More than 300 body camera videos are under review by MNPD for improper editing

The Metro Nashville Police Department is currently reviewing more than 300 recordings from police body cameras for improperly edited footage.

The videos were previously provided to the Community Oversight Board for its investigations into police misconduct, said WPLN criminal justice reporter Paige Pfleger on Wednesday’s episode of This Is Nashville.

MNPD is expected to conclude its review later this month.

“Depending on what the investigation finds, the COB could have to go back and revisit some old complaints that they’ve already closed,” she said.

MNPD’s audit comes more than a year after a resident complained to the COB about a police officer’s behavior. The COB requested body camera footage of the incident and recommended discipline. But when MNPD responded, the department said it would also discipline the officer for swearing.

COB members were confused. The videos they had did not show the officer cursing.

“That was kind of how they realized that some of the footage that they had received for this particular incident had been edited,” Pfleger said.

An IT employee at MNPD was the person who muted the profanity, the department says. However, MNPD’s narrative about the altered footage has evolved since that was first reported in July.

The oversight board asked the police department to investigate the incident, and that investigation found that a second IT employee with the department was involved in editing body camera footage as well. However, that internal investigation did not reveal how many videos were edited before being passed on to the oversight board.

“We’re going to be looking at that, and we will have an answer as to how many words may have been muted in videos through all the reviews and then the reissuance of these videos. At this point, I can’t give you a definitive number. We just don’t know,” police spokesperson Don Aaron said at an August press conference. 

This has strained the relationship between the oversight board and the police.

“They cannot continue to send their liaison and others with all these different stories on what’s happening,” says Jill Fitcheard, director of the Community Oversight Board. “So who’s not being consistent here is them, right? And so it’s them that has to try to figure out how they’re going to build trust with this community.”

Fitcheard says the censorship of profanity makes it difficult for the board to do their jobs. And it makes it hard for the community to believe that investigations into police misconduct won’t be stymied by the police department.

“There’s also a question of whether or not community members feel as though the oversight board is able to hold the police department accountable — even if that’s because they’re not getting all the information that they need from the police department,” Pfleger said. “It could make people think, ‘I’m not going to bring forward a complaint about police misconduct if we’re not going to get to the bottom of the actual interaction.'”