The reporting for this investigation began in August 2020, after a former Nashville police officer said 19 current and former department employees had approached her organization, Silent No Longer, with allegations of gender- and race-based discrimination. That number continued to grow, eventually reaching 44.
Since then, WPLN News has interviewed more than 20 current and former Metro Nashville Police Department employees — some of whom are part of the 44, some of whom are not. Those employees represented a wide range of experiences at the department, from the lowest rank of training academy recruit all the way up to captain. Some were sworn officers and others were civilian employees. They also comprised a diverse demographic subset of MNPD, including Black men, Black women, white men, white women, a Latino man and an immigrant whose first language wasn’t English. Several identified as LGBT.
More: Read or listen to our full investigation here.
To further investigate the claims these employees shared with us, we reviewed more than a dozen lawsuits and internal complaints from recent years that accused the department of discrimination and/or retaliation. We also obtained datasets with every hire, promotion, departure, decommissioning, complaint and disciplinary action from 2010-2020, broken down by race and gender. Our partners at APM Reports matched employee demographic information to the vast majority of discipline data to look for racial and gender disparities, particularly in disciplinary action. We found that nonwhite employees faced higher rates of the most serious forms of punishment — suspension, demotion and/or termination — than white employees, when they were investigated for wrongdoing.
Additionally, we requested more than 30 personnel files and obtained recordings of multiple investigative interviews from Metro Nashville Human Resources and the Metro Nashville Police Department’s Office of Professional Accountability. Silent No Longer also granted us access to their entire file compiled in response to the accusations. Those records included transcripts of intake interviews with accusers, survey responses from current and former employees, emails, whistleblower letters and police department records.
More: Browse some of the records and data we reviewed for this investigation.
We reported this story because countless others have been told about shootings and killings by police. But after dedicating so much of our own coverage to the relationship between the police department and the community, we wanted to know how police treat their own. And what it means for the community when the people who are supposed to keep us safe victimize their fellow men and women in blue.
This story was produced as part of APM Reports’ public media accountability initiative, which supports investigative reporting at local media outlets around the country. Support also came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM