are lying to you. But don’t take my word for it. Go down to the library parking garage if you want to see what NDP’s version of “clean and safe” looks like.

Your Metro Watch Dog,

Woof Woof.

by Stephen Elliott
June 8, 2026

Metro Nashville’s insurer, Travelers, filed suit late Friday in Davidson County Circuit Court, accusing the Nashville Downtown Partnership and its contractor Block by Block of negligence related to a fire that has caused a downtown parking garage to be closed for nearly a year.

A June 2025 overnight fire in a city-owned, Nashville Downtown Partnership-managed garage resulted in a nine-month closure of the adjacent main branch of the Nashville Public Library. A portion of the downtown library, including the main level’s convention facilities, remains closed despite the reopening. The garage remains closed, and officials have discussed a partial reopening as repair work is undertaken.

Photos from inside the burned-out garage showed what appear to be gas containers. NDP has acknowledged that the contractor, Block by Block, stored fuel in the garage.

The filing alleges that NDP and Block by Block “stored combustible materials” in an “impermissible” storage yard constructed in the garage. Travelers alleges that the entities were negligent by changing the use of the leased property from a parking garage to a storage yard, “allowing its employees to smoke in the property,” and “improperly storing combustible, hazardous, and flammable materials in the property.” The filing claims that “other negligence … will be obtained in discovery.”

The litigation estimates damages at more than $10 million.

“Talking about the garage fire, it’s an undetermined cause from an undetermined source,” NDP CEO Tom Turner told the Banner in April. “So I think to imply that somebody had a role in it is maybe not the best conclusion to draw. … Because Block by Block was in the garage doesn’t mean that they have anything to do with what’s going on with a fire of unknown origin.”

In a statement on Sunday, the NDP said it was aware of the filing but could not comment on pending litigation.

The filing comes at a fraught time for the Nashville Downtown Partnership. The Metro Council narrowly rejected the Central Business Improvement District’s annual budget last week, with the budget expected to be brought back for another vote on June 16. The district largely operates via the Nashville Downtown Partnership. The council vote was 20-8 in favor of the budget, but the legislation required 21 votes to pass, and a dozen members were absent. The garage is not part of NDP’s work with the improvement district.

The plaintiff was up against a one-year statute of limitations that expires this week. Given the high estimated cost of repairs and the different overlapping entities with interests in the garage, a sprawling web of insurance companies and attorneys is expected to be involved in an extended process to determine different levels of liability for repairs.

Other insurance issues have arisen in the wake of the fire. A tourist from Wisconsin told the Banner that he had been unable to prove to his insurance company that his car was destroyed in the fire without photos, including a visible license plate or other identifiable information. He said he had paid more than $1,500 in loan payments and insurance premiums while waiting for his destroyed vehicle to be identified.

“The library garage is not just a revenue-generating asset, it’s also the affordable, public parking option that many locals rely on when we’re downtown,” Councilmember Sean Parker, the council’s representative on the Traffic and Parking Commission, told the Banner. “It’s been closed far too long. I hope this lawsuit is a step toward reopening.”

Travelers is represented by attorney Gail Vaughn Ashworth of Wiseman Ashworth Law Group.

In an outcome that truly shocked advocates for good governance and accountability, including me, the Nashville Downtown Partnership’s (NDP) budget, including its funding for private policing conducted by the same vendor likely responsible for the downtown library garage’s destruction, was not approved.

Requiring 21 votes for approval, it fell one short last night.

But one advocate for the Nashville Downtown Partnership showed his displeasure with the vote in a manner that derailed the meeting, according to the official video recording of the incident.

District 14 Council Member Jordan Huffman, an adamant “yea” on the NDP budget, can be seen calling out to Deonte Harrell, a “nay” on the resolution, and the two approached each other on the Council floor. The altercation derailed the next item’s discussion and reportedly startled the crowd in attendance. The situation appears to have been diffused by Vice Mayor Henderson.

The rejection of NDP’s budget seemed to take everyone by surprise; even the automated vote tabulator made a mistake, displaying the result as affirmative for the NDP. But as the Metro Clerk confirmed, NDP did not receive the 21 votes it needed to get its budget through Council and was sent back to the drawing board to come up with something the Council could approve.

The result, which de facto requires NDP to resubmit their budget, is the first rejection of NDP’s budget in history (as far as I can tell from the ancient record of the early internet).

It is an incredible victory for good governance, public safety, community safety, and law & order. But at the end of the day, it is an outcome completely contemplated by Metro Code. It is an outcome considered in the founding ordinances of all Nashville BIDs, and has a clear next step: the board of the Central Business Improvement District must simply propose a new budget that Council is willing to approve.

As many in the council debate noted, it was not a vote against the NDP ever being funded, per se. It was a vote to take a breath, set emotions aside, and think more clearly about what is in the best interests of Nashville, its tourists, its vulnerable populations who have been harassed by the law enforcement NDP employs, and the city’s business interests.

Taking a deep breath and putting emotions aside was not observed by all, including the Council Member who presented himself last night as NDP’s biggest defender.

Council Member Jordan Huffman, who spoke in favor of giving NDP its budget as asked last night (without further consideration of the glaring governance issues at play) appeared outraged at the vote.

Tensions flared up as Deonte Harrell, who voted no on the resolution, reportedly reacted to Huffman’s meltdown, and the two’s altercation derailed the council meeting.

Vice Mayor Henderson appears to have defused the tension with remarkable aplomb, marking a notable improvement over the last notable council altercation, in which she received criticism for how she handled tensions between two Council Members. She navigated the chaos that the supporter of the Nashville Downtown Partnership prompted with grace and professionalism.

It was not a good showing for the advocates for the Nashville Downtown Partnership, a cohort that has tried to shake off accusations that they act as if they are beyond the bounds of democratic oversight and consequences for their actions.

Last night, Mr. Huffman cast himself as NDP's fiercest defender, outflanking even Mr. Kupin, the council member in whose district NDP actually operates. If his performance is any measure of the organization's emotional maturity, the Nashville Downtown Partnership has a great deal of growing up to do before it is fit to participate in modern democracy.

Many are hoping that this is the warning that the board of the Nashville Downtown Partnership needs to turn the ship around before it runs fully aground. For those who feel the vote went the wrong way last night, thr facts are not in their favor:

• twenty-two years without a statutorily required Council budget review,

• a private police force operating through a shell company,

• a vendor that appears to be responsible for exploding a parking garage and rendering the main library branch defunct for the better part of a year, and

• a $15M surveillance MOU routed through the nonprofit to the outrage of community members across the political spectrum.

These are not the hallmarks of an organization that has earned the public's trust.

Last night, the Metro Council voted, to the obvious displeasure of some of its own members, to politely ask the board of directors of NDP to try again, this time with a little more effort.

I would like to talk to you about something that is beyond liberal or conservative politics: Law & Order.

I joined the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety in 2022 because I believe in the power of democracy to shape our laws, and in the power of well-ordered policy to make us safer. You could say that I believe in law & order, a term that has been hijacked by people pushing for anything but.

Law & order, properly understood, is the discipline of binding power to publicly known rules. It is the patient work of writing those rules down in the open, debating them in chambers any resident can sit in, enforcing them through officers whose conduct is reviewable by the people who pay them, and revising them when they fail. It is slow. It is occasionally tedious. And it is the only arrangement humans have ever invented that makes a city livable for the people inside it rather than merely convenient for the people who own it.

What is being assembled in downtown Nashville is none of these things. The contracts are confidential. The officers’ orders are hidden. The vendors are rewarded for their failures. The funding is structured to evade the very public oversight that turns mere force into legitimate authority. This is not law & order. It is the inversion of it: coercion without consent, enforcement without accountability, “order” defined unilaterally by the people who profit from imposing it. When they say “law & order,” they mean neither.

They use the phrase because it still commands respect from people who do believe in it, praying that they never look behind the curtain. When they talk about Law & Order, it is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So, with that said:

I want to acknowledge the courage of members of the public, Council Members, and Metro staff who have stood up to the executive leadership and board of the Nashville Downtown Partnership over the last year. I know it has been hard and has cost you dearly.

The NDP board comprises, quite literally, the most powerful organizations in our city and region, and for 22 years, they have benefited from operating without the statutorily required budget approval, creating potentially $60M in liability for Metro Nashville because those funds were distributed without authorization.

Since that budget was last approved, NDP has established a secret private police force under a shell company called NDMC and signed two vendor contracts for private policing on confidential terms that the public has not seen. To staff it, they hire THP troopers, the same pool of officers who carried out the May 2025 ICE raid. These officers retain arrest powers and the authority to use weapons, but their activities are shielded from public records requirements.

When they arrest someone, that’s public record. But their orders? Hidden behind a “confidential contract.” Whistleblowers say the assignment is simple: round up unhoused people and ignore the tourists, even when both are doing the exact same thing.

The newest vendor is Civicity, a sister company of Block by Block. Block by Block is the firm whose stored propane tanks were the origin point of the library garage fire nearly a year ago this month. At the time, council members were told by Metro Legal not to discuss the garage fire while the Mayor’s Office was trying to route $15M in surveillance funding to NDP. Now the Council is preparing to let millions more flow to a sibling of the vendor whose fuel ignited that garage, for private policing.

The public has made it clear, in many ways, that it is not interested in ungovernable law enforcement, much less private policing controlled by corporate leaders who quite explicitly believe they are entitled to operate a secret city within our city.

People are asking, “How is this possible?” Now that the Metro Council appears ready to fund this operation again with only cosmetic changes, they’ll be looking for answers. I can tell them where I think those answers lie.

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Part of the answer is campaign contributions and paid persuasion.

The public is increasingly asking that campaign contributions be analyzed, tied directly to the events of the last few years, and understood not as background noise but as a pragmatic shaper of how policy moves through this Council.

Search Council Donations Here

A notable example is the PAC of Gresham Smith, the structural engineer of record for the library garage expansion, and the firm that employs the chair of the Nashville Downtown Partnership.

Another is the client list of Sam Reed of Jigsaw Consulting: the Nashville Downtown Partnership, Oracle, Ryman Hospitality, the Predators, the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation, the Greater Nashville Hospitality Association, and a roster of the largest downtown real estate interests.

Mr. Reed is present at virtually every council meeting, and his clients donate profligately to council members and mayoral races. His near-monopoly on the heavy hitters of corporate giving to local government allows their influence to compound: when a smaller corporation wants the council to vote a certain way, sending Mr. Reed to make the case carries the inherent weight of every other client in his book.

He operates, though he’d probably hate the comparison to organized labor, as something like a union steward for the corporate managerial class of Middle Tennessee. And his influence, grounded in his anonymity among the very residents most outraged at how their city is being redesigned underneath them, is only growing.

Mr. Reed is the co-owner of 8th & Roast Coffee and was previously an owner of the restaurant Sinema. 8th & Roast is the primary sponsor of the Nashville politics podcast Podbless Nashville, hosted by Jamie Hollin and Braden Gall.

But NDP

Tom Turner has run the Nashville Downtown Partnership since arriving from Portland, where he was Vice President for Public Space Management at the Portland Business Alliance. He has served on Metro's homelessness governance bodies and draws total compensation exceeding $500,000 — paid out of NDP's commingled revenue, the largest single component of which is the CBID assessments the Council has not formally reviewed in 22 years.

Tom Turner has run the Nashville Downtown Partnership since arriving from Portland, where he was Vice President for Public Space Management at the Portland Business Alliance. He draws total compensation exceeding $500,000 — paid out of NDP's commingled revenue, the largest single component of which is the CBID assessments, the Council has not formally reviewed in 22 years. He is also, along with his COO Ben Simpson and three others, a registered Metro lobbyist for NDP: five lobbyists working a Council on behalf of a single nonprofit it has not audited in two decades.

The man who stood up a private police force downtown is also a registered lobbyist paid to persuade the Metro Council of NDP's way of seeing things. For a Chief of Police, this would be a disqualifying ethics violation. Yet Mr. Turner, under whose leadership NDP registered a shell corporation to hold a private police license and contracted with THP troopers under terms it refuses to disclose, does it openly, while drawing more than $500,000 a year from a nonprofit funded by money the government collects under threat of criminal penalty.

But campaign contributions and persuasion do not fully explain it.

I have never met a council member who can simply be bought (I think). It takes a rare breed of morally bankrupt person to sell their soul and neighbors that way, and our council members are, by and large, pretty normal homeowners.

But that phrase “normal homeowners” is a bit loaded.

There are class dynamics at play here, dynamics extraordinarily hard for Americans to talk openly about, because we pretend we do not care about class or caste. Class is for England, caste is for India; we are the egalitarian land of the American dream. In reality, virtually every member of Metro Council is a homeowner with income from somewhere other than the Council itself, which pays roughly $25,000 a year. You cannot live in Nashville on $25,000 a year. The job structurally requires that you already belong to, or at least aspire to, a professional class with another source of income, another network, another set of dinners you get invited to.

So when the corporate professional class, the people who make up the Nashville Downtown Partnership board and Mr. Reed’s client list, say this must be so, they are extraordinarily convincing to people who believe themselves to be part of that same class of enlightened, educated, rational lawmakers, the ones who are above the paltry emotionality of mere politics. That’s the trick.

It isn’t a bribe. It’s an invitation. It is the warm assurance that we are the serious people in the room, and the people outside the chamber, the people who showed up with cardboard signs, are not serious, and you do not have to take them seriously.

This is the neoliberal ideal of governance, and it has a name. The political theorist Sheldon Wolin called it “managed democracy”: a system that preserves the forms of democratic life (elections, hearings, public comment periods, ribbon-cuttings) while quietly relocating actual decision-making into corporate boardrooms, public-private partnerships, “stakeholder” working groups, and confidential contracts.

The role of the elected official, in this model, is not to govern. It is to manage the public’s relationship to decisions that have already been made elsewhere. To smooth, to translate, to make palatable. To explain to the residents of Nashville why the thing they did not ask for and do not want is, in fact, inevitable, optimized, and best for them. Democracy is not abolished. It is administered away.

The Nashville Downtown Partnership is the local face of this arrangement. So is Sam Reed. So is every “confidential contract” that flows public money to private operators and then asserts that the public has no business asking what’s in it.

The red line.

I want to be very clear about what changed this year. Endorsing a private policing vendor under a contract that has never been made public, and rewarding both that organization and the vendor whose stored fuel contributed to the destruction of the library parking garage and the year-long closure of our downtown library, is a political red line in the sand.

Not because it is a novel form of malfeasance. It isn’t. It is disturbing, business as usual in Nashville. But it is now a red line because it is now a conscious form of malfeasance, and that consciousness is something the Council did not have one budget cycle ago.

The public, by inventing our own form of people’s journalism (in the wake of local media being all but completely Ganneutered), has forced the conversation. We have dragged the truth, kicking and screaming, into the light.

Truly: I do not blame any of you for not reviewing NDP’s budget last cycle. It had been more than two decades since anyone in council chambers had done so. You don’t get an instruction manual when you take office. When you ask for an export of all the county’s laws, you’ll likely be quoted, as I was, around $4,500 for the privilege. Nobody is going to hand you the map. But you have it now.

But I have said this to several Council members already: If we are knowingly allowing a private police force to operate downtown, officers working off-duty for the Nashville Downtown Partnership and on-duty for the Tennessee Highway Patrol, with an abject lack of interest in any law and order other than the order defined by the officers themselves and the people paying them, what are we even doing here? What are we passing laws for? What are we voting on?

What you will hear.

“There already is officer oversight! (Too much, if you ask me.)”

You will hear a framing that defends all this. You will hear that these officers are POST-certified, that THP supervises them on duty, and that everything is fine. Here are the facts: When these officers arrest someone, that is, in theory, subject to public records: the arrest record itself, the trooper’s incident report.

But consider what “in theory” means in practice. To pry loose the records of the THP’s on-duty conduct during the May 2025 ICE operation, it took a six-month collaborative investigation by Lighthouse Reports, Mother Jones, the Nashville Banner, Nashville Noticias, NewsChannel 5, and the Institute for Public Service Reporting. It took a public records lawsuit filed in Davidson County Chancery Court by the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition. It took the state of Tennessee actively litigating to keep the records sealed, arguing that troopers’ identities had to be concealed for their safety. The records that did surface, more than 1,700 pages of incident reports, were heavily redacted. The Banner had to inspect them line by line. Six outlets, six months, a lawsuit, a chancery court, and dozens of journalists, to obtain the on-duty paper trail of officers whose conduct is supposedly transparent by default.

What would never be included in those public records is what matters: the orders these officers are given by the unelected private executives who set their priorities, and who, extraordinarily, claim that the contracts governing these officers are confidential.

“These aren’t taxes! We can do what we want with it.”

You have heard, and will continue to hear, that this is not public money. That this is the corporations’ own money, collected to be spent however they like, and that the public and Council have no business telling downtown corporations how to use it. Let us be extremely clear about something: the Nashville Downtown Partnership’s leadership, which consistently conflates its 501(c)(6) membership-organization role with its role as the District Management Corporation, the actual operator of the CBID, appears totally incapable of saying out loud.

If we want to be pedantic, these are not, by and large, “taxes.” Taxes are collected by the government for general use in any context approved by the provisioning body: Congress, a state legislature, or the Metro Council. These are special assessments collected by the government. They differ from taxes in that they must be spent in a very precise context, in this case, the context explicitly authorized by the Metro Council.

If you don’t want to call them “taxes”, fine. The umbrella term in public finance for the category that special assessments fall under is coercive revenue: money the government collects, money you will be charged with a crime for failing to pay. Until the CBID is dissolved, downtown property owners (and, through sales tax flowing back to NDP in parts of the district, ordinary shoppers as well) are required by force of law to pay it. That is the deal. That is the whole arrangement.

The Nashville Downtown Partnership is a 501(c)(6) membership organization. It could simply collect dues. But dues are not how Mr. Turner’s more than half-million-dollar salary for running a nonprofit gets paid. NDP gets to leverage the coercive revenue power of the city government to require people to pay what amounts to a tax to NDP, a power granted to it by a democratically authorized arrangement that predates most of the businesses now compelled to pay into it.

And for what it is worth, NDP does explicitly collect sales tax surcharges from parts of the city it operates.

“It’s not your job to tell us what to do.”

There is something in the neoliberal worldview that draws into political power people who seem fundamentally incapable of understanding how power works, yet the corporations that help put them there understand it perfectly well. There is a deal being made.

The government forcibly collects revenue and hands it to the CBID, which contracts with the Nashville Downtown Partnership. In exchange, and this part is non-negotiable, that arrangement is subject to the oversight of the Metro Council, a duly elected public body. Which means, unambiguously, that what Mr. Turner does, and by extension what the corporations he serves at the pleasure of do, with Kelly Knight Hodges of Gresham Smith as his chair, is subject to public feedback.

And when you set up a private police force that targets our most vulnerable residents; when you hire vendors, then mismanage public facilities to the point of explosion; when you reward those same vendors and try to steer the conversation away from all of it by donating generously to the politicians who are supposed to be the accountability backstop preventing this kind of harm in the first place, you tend to get the public’s attention.

You have it now.

This article was made in partnership with @nashcommunitysafetynetwork_. Our platforms have been working around the clock analyzing Mayor O’Connell and MNPD’s drone program since it began on May 26, 2026. We have been analyzing publicly available drone data to compare it with calls for service, incident reports, demographics, and council district boundaries. Below are some preliminary findings.

How to Read This

This is {Plain Text}, a more digestible version of what I have historically published on {Rich Text}. As the the {Rich Text}-iverse expands, I am seeing the need to provide concise summaries on important topics like this. {Rich Text} has some exciting things emerging, but I want people to always have access to important information and make it easy to read, cite, debate, and use to build a better city.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

▸ The Demographics — who is being surveilled
▸ The Map — flight data, district by district
▸ The Carve-Out — the geofence, the Gregg sliver, the Benedict exclusion
▸ Analysis — disparate impact, the failure to learn, the law
▸ How It Lands — civil rights exposure, what’s next

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{Plain Text}

How it’s being sold: MNPD’s promotional video for their drone trial program.

What it looks like in practice: Screen recording of our drone analysis tool tracking the drones returning on 6 different occasions to one apartment complex during the first four days of the drone trial. Subsequent analysis will examine the stated reasons for this type of surveillance activity and the public records of calls for service and incident reports that can be tied to them.

Last Friday, MNPD announced it was starting a “Drone as First Responder” trial three days later, without the public hearing, civil-rights analysis, or council approval required by Nashville’s surveillance ordinance. It also appears to fly in the face of Tennessee code section § 39-13-609, a law which kind of tells you what it is on the tin.

TN § 39-13-609
Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act - Use of drones to gather evidence or information - Standing to initiate civil action against law enforcement agency

The drone trial is not happening in a vacuum. A week earlier, a pro-surveillance report commissioned by MNPD’s booster nonprofit conceded that the last corporate mass surveillance program MNPD undertook, its automated license plate reader (ALPR) trial, was overwhelmingly deployed in low-income and nonwhite areas.

People concerned with the liability MNPD has created in the past by applying invasive corporate surveillance technology in predominately working class, non-white areas have been watching to see if MNPD has learned any lessons on how to avoid what civil rights attorneys and the Supreme Court call “disparate-impact discrimination”.

It appears the best they have found is to clarify that this is “not surveillance”.

MNPD has an FAQ page on their website about the program, with one question: “Is this a surveillance program?”

MNPD appears to have invented its own definition of “surveillance”. Fortunately, the Metro Council had the foresight during the first Trump administration to define it for MNPD and all of Nashville. And it’s not a bad definition:

“Surveillance technology” shall mean any electronic surveillance device, hardware, or software that is capable of collecting, capturing, recording, retaining, processing, intercepting, analyzing, monitoring, or sharing audio, visual, digital, location, thermal, biometric, or similar information or communications specifically associated with, or capable of being associated with, any specific individual or group; or any system, device, or vehicle that is equipped with an electronic surveillance device, hardware, or software.
Metro Code § 13.08.080(A)(2)

If these drones are not able to be used for this purpose, then MNPD’s own Drone as First Responder policy is, by its own enumeration, almost entirely a list of things the drones cannot do.

Section 8.50.040(D) authorizes the program to support “active criminal investigations,” “fleeing suspects,” “barricaded suspects,” “hostage situations,” “high-risk warrant service,” “missing persons,” “lost or endangered individuals,” and twenty-five enumerated calls for service — seven of which have the word “Person” in the title.

Every one of those uses requires the drone to be capable of being associated with a specific individual or group, which is the precise statutory threshold for surveillance technology under § 13.08.080.

Three authorized uses that survive the test: inspecting infrastructure damage, surveying a natural disaster after the area is cleared, and training exercises in an empty field. The other twenty-something do not.

Either the drones are surveillance technology under Metro Code, in which case the program required a public hearing and council approval it never received — or they aren’t, in which case MNPD spent eight pages writing a policy authorizing the drones to do things the drones cannot do.

The Geography

The drone trial’s official geography is a two-mile radius (almost) circle, its zero point the Madison Police Precinct, whose rooftop hosts the borrowed drones.

MNPD’s own announcement names five council members whose districts as in scope:
Gamble, Hancock, Frensley Webb, Eslick, and Gregg.

This statement by MNPD is incorrect. There are six council members within 2 miles of the MNPD district.

Notably absent: Council Member Emily Benedict, a known surveillance skeptic whose District 7 sits well inside what a true two-mile circle would cover. The radius was carved into a non-circular shape that excludes the northern part of her district.

She made a stir on social media last week pointing this out.

Among the five six council districts inside the trial radius, the three with the lowest white populations received all 45 MNPD drones over four days. 100%.

The three with the highest white population received none.

Benedict’s district, which is 7.9% whiter than the average for Davidson County, also received none. This is not surprising, since that District 7 was excluded from the circle for reasons not provided. But given that District 7 is nearly 30% whiter than the neighboring districts being drone-surveilled, this is quite a design choice by MNPD and its vendor, Skydio.

This arrangement is virtually a case study of “disparate-impact discrimination”. It is almost too obvious a case to even be worth studying, one where students would rightly ask: “yeah, but no law enforcement agency would ever make the discrimination that obvious, would they?”

There is an argument that has been and will be made: it’s not discrimination because surveillance technology follows crime. I point you to the calls for service that occurred just within the borders of District 7 that are not being responded to with drones, directly across the street from those that do appear to be responded to with drones.

Additionally, my sleepy former neighborhood of Old Hickory has not been without calls for service and incident reports during the drone trial. Yet despite this area allegedly being within the 2-mile circle where the drone trial is taking place, not a single drone has crossed the Cumberland to respond to them. Maybe the drones are afraid of water?

For those interested in the legality (or lack thereof) of this “trial,” be advised that the program may violate both Nashville’s surveillance ordinance and Tennessee’s Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act. The statute gives any aggrieved person standing to sue.

Last Wednesday on WPLN’s This Is Nashville, Mayor O’Connell told listeners, “We are always compliant with the law and charter here.”

O’Connell went out of his way to affirm his support of this program and his participation in its ideation and deployment, though it is not clear who the “we” refers to in that statement, when we claimed compliance with the law and charter.

The Community Review Board has documented that MNPD entered into its original Fusus contract in violation of Metro’s surveillance ordinance during the Cooper administration, without the required council approval or public hearing.

And later, O’Connell’s own administration attempted to validate Fusus with a formal contract multiple times, and then routed the $15M Downtown Public Safety Grant through the Nashville Downtown Partnership, a private nonprofit, to push surveillance-technology procurement outside the council review the ordinance requires.

Public pressure forced a surveillance hearing anyway. The administration held it, but omitted technologies that plainly qualified. The technology that was deemed “surveillance” was killed. The technology that came to be called “not surveillance”, including a tactical command center, passed.

Now, MNPD has launched a Drone as First Responder program without a statutorily required public hearing, a civil-rights impact analysis, or Council approval. The only times the Mayor’s Office and MNPD have been compliant with surveillance requests have been when organizers, activists, and Council Members demanded it. This latest incursion on the 4th Amendment appears no different.

The Flight Map & the Demographic Map

Four days in, here is how the experiment has been going.

The three in-scope districts below the county average for white population received every one of the 45 unique trial flights. The three above the county average (including Benedict’s carved out area) received zero. Two flight paths did cross into CM Benedict’s district, though it does not appear that they were in response to two calls for service just inside the district border that occurred during the drone trial.

District 7, which is +7.9% more white than the rest of the county, is for some reason on a do-not-fly list for the drones. Let us be clear: even if this geofencing is for political reasons and not to intentionally avoid surveilling District 7th’s greater-than-average white population, this still very, very much looks like disparate-impact discrimination”.

District 11, in Hermitage — Jeff Eslick’s district, my old neighborhood, which, according to census data and personal experience, is hella white — had eight calls for service of the precise kind the drones are being deployed to. None were responded to by an MNPD drone.

District 15, Jeff Gregg’s district in Old Hickory, is also above average in terms of white. It has no calls for service in the trial window and no drones. But it is here that we need to look at the map to understand the absurdity.

Jeff Gregg’s Sliver

Gregg’s district is only included in the two-mile radius where the drones fly by a few hundred feet. The drone radius includes a single sliver of a single portion of his district — and the majority of what is counted as inside his district appears to be a short stretch of the Cumberland River. There is no development on this single parcel. No one lives there. Absent a boat crash on an empty shoreline, no drone would plausibly have reason to enter.

But Gregg was briefed on the trial, and his majority-white district is allegedly included in it. Meanwhile, District 7 was carved out literally by its Council District lines for unstated reasons, but the reasons don’t matter. The geometry cannot lie. The same cannot be said of our public servants.

How It Lands

MNPD was asked which statutory exception authorizes the DFR program’s standing deployment posture and how the agency is satisfying § 39-13-609’s data retention requirements. The agency did not respond by publication. This story will be updated.

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This week, MNPD launched a drone as a first-responder “trial” with war-drone supplier Skydio, with four days’ notice. Nashvillians are not pleased.

The Instagram account @nashcommunitysafetynetwork_ posted an explainer of what was happening and received nearly 30k views within 2 days. The same content posted on the relatively sleepy Reddit r/Nashville went viral by that subreddit’s standard. The comments tell you precisely how actual Nashvillians feel about programs like this.

This week, my Council Member, Emily Benedict of Nashville's District 7, made a series of posts highlighting the strange shape of the two-mile zone where the drones are being deployed. You'll notice that despite the simple geometry of a two-mile radius, MNPD chose not to make the deployment area a circle. There's a conspicuous "bite" taken out of the lower left—precisely where District 7 cuts into the radius.

Ms. Benedict, a critic of surveillance technology, was not among the five Councilmembers MNPD claims it consulted about the drone trial. This part of the story is still unfolding, but the apparent decision to route around the elected officials most likely to scrutinize a potentially extra-legal surveillance program makes it hard to credit MNPD and the Mayor's Office when they say they engaged the community.

And today, City Cast Nashville spent its entire opening segment discussing the lack of community engagement, dubious legality, and Mayor O’Connell’s inscrutable comments when asked about these issues on Wednesday’s episode of WPLN’s This is Nashville.

Here are the comments from that WPLN appearance that City Cast hosts Marie Cecile Anderson, EP Whitney Pastorek, and guest Nicole Williams (a resident of the area covered by the drone trial) try to make sense of.

CityCast Nashville, Friday, May 29, 2026

Transcript from segments on MNPD drones and the unfolding data center efforts in Davidson County.

This article originally transcribed Nichole’s name as Nikole. This was an artifact of AI transcription. The AI data center irony is not missed by {Rich Text}.

Drones in Madison

Marie: The Metro Nashville Police Department’s Drone as First Responder pilot program launched at the Madison Precinct on Tuesday, according to WKRN. Three drones are now stationed on top of the precinct roof, ready to respond to any incidents in a two-mile radius.

Whitney: This radius covers portions of Council Districts 9 and 10, where extremely conservative council members Tonya Hancock and Jennifer Webb have said that they and their constituents are in favor of the drones. Another person the drone radius includes is our very own Nikole Williams. Nikole, thank you so much for being here today. Are you excited?

Nicole: Well, I’m excited to be here. I’m not excited to be subjected to arguably unlawful surveillance.

Marie: Mayor O’Connell appeared on This Is Nashville for his regular call-in segment, and a caller named Trina questioned the legality of this pilot program, saying that Metro Council is supposed to have a vote on any tech capable of public recording, and that this pilot is violating both city code and open procurement laws. Metro watchdog Mike Lacy has also questioned the legality of the pilot on his Substack. The mayor said the pilot is compliant with the law and the charter, and that there were community engagement points in Madison. So Nikole, you’re in that area — did you attend any of these meetings?

Nicole: I’ve not heard a single thing about any of these quote-unquote community engagement points. My council member is Tonya Hancock; however, she doesn’t represent me. I’m not in favor of this. I think it’s insane for her to suggest that all of her constituents want this. They didn’t even talk to the people who are within the two-mile radius — which, again, includes my home. So what I would like to know is, why do we have to do endless amounts of community engagement, multiple meetings, multiple homeowner surveys in order to get some freaking speed cushions to save people’s lives, while we can just flit around with surveillance like it’s nothing? Nobody asked my opinion. I’m pretty sure they know it — if they know me, there was no “let’s have a community meeting about this.” There was no community engagement to speak of.

Whitney: All right. So let’s get into the legality of this, Nikole, because I think this is where you have a chance to shine. The mayor also said during that same This Is Nashville interview that, quote, “this one is like some that don’t always meet the test of legal requirement. But we are always compliant with the law and the charter.” I don’t know what that means.

Nicole: I have no idea what that means. What I hear is that they consulted with Metro Legal to ensure this was compliant with law. But let’s not forget — that’s the same Metro Legal that okayed the FUSIS procurement without council approval, which it turned out they did need council approval for. So Metro Legal can get it wrong, the mayor can get it wrong. Even if it is technically legally allowed, it’s not morally appropriate to be using technicalities. Mayor O’Connell did not cite the Metro Code to tell us what he’s basing his opinion on, but I think what they’re using is an item in the surveillance ordinance that says this section shall not apply to acquisition or use of surveillance technology by or on behalf of law enforcement that is used on a temporary basis for the purpose of a criminal investigation supported by reasonable suspicion. What I think MNPD and Metro Legal and Freddie would argue is that a call for service creates reasonable suspicion, right?

Whitney: Like, there’s going to be criming going on, we’re going to make sure we’re ready. Well, I’m glad you brought up FUSIS, because yes — this is exactly the same situation that got us into the whole FUSIS debacle a couple of years ago. That was a pilot launched in 2022, like Nikole said, without council approval or public hearings. It ran for 18 months until folks realized what was going on. So at least we’ve got the jump on knowing this is happening this time. And I want to point out one more thing Freddie said on This Is Nashville. When WPLN host Blake Farmer asked if he had any reservations about general surveillance during this pilot, Mayor O’Connell said, quote, “the cameras aren’t even on when the drones are arriving at the scene.” I am not a drone expert.

Nicole: How do they get there? Echolocation?

Whitney: Yeah.

Marie: Right.

Whitney: Like bats.

Marie: I mean, that’s the sole purpose. I Googled what other cities are using this type of technology, and all of them — they have to have the cameras on. They especially have to have the heat sensitivity, because they’re looking for action. That’s how they see humans, by seeing their —

Whitney: Oh, so like heat sensors.

Marie: Heat sensors.

Whitney: And they have, like — like you see on TV.

Marie: Right.

Whitney: None of us are drone experts here at CityCast.

Marie: Again, not a drone expert, but.

Whitney: Well, and this same company that provided these drones has also provided drones to militaries, including the US military. And in those cases, they’re designed to fly grenades around.

Nicole: Well, this just feels to me like another instance where we’re being told we need to trust MNPD. We just need to trust them. But it doesn’t matter how many times you tell a community they just need to trust us — if they don’t trust you, continuing to do things that harm that trust is not going to help you.

Whitney: Right. And I’d say the same for the mayoral administration. This formerly very anti-surveillance mayor has repeatedly attempted to sort of sneak surveillance programs — cameras, that MOU with the Nashville Downtown Partnership for armored vehicles and whatnot. He keeps trying to sneak this stuff past the goalie. And up to this point, people have said, wait, hold on, let’s push pause on this. Let’s think about it. Metro Council has said, actually, no, we don’t want to approve this stuff. But it keeps happening. And I feel like that could cause some serious trust issues too, if it hasn’t already.

Nikole: And if we’re just going to say that individual council members can decide what happens in their district, then let’s go full-on with that. Let’s not do council-wide votes on zoning. Let’s let council members decide how much housing they want in their district. And, oh — let’s not go to the planning commission. Why do we need a public hearing of constituents when the council member can just say, “my constituents support this”? Why do we ever need to hear from the public? Let’s just get rid of it all. I’m really calm about this, guys.

The Data Center Near the Zoo

Whitney: It’s warranted, though, I think. Well — there’s another council member who’s trying to do something kind of in the tech realm. Marie, tell us what news happened this week and what someone is doing about it.

Marie: Absolutely. So the Nashville Business Journal reported this week that a company called DC Blox has purchased property next to the zoo, where it wants to build a 69,000-square-foot data center.

Whitney: I’m just going to jump in and say I don’t like that.

Marie: Let me just repeat: a 69,000-square-foot data center near the zoo.

Whitney: Don’t those things, like, vibrate?

Nicole: That could be a lot of housing. Wouldn’t that be nice to have housing near this?

Whitney: That would be really nice. I’m just wondering how the clouded leopards are going to enjoy the vibrating, pulsating building next door — and the fresh water.

Marie: Councilmember Rollin Horton also announced he’s filed a bill to restrict and regulate data centers. He wants to completely ban massive data centers like Elon Musk’s xAI out in Memphis, and anything smaller than that would require an exemption from the Board of Zoning Appeals and a public hearing. Nikole, would this bill be effective?

Nicole: I think it depends on what you mean by effective. One point I saw raised on Bluesky by my friend Neil Cornettick was that it’s sort of an arbitrary line you have to pick when you decide what counts as a hyperscale data center versus what would be allowed with an exemption granted by the Board of Zoning Appeals. So if you ban what you consider to be big ones and you allow smaller ones, you could just get two smaller ones that end up being bigger than a big one.

Marie: Is this the first bill of its type being introduced about data centers for zoning here in Nashville?

Nikole: Yes.

Marie: So there’s no zoning.

Nicole: I mean, we have roughly 27,000 different land uses in our land use table, and I’m sure data centers fit somewhere in one of those. But no, there hasn’t been any specific legislation related to data centers yet. This would be the first in Nashville.

Marie: Okay.

Whitney: And as Middle Tennessee continues to grow as a hub for data centers — we’ve reported on this previously on the podcast — you’re starting to see this very interesting bipartisan push against putting them certain places. Like, maybe they shouldn’t be in residential neighborhoods, but also maybe they shouldn’t be in farmland. And, like, where do we put them?