Around a year ago, the Metro Nashville Police Department’s Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) gathered for a meeting. A new state law had just been passed to eliminate the OPA’s civilian counterpart — the Community Oversight Board — and the meeting was called to address how that would affect internal investigations into police misconduct allegations.
Five years after more than 134,000 Nashvillians had voted to create the Community Oversight Board, establishing a mechanism for previously unprecedented external police accountability in the city, Tennessee Republicans passed a law abolishing such bodies throughout the state. While Nashville officials quickly made plans to form a new entity, the Community Review Board, in its place, the law guaranteed that such a replacement would have a significantly diminished oversight capacity.
So, last year, OPA Director Kathy Morante called together her staff and invited Deputy Chief Chris Gilder to the meeting. But rather than calling him forward to discuss the implications of the new law on the OPA’s work, Morante used the occasion to celebrate the work Gilder had done behind the scenes, along with Assistant Chief Mike Hagar, to help get the law passed. She presented him with a small, engraved crystal trophy to mark his apparent accomplishments in reducing outside accountability for Nashville police.
That allegation is one of many found in a scathing 61-page complaint written by former OPA Lieutenant Garet Davidson, who retired in January this year. The document was the subject of a heated Community Review Board meeting earlier this week, at which members expressed outrage at the allegations within it but largely refrained from detailing them at the urging of a Metro attorney. Davidson also filed the complaint with the OPA and sent it to Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s office.
CRB leader calls for federal investigation
After local media outlets, including the Banner, started obtaining unredacted copies, the MNPD released a redacted version of the document Thursday evening with some personal information omitted.
In an email, the MNPD stated that the complaint was under investigation by the OPA, which is, itself, notably the main subject of the complaint.
“We will look at whether our administrative processes for internal investigation and discipline need any refinement,” said Police Chief John Drake in a written statement.
The department did not address, or deny, one of the complaint’s most significant allegations: that members of MNPD’s command staff participated in the effort to gut civilian oversight of the police, with the full awareness of the chief.
Davidson makes numerous other allegations and cites various instances of what he sees as improper conduct by the department and its highest-ranking officials. The consistent theme of the document, though, is illustrated by his account of the trophy presentation at last year’s OPA meeting. He presents a picture of a police department that has worked to thwart external accountability, while at the same time eschewing a good-faith pursuit of it internally.
Jill Fitcheard, the executive director of the CRB — who served in the same role for the COB — told the Banner Thursday that she believed the allegations in the complaint call for a federal investigation of MNPD.
“The allegations are serious and an investigation of this complexity should be conducted by an independent external law enforcement agency or law department. I would ask that city officials bring in the US Attorney’s Office, Department of Justice or Federal Law Enforcement Partners to conduct an impartial inquiry into these serious allegations of gross misconduct by officers of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department,” she said.
Policies not consistently applied
Davidson’s complaint describes the MNPD as a place where internal policies are not consistently followed or enforced. In his telling, MNPD higher-ups routinely interfere with internal investigations, “driving disciplinary outcomes based upon their discretion and ulterior motives rather than objective, fact-driven investigations and decisions bound by policy.” One result, according to Davidson, is an environment in which the higher up the command structure an officer climbs, the less accountability they are likely to face.
“MNPD has a culture of protecting high-ranking supervisors, providing better outcomes, interfering with investigations, taking advantage of a manipulatable disciplinary policy, and even not documenting complaints or failures in performance at all so that no written record exists—thus limiting knowledge of misconduct to a very small group of individuals and removing it from public record discovery,” he writes.
Davidson singles out Assistant Chief Hagar, a 34-year MNPD veteran, as a high-ranking MNPD official who has “enabled and perpetuated harm to employees through disparate treatment and sustaining a culture which tolerates certain misconduct.”
In one such example of “rank bias,” Davidson writes that former Deputy Chief Chris Taylor was the subject of an internal investigation stemming from a confrontation at the MNPD’s training academy in which witnesses “believed he was about to assault the training instructor.” Taylor was also under investigation for campaigning to be elected mayor of Sumner County while in uniform “and possibly on duty.” Davidson writes that Taylor was found to be in violation of several MNPD policies as a result of these investigations, but, because of his high rank, he argues, was allowed to resign rather than receive any official sanction.
Elsewhere in the complaint, Davidson contrasts two cases that he says illustrate how rank bias works in the department.
In the first, Davidson writes, Lt. Michael Gooch was investigated for “being at a bar for around nine (9) hours one day, instigating a confrontation following the other patron outside and causing a physical confrontation requiring the other to act in self-defense, and then getting into his truck and driving off despite being obviously intoxicated.” Gooch was later pulled over but not charged with driving under the influence. Despite all this, Davidson writes, Gooch was allowed to enter a rehabilitation program and saw several policy violations rolled into one to obscure the details of his conduct.
In another case, Det. William Thorowgood — two ranks lower than Gooch — was forced to submit a letter of unconditional resignation after he started a physical confrontation with a man outside his home, a video of which was posted online.
“The low-ranking officer received additional pressure and antagonism from leadership to force him out, possibly because there was some actual publicity on his case,” Davidson writes.
The complaint includes other examples of the department failing to uphold its own job performance standards and policies, like the enforcement of body-worn and in-car cameras. According to Davidson, an internal unit that performs monthly audits of officers’ camera footage “noted that they had individuals who had easily half-a-dozen or more of these audits without any actual formal action being taken to address the officer’s repeated violations of policy.”
Davidson also alleges that MNPD supervisors “are discouraged from scoring poor performing officers as failing or are given instructions to change scores” on annual evaluations. He writes about the case of Officer Brian Woodard who failed his annual evaluation in 2017. But that evaluation, Davidson writes, was effectively buried and a subsequent Job Performance Improvement Plan — which Davidson wrote himself for Woodard — was “not fully supervised or implemented” by Woodard’s supervisors.
In Davidson’s telling, this represented the department turning a blind eye to an officer whose conduct was raising red flags. Several years later, that officer was arrested for sexual battery.
No policy on sexual harassment
In 2020, then-Mayor John Cooper’s 2020 Policing Policy Commission recommended that the MNPD create a zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual assault and sexual harassment. But Davidson writes that the department has failed to follow through on this.
Davidson cites the 2021 case of Lt. Taylor Schmitz. An internal investigation, Davidson writes, found that Schmitz had engaged in “a pattern of mistreatment towards female employees.” The conduct included “how he placed his hands on them and invaded their space, ignored them during meetings” and in one case, “carelessly moved academy equipment” in a way that led to “significant physical injury” to a female training academy officer. Despite all that, Davidson writes, the case was settled without a hearing and Schmitz was not even demoted. He adds that the woman who’d been harmed was not consulted or updated on the case.
Davidson also notes the case of Officer Sean Herman — who was recently fired by the department after he appeared in an OnlyFans video in uniform — groping a woman during a simulated traffic stop. Although he doesn’t include details, Davidson writes that Herman had previously been suspended for violating the department’s harassment and discrimination policy.
Reduction in police training
Also among the issues highlighted in Davidson’s complaint is a reduction in training hours for MNPD recruits. He says the department’s training academy has been reduced by one month, from 23 weeks to 19. While he acknowledges that the department is still meeting state standards for police training, he suggests that the department has decided to accept diminished training as a means of combating ongoing struggles with recruitment and retention.
Davidson’s commentary about the department’s training requirements was the one area of his complaint that attracted a specific response from the police chief in his statement Thursday night.
“The State of Tennessee requires a minimum 488 training hours to be certified as a police officer,” Drake said. “New police officers who graduate from MNPD basic training receive 893.5 hours of training, 83% more training hours than required by the state. New lateral officers, those men and women with policing experience who have transitioned their law enforcement careers to Nashville from other agencies, receive a total of 621.5 training hours from us, 27% more than required by the state, on top of what they received from their former agencies. I believe our training process and our instructors are exemplary, and we work to ensure that our training conforms with essential elements that officers need on the streets every day to be personally and collectively successful in serving the Nashville community.”
Elimination of external oversight
The elimination of the Community Oversight Board last fall left a bad taste in the mouths of many Nashvillians. That disappointment has been exacerbated by the new Community Review Board’s struggle to serve a similar role with diminished power. Davidson’s complaint arrived as the CRB has been expressing public frustration over the difficulty they’ve faced getting the MNPD to come to the table and discuss an agreement for cooperation between the two agencies.
To learn that, according to Davidson, the MNPD was involved in the process of “crafting and advising” the legislation behind the significant reduction in external oversight of the police prompted unrest at the meeting of the CRB earlier this week. It also produced obvious tension between board members and Metro Legal. The department’s attorney advised members not to discuss the allegations in the complaint, frustrating some members who were already upset by Metro’s decision not to wage a legal fight to defend the COB against the state last year.
Board chair Alisha Haddock told members that the allegations, if true, would vindicate the long-held suspicions of Nashvillians fighting for civilian oversight of the police.
“I think these allegations uncover a lot,” she said. “They uncover that we were not imagining things.”
Over 61 pages, Davidson lays out a detailed case calling into question the accuracy, fairness and effectiveness of the MNPD’s OPA, an office he worked in for 2 years. That office is now, according to Chief Drake, beginning to investigate Davidson’s complaint. To CRB members, and the community advocates who spoke at their recent meeting, that notion is even more problematic than the department being left to police itself in the first place.
“After reading through the complaint, it is my belief that the Office of Professional Accountability should not be involved in or the lead investigation of this magnitude,” the CRB’s Jill Fitcheard told the Banner.
Davidson argues in his complaint that, in allegedly lobbying for less community oversight, “the department has spit in their face by finding a solution which rather effectively overturns the will of Nashvillians.”
As it is now, he writes, “both external and internal mechanisms of addressing police employee misconduct have been reduced or eliminated, and they are on a trajectory to continue to do so.”
“Accountability of those engaging in misconduct is eroding at the MNPD, and this is being driven not by those investigating the misconduct but by a leadership willing to pull the strings to get the results they want, rather than the results the facts and public demand,” he writes.
